It was my first Sunday without access to the NFL Sunday Ticket, since the only bar in the greater Pittsburg/Frontenac area to have it was gutted by a fire a couple of days ago (looking forward to your comeback, Santino’s!), and there were two stinkers for games available on my local CBS and Fox affiliates.
That was enough to drive me to the computer and craft a breakdown of another one of the Vintage Sports Publications in my collection — not that I finished it that day. The scanning of all the pages takes awhile (besides, the Sunday Night Game got to be good when New England rallied from down 31-3 to tie it)!!
This publication is from a game with significance in the history of professional basketball — the first game in franchise history for the Denver Rockets (later to be called the Nuggets) and just the third game in the history of the American Basketball Association.
ABA Cage Stars — Denver Rockets Vol. 1, No. 1
Date: October 15, 1967
Opponent: Anaheim Amigos
Scene-setter: The National Basketball Association consisted of 10 teams during the 1966-67 season (after adding the expansion Chicago Bulls) and had a monopoly on major league basketball. The expansion Seattle SuperSonics (now the Oklahoma City Thunder) and San Diego (now Houston) Rockets were set to join the league the following season, so the NBA owners seemed very content to
play with 12 teams.
There were several folks who missed out on the expansion plans still looking to be pro basketball moguls. So in February of 1967 — Groundhog Day, to be precise — a group of men in California announced the formation of the American Basketball Association. Among those men was Dennis Murphy, who would be the public relations director of the Denver Rockets.
The sports pundits of the day were cynical that this endeavor would get off the ground, let alone be successful.
To a degree, those basketball Punxsutawney Phils were correct. The ABA would struggle from season-to-season throughout its nine-year history to survive — but survive it did. In doing so, the ABA paved the way towards the game of pro basketball as we know it today (for better of worse in the opinion of some).
While the NBA played a very structured style, the ABA would earn a reputation for being more wide-open and free-wheeling. The critics chided the ABA style by saying there was no defense played (which sometimes was the case), but in reality it became an introduction of the one-on-one style of play often seen on the urban playgrounds of the day to the confines of an arena.
The Denver Rockets were born when James Trindle, one of those Californians who founded the ABA, moved his franchise from its originally-intended location of Kansas City because of the lack the needed number of dates at Municipal Auditorium Arena.
At the suggestion of the league’s commissioner, the legendary NBA star George Mikan, Trindle moved to Denver and after struggling to post a $100,000 performance bond he sold two-third of the controlling interest to Bill Ringsby for $350,000.
Ringsby owned the Ringsby System trucking company, and his fleet of trucks was referred to as the Ringsby Rockets. So instead of being the Colorado Lark Buntings (as Trindle and Murphy had planned before selling out to Rinsgby), the franchise would be known as the Rockets. The team even used the same colors as Ringsby’s company — orange, black and white — and had the company’s name incorporated in its logo.
The Rockets played their first game, and 31 of their 39 regular season home games that season, at Denver Auditorium Arena. It was a cozy downtown facility that seated 6,841 fans and coincidentally looked an awful lot like Kansas City’s Municipal Auditorium Arena did before it was renovated in the mid-1990s.
The other eight games were scheduled for Denver Coliseum, a much larger venue which could accommodate more than 10,000.
The opponent for that first game was the Anaheim Amigos, one of the 10 other ABA teams that first season. The Amigos were in the midst of playing their first six games of the campaign on the road, which included the home openers for Denver and two other teams — the Oakland Oaks (the first game in ABA history) and the Dallas Chaparrals (now the San Antonio Spurs).
The reason, according to Terry Pluto’s fabulous book on the history of the ABA “Loose Balls,” was so the Amigos could get their share of the road gate receipts to use for early operating capital.
Anaheim came into the game off a 134-129 loss to the Oaks (which were owned in part by singer Pat Boone) two days earlier (Friday the 13th, believe it or not). John Fairchild, who was a reserve for the Los Angeles Lakers two years earlier averaging 2.0 points in 30 games, led the Amigos with 33 points that night.
The Rosters: Because it was the first game of the first season, it was impossible to include printed numerical rosters in the program, so the Rockets inserted copies (which didn’t appear to be mimeographed “ditto” copies) of both teams into the book — and fortunately both came with the program I purchased (I actually ended up with two copies of Denver’s roster).
The Rockets’ most experienced player on opening night was three-year veteran center Tom Hoover (program bio). The Villanova product played two seasons with the New York Knicks and one with St. Louis after being a first-round draft choice (6th overall) of the Philadelphia 76ers in 1963.
According to a retrospective article done by the Rocky Mountain News, Hoover “spent his summers in New York, going door-to-door politely recommending to longshoremen they join the union.” In Pluto’s book, Hall of Fame center Mel Daniels said Hoover also worked as a sparring partner for Muhammad Ali.
Other Denver players with NBA experience included Ron Horn (single seasons with the Hawks [1961-62] and Lakers [1962-63] — program bio) and Larry Jones (1964-65 with the 76ers — program bio).
Two of the more heralded of the nine major league rookies on the 12-man roster included former All-Big 8 performer Willie Murrell, a forward out of Kansas State, and forward Julian Hammond from the University of Tulsa.
A local favorite was Byron Beck, a center who played for the University of Denver, who ended up playing for the Denver franchise for all nine ABA seasons and one after it joined the NBA. His number 40 has been retired by the team (program bios for Murrell, Hammond and Beck).
Besides the aforementioned Fairchild, the only other Anaheim player with previous NBA experience was forward Ben Warley. Warley played with three teams over five seasons, the last with the Baltimore Bullets (now the Washington Wizards) in 1966-67.
He also played for the Long Beach Chiefs of the American Basketball League in 1962-63, a season that never reached 1963 as the ABL folded on New Year’s Eve. The Chiefs were owned by Art Kim, the same man bankrolling the Amigos.
Of the 10 Amigo rookies, the ones thought to be top prospects were forward Bob Bedell, a 10th-round NBA draft pick by the 76ers in 1966 out of Tennessee A&I (now Tennessee State), and guard Steve Chubin from Rhode Island — he played the year before in Italy. Chubin was originally a Rocket (program bio), but was sold to the Amigos just three days before Denver opened the season.
Les Selvage, from Kirksville State (now Truman State), would go on to set the ABA record for most three-point field goals made (147) and attempted (461) in a season — records which stood the entire history of the league.
The Coaches: Bob Bass was the Rockets’ head coach (program bio). He was plucked from small Oklahoma Baptist for his first big league gig, after serving as head basketball coach and director of athletics for 15 years.
He would go on to be a head coach and executive in both the ABA (Denver, The Floridians, Memphis Tams/Sounds and San Antonio) and NBA (San Antonio and New Orleans Hornets) before retiring in 2004 from the Hornets’ front office. He was a two-time NBA Executive of the Year.
Al Brightman had coached seven seasons (1948-56) at Seattle University, leading the then-Chieftains to four NCAA tournament appearances and one NIT berth. He was head coach for Kim’s Chiefs squad in 1962, which went 16-8 and was 2.5 games behind the Kansas City Steers when the ABL went belly-up.
He also played one season (1946-47) for the Boston Celtics in the Basketball Association of America (which after merging with the National Basketball League would become the NBA in 1949-50). He was the first Celtic to score 20 points in a game.
Brightman lasted just 36 games in Anaheim, winning only 12, before being replaced by Harry Dinnel on Dec. 30 — almost five years to the day the Long Beach ABL team folded. He was shifted to a position as the team’s public relations director.
Dinnel was a guard for the Amigos to start the season, but a knee injury sidelined him three weeks into the season and forced him into an assistant coach role. Before playing for Anaheim, Dinnel was an assistant at his alma mater, Pepperdine.
The Cover: The cover featured a drawing of the ABA ball with all of the league’s teams encircling it celebrating the start of the inaugural season.
Other program details: Like the National Football League and the American Football League were doing at the time (I’m not sure about the NBA), the ABA produced a 16-page insert which featured the league’s sponsors as well as a few league-angled articles.
I’ve scanned the two main articles for your reading pleasure — one by the Minnesota Muskies’ PR guy (1, 2, 3) and the other courtesy of the Oakland Oaks (1,2). They offer a great insight into the vision of the ABA’s founders. Both articles feature the rule differences between the ABA and the NBA — including the 3-point line (which the ABL introduced during its brief existence) and 30-second shot clock.
Checking out the ads: If it wasn’t bad enough that the entire Denver team was an advertisement for the Ringsby System, they threw in a program ad as well!
I figured there would be a Coors ad in this, but was surprised to learn there was a Golden Ox (the venerable Kansas City steak house) in Denver.
You can definitely recognize which advertiser provided camera-ready artwork.
Youngsters won’t ask the obvious question, but likely will wonder what all of the knobs and switches are for on that wooden TV?
I don’t think any major pro league could negotiate a deal like the ABA did with UniRoyal/Keds these days!
Coca-Cola sponsored the scorecard center spread, but as stated above the rosters weren’t set, so the ad included lists of players for each team with no uniform numbers.
So, who won?: The Rockets were down by two at halftime, 48-46, but would come back and take a 110-105 win from the Amigos in front of an announced crowd of 2,748 fans. It would be the second of five straight losses to open Anaheim’s season — the Amigos wound up their season-opening road trip with a win at Minnesota.
Denver’s Lefty Thomas (program bio) led all scorers with 39 points, while Murrell added 22 for the Rockets. Selvage, on the strength of four 3-pointers, led the Amigos with 26 points, while 7-foot center Larry Bunce added 22 points.
Anaheim made seven 3-point goals in the game (out of 39 total field goals made), while Denver did not make one of the bonus shots (out of 48 TFG made).
Denver would be among the top teams in the Western Division for most of the year, but a late-season swoon sent the Rockets from second to third place with a 45-33 record — three games behind the division-winning New Orleans Buccaneers and one behind Dallas.
That would be a major move in the standings, thanks to the playoff format used that first ABA season. The first round of the playoffs had the division winner taking on the third-place team, while the division runner-up was paired with the fourth-place team.
Denver took the best-of-five series with New Orleans to the limit, rallying from a 2-0 deficit with two home wins. The Bucs took Game 5 back in the Crescent City, 102-97, to end the season for the Rockets. New Orleans reached the first ABA Finals, falling in seven games to the Connie Hawkins-led Pittsburgh Pipers.
Anaheim missed the playoffs with a 25-53 record, four games behind the Houston Mavericks for the final postseason berth in the Western Division. The Amigos would move to the Los Angeles Sports Arena the next season and become the Los Angeles Stars.
Highway 69 Blues 
