The NBA's Small Town Squeeze
Another dissertation drop!
Hi friends of ProHoopsHistory!
Sorry, I’ve been derelict on the Lost Awards series. I’ve been editing my dissertation these last couple weeks. Gotta defend that bad boy at the end of July to become Dr. ProHoopsHistory.
Since I’ve been editing that beast, here’s an excerpt y’all might enjoy.
BAD TIMES
Unfortunately for Les Harrison, the NBA seemed intent upon deep-sixing his franchise as it turned out players weren’t the only ones who would be subjugated by the league. The forces of professional basketball had already squeezed out smaller cities like Sheboygan and Toledo. Now the NBA was determined to relocate its remaining roster of small and mid-sized cities. Fort Wayne, Minneapolis, Rochester, and Syracuse were all firmly in the crosshairs by the mid-1950s. The owners of the Pistons, and Lakers moved their teams quite willingly, while the New York State cohort clung desperately in vain to their franchises.
As the calendar turned to 1957, pressure was applied upon Harrison to sell the Rochester Royals to a Cincinnati consortium led by Robert L. Siegel. When asked by reporters about the potential sell and relocation, Harrison tersely responded, “We are playing in Rochester.” Nevertheless, with the Royals in Cincinnati playing an exhibition game versus the Fort Wayne Pistons, Harrison met with NBA president Podoloff and Siegel. “I was invited to attend the meeting,” Harrison stated giving the impression that Podoloff compelled the longtime Royals’ owner into the meeting. Despite Harrison’s demurring, Siegel seemed confident that the Royals were permanently on their way to Ohio. “[T]here is a good chance we will buy the Rochester Royals,” he stated.[1]
By late February, the sell and relocation seemed a fait accompli. The Cincinnati-based group reportedly offered $150,000 for the Royals. Considering Harrison paid a $25,000 franchise fee to enter the NBL in 1945, this was a good return on the investment.[2] Harrison would be allowed to maintain “up to 25 per cent” ownership of the franchise. Siegel was hopeful the deal would be consummated in March after the Royals’ season ended. Meanwhile, Harrison was in an irritable mood and was “sick and tired of having to deny wild rumors almost everyday.” Harrison continued unloading his frustration. “We haven’t talked to anybody about selling our franchise…. I told the Cincy people we are not for sale and that’s the way it still is. How often must I keep denying a story that is helping to keep customers away from my games?”[3] Apparently no investment-return could placate a man who loved owning a basketball team.
The recalcitrant Harrison successfully fought off Siegel’s hostile takeover, but it was an incomplete victory. While still retaining ownership with his brother Jack, Harrison acknowledged that Cincinnati was likely to be the Royals’ new home for the 1957-58 NBA season. Although other cities such as Cleveland, Milwaukee, Chicago, and Kansas City were mentioned as possible destinations, Harrison and his brother decreed “Cincinnati is our most favorable spot” and that negotiations for utilizing Cincinnati Gardens as their new homecourt would proceed.[4]
The impending abandonment of Rochester was particularly disturbing because the city had recently completed the Rochester Community War Memorial. Opened in October 1955, the downtown arena cost $7.5 million and could seat 10,000 spectators.[5] This new facility replaced the Edgerton Sports Arena. The old building seated 4200 for basketball and was constructed in the 1890s.[6] Rochester’s new stadium even compared quite favorably to Cincinnati Gardens, the court the Royals would soon call home. Opened in 1949, Cincinnati Gardens could seat an audience of 11,200. In contrast to Rochester’s new arena, however, the Gardens was located outside of a central urban core. Instead, it was placed on the outskirts of the city, a harbinger for future stadiums of the 1960s and 1970s that catered to suburban freeways instead of walkable downtowns.
In early April 1957, the Rochester Royals’ relocation to Cincinnati was concluded pending the perfunctory vote of approval by the NBA’s Board of Governors, the official name for the owners that participated in the league. Harrison’s statement announcing the move was a rare contemporaneous explanation of the growing bind that smaller cities had navigating the increasingly “big league” world of professional sports. Obviously referring to the new Rochester War Memorial that was essentially the same size as Cincinnati Gardens, Harrison lamented that despite Rochester boasting “excellent facilities and attractiveness,” the NBA was moving “toward larger, major-league cities, with a potential draw of approximately one and a half million to two million people.” Additionally, “it is necessary to include in the successful operation of a team, the radio and TV financial market.” Since Rochester and its surrounding area boasted “approximately one-half million people,” gate receipts and broadcast revenue were limited compared to larger urban areas. Indeed, Harrison claimed the franchise lost approximately $25,000 in its final year of operation in upstate New York.
Harrison’s remarks then turned more personal. Now 53 years old, Harrison had been involved with the Royals, throughout their various name changes and affiliations, since the age of 19. He concluded “that since basketball and sports promotion had occupied a great share of my life” he would not sell the team, but still bowed to pressure to move it because “necessity as outlined above, has made this transfer essential.” Harrison thanked “Royal devotees” for their 12 years of support dating back to the NBL years and he promised to still have the team appear in Rochester for games during the upcoming 1957-58 NBA season.[7]
As the tables below illustrate, the NBA had a penchant for expelling and relocating franchises in smaller cities, while large cities had a habit of folding due to poor management and finances. On average, expelled franchises had a population of 142,537 in 1950; and that number was buoyed by Denver. In contrast, franchises that folded had an average population nearly ten times (1.16 million) that of the expelled clubs. Meanwhile, relocations showed a similar trend. The origin cities had an average population of 536,232. The new cities had an average of 1.27 million people. The only time an NBA franchise moved from larger city to a smaller city was when the Philadelphia Warriors moved to San Francisco in 1962. Yet, this exception proves the principle. Just a year later, the Syracuse Nationals were moved to Philadelphia becoming the 76ers.
Rochester’s Democrat and Chronicle detected this trend and lamented the demise of the Royals as an ill omen for similar cities. Columnist Hans Tanner noted that “Rochester will be the second ‘small city’ to shift its franchise for next season.” The Royals were following on the heels of “Fort Wayne [which] already has been transferred to Detroit.” The shuffling left Syracuse as “the only ‘small city’ left in the circuit. High costs of operation of a National Basketball Assn. club have made it practically impossible to make money in the so-called ‘small cities.’” [9]
As the Democrat and Chronicle mentioned, Fort Wayne was another “small city” that had lost its longtime franchise in the spring of 1957. Unlike Harrison reluctantly moving his Royals, Fred Zollner eagerly shuffled his Pistons to Detroit. Declaring the move a matter of “simple arithmetic,” Zollner noted that in Fort Wayne “we draw from a potential population of 200,000.” Meanwhile, the metropolis of Detroit “would have 10 times that amount” of people to draw from.[10] Undoubtedly summarizing the sentiment of the other NBA owners, except Harrison and Nationals’ owner Daniel J. Biasone, St. Louis Hawks’ impresario Ben Kerner beamed, “I think it’s a wonderful idea and I hope it goes through.” As with the Royals’ move to Cincinnati, Zollner’s inquiry was deeply linked to arena space as Detroit’s Olympia stadium far exceeded the capacity available at any arena in Fort Wayne.[11] With details satisfactorily arranged by mid-February 1957, the Pistons left their longtime home. A news item tucked away on the Indianapolis Star’s sports page in January 1957 mused, “Maybe Fred Zollner is missing a bet in plans to move his Fort Wayne Pistons to Detroit instead of to the West Coast.”[12]
With Major League Baseball’s Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants preparing to relocate to Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively, it was inevitable that the NBA make good on its own California dream to keep up with major-league Joneses. The wait would not be a long one as the tumultuous spring of 1957 continued for the NBA. Once the dominant franchise of the NBA, the Minneapolis Lakers fell on hard times. By early 1957, owner Ben Berger was publicly acknowledging that the franchise was for sale and that a consortium from Kansas City had made a $150,000 offer to buy the club. Despite pressure from Podoloff, Berger and co-owner Morris Chalfen gave local Minneapolis investors a ten-day period ending on March 5, 1957, to match the offer.[13] Berger’s inclination to sell the Lakers was based upon his claims of $40,000 in monetary losses in both, the 1955 and 1956 seasons. In 1957, he claimed the Lakers “are losing again this year.”[14]
Berger and Chalfen finally found an investor willing to keep the Lakers in Minneapolis: Bob Short. Displeased by this development, the league office slapped conditions on the potential sale. If these terms were not met, the franchise would be dislodged from Minnesota. The most prominent demand was that the “new Minneapolis owners must guarantee minimum gate receipts of $200,000 each season for three years[.]” The other stipulations centered around the Lakers’ troubles in securing a dependable home arena. As the Minneapolis Star noted, “Available dates at the [Minneapolis] Auditorium have long been a problem,” resulting in the Lakers routinely using the Minneapolis Armory and St. Paul Auditorium for their home games.[15] Short’s group approved of the conditions and the Lakers were sold.[16]
Despite the pledge to remain in Minnesota, the Lakers immediately began to play “home” games on the West Coast. Short believed that the NBA permanently reaching Los Angeles and San Francisco was “a certainty, perhaps soon.” It was no idle prediction as Short assumed the role of self-fulfilling prophet. As the Lakers were “exploring a possible move to Los Angeles next season,” they abruptly on February 6, 1960, moved two home games from Minneapolis to Los Angeles. The games were slated just two weeks later on February 21 and 22. “A large turnout on successive nights would put Los Angeles No. 1 on the list of a new home for the Lakers if and when we decide to move,” the Lakers’ owner said of the games. Short also claimed that the franchise was losing $60,000 during the 1959-60 season.
The sale of players Dick Garmaker and Larry Foust for a combined $35,000 to the St. Louis Hawks plus the haul of $25,000 from two games played in California (one each in San Francisco and Los Angeles) coincidentally brought the club back to break-even.[17] The permanent relocation plans were completed by April. In an interview with the Minneapolis Star, Short conceded that he had been thinking of moving to Los Angeles for three years—essentially since he had taken over majority ownership of the club.[18] The addition of Los Angeles caused scheduling headaches for a league accustomed to traveling in the northeast quadrant of the United States. Improved plane travel could not completely compensate for the geographic isolation that awaited the Lakers since their closest NBA neighbor was in St. Louis. As previously mentioned, this lonesome situation was rectified by transplanting the Philadelphia Warriors to San Francisco. The very next year, Biasone sold the Syracuse Nationals to businessmen from Philadelphia filling that temporary void. With that sale, the last direct vestige of the small-town NBL presence in the NBA was extinguished.
NOTES
[1] AP, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, February 1, 1957https://www.newspapers.com/image/135905447/
[2] Rochester Institute of Technology, “Basketball Beginnings in Rochester,” When Rochester Was Royal: Professional Basketball in Rochester, 1945-1957. https://royalsexhibit.wordpress.com/basketball-beginnings-in-rochester/.
[3] AP, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, February 24, 1957 https://www.newspapers.com/image/135911449/
[4] AP, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, March 27, 1957 https://www.newspapers.com/image/135718095/
[5] “Rochester to Open Memorial Oct. 16,” Syracuse Post-Standard, October 2, 1955. https://www.newspapers.com/image/16002985/.
[6] George Beahon, “Royals Trim Lakers, Gain 2-to-1 Series Edge,” Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, April 2, 1951. https://www.newspapers.com/image/135421923/.
[7] Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, April 4, 1957, https://www.newspapers.com/image/135912477/. The Royals did play two games in Rochester during the 1957-58 season: December 14, 1957, versus the Syracuse Nationals and February 8, 1958, versus the Boston Celtics.
[8] The Tri-Cities Blackhawks’ original city was Moline, Illinois. They subsequently moved twice. First to Milwaukee in 1951 and then to St. Louis in 1955. With the move to Milwaukee, the club shortened its name to “Hawks.”
[9] Hans Tanner, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, April 3, 1957, https://www.newspapers.com/image/135912293/.
[10] “Pistons Move,” New York Daily News, January 16, 1957, https://www.newspapers.com/image/456007528/
[11] “Pettit Top Scorer With 21 but East Wins All-Star Game; Cousy and Johnston Unite to Beat West,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 16, 1957, https://www.newspapers.com/image/139773446
[12] Jep Cadou, Jr., “Calls ‘Em,” Indianapolis Star, January 20, 1957, https://www.newspapers.com/image/105566618/
[13] Charles Johnson, Minneapolis Star Tribune, February 24, 1957, https://www.newspapers.com/image/202771543/.
[14] AP, Minneapolis Star Tribune, February 24, 1957, https://www.newspapers.com/image/135911469/
[15] “Laker Owners Consider NBA Terms ‘Reasonable,’” Minneapolis Star Tribune, April 3, 1957.
[16] Augie Karcher, “Lakers Prepare to Trade to Field Best Club Possible,” Minneapolis Star, April 4, 1957. https://www.newspapers.com/image/178827576/.
[17] “2 Hawk-Laker Games in L.A.,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, February 7, 1960. https://www.newspapers.com/image/574606206/.
[18] “Laker Move Long in Making,” Minneapolis Star, April 28, 1960. https://www.newspapers.com/image/187917539/.