King Kaufman's Sports Daily
For years, about 85 elderly ex-players have been fighting to get NBA pensions. The response from the league and the union: Drop dead. Half of them have.
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June 28, 2005 | Shaquille O'Neal once gave a photo to George Mikan, the NBA's first great big man and first great star, inscribed, "Without you, there would be no me." The Miami Heat star repeated the sentiment earlier this month when he publicly offered to pay for Mikan's funeral.
It doesn't appear to be a sentiment widely held by NBA players, or by the league itself. In a little over a half century the NBA has grown from a struggling entity vainly hoping to fill hockey arenas on dark nights to a $3 billion international business that turns young ballplayers into millionaires by the dozen.
Tuesday night 30 such players, the first-round picks in the draft, will find out which teams will sign them to a guaranteed, multimillion-dollar contracts. The average NBA player makes $4.9 million a year. More than 20 players make at least $13 million.
But as the finishing touches are being put on the league's new collective-bargaining agreement with the players union, some of the game's pioneers, men who played in front of small crowds for teams like the Chicago Stags and the Tri-Cities Blackhawks -- but also for the Boston Celtics and the New York Knicks -- are hoping for an increase in what they consider an ungenerous NBA pension.
Others are hoping, after two decades of fighting, to be included at all.
The former players in both groups are in their late 70s and 80s mostly, some of them doing fine and others in desperate financial straits. They see the billions being generated by the league they helped build and wonder why today's millionaires won't shake loose what amounts to chump change to help them out.
"We were responsible for starting the league and keeping it going," says John Ezersky, 83, who played in the old Basketball Association of America and then the NBA in a three-year career that ended in 1950. "I think we're entitled to a little bit."
Ezersky gets no pension, and he and his wife, Elaine, live on about $15,000 a year in Social Security. He retired five years ago after spending a half century driving cabs in New York and San Francisco.
"The league owes its very survival to these players," says Neil Isaacs, author of "Vintage NBA: The Pioneer Era (1946-1956)," a history of professional basketball's early days. "The league could not have survived unless these players played under extraordinarily difficult circumstances and kept at it for the love of the game."
What makes their fight so compelling, and the resistance of the league and the National Basketball Players Association so puzzling, is that, relatively speaking, what they're asking for is such a pittance.