Bill Tosheff, who leads a group of three- and four-year veterans who are not included in the pension plan, says $400,000 a year would take care of them all, diminishing annually as the bell tolled.
That's a little more than a third of what the San Antonio Spurs paid forward Tony Massenburg this year to sit on the bench. It's less than 1 percent of the average payroll of a single team. It's significantly less than what just two teams, the Celtics and the Toronto Raptors, donated to tsunami relief.
"They could put on four exhibition games, or one exhibition game per team, or T-shirts" to cover pensions, Tosheff says. Isaacs suggests using a fraction of the fines assessed to players over the course of a season.
"It's like we're pressing our noses against the window of a restaurant where everyone inside is just gorging themselves," says Bob Cousy, the Celtics point guard of the 1950s who is among the greatest players ever and one of the most prominent of the so-called pre-'65ers, men who played before the league's pension plan was introduced in 1965 and were thus excluded.
"They should be able to take care of everybody, not just the three- and four-year guys but even the ones who just had a cup of coffee. It wouldn't be a blip; they wouldn't feel it at all."
Or as Ezersky puts it, exaggerating a little, "My gosh, just don't go out for dinner one night and you could give me a whole year's pay."
Tosheff, a tenacious and energetic 79-year-old who was a successful general contractor in San Diego for 45 years, says that he has been able to prove the eligibility of 10 men who hadn't known they had pensions coming. "Some of them think I'm Jesus Christ, some think I'm Santy Claus, but it's just a matter of researching," he says. "The NBA won't do it, the players association won't do it, so I do it. And why aren't they doing it? Why am I finding guys and they're not?"
The 1965 collective-bargaining agreement created a pension benefit for all players from that point on who played at least three years. The payment is now $358 a month for each year played, which amounts to about $43,000 for a 10-year veteran. That could go up significantly under the new CBA.
In 1988, former Boston Celtic Gene Conley and his wife, Katie, organized a group of veterans that they called the NBA Old Timers Association, which included Hall of Famers Cousy, Mikan, Dolph Schayes and others. The association lobbied successfully to have pre-'65 players brought into the pension plan. But they came in at a lower rate, first $100 a month, since raised to $200 for 100 or so surviving veterans.
And for pre-'65ers to qualify, they had to have played at least five years, not the three that post-'65 players need.
That left out about 85 players with three or four years' experience -- "some of whom were every bit as good as the five-year veterans," says Isaacs. "It was not a good business to be in, and after four years they had to find a way to make a living."
Tosheff, who played two seasons with the Indianapolis Olympians and one with the Milwaukee Hawks before turning to minor-league baseball in 1954, has been battling to get his group of three- and four-year veterans included in the plan ever since, even going to Congress in 1998. So far, no dice.
The 85 have shrunk to 45, including four men he can't find and who might be dead. He says the league and the union, which have resisted him at every turn, are just waiting for the men he calls "my guys" to die out.
"Death cures a lot of things," he says.
While the league and the union have agreed on the new CBA, they're still negotiating the smaller details, including the pension plan.
"There's extra money being put into the pension, but they're still working out the specifics of how it's going to work," said NBA spokesman Tim Frank. Asked if it's possible the three- and four-year men would be brought into the pension plan, Frank said, "I wouldn't assume anything until they work out the details."
One thing that irritates Tosheff's group is a part of the 1988 agreement that allows pre-'65 players to get credit for a year in the league if they were in the military -- but only if their basketball career was interrupted or immediately preceded by military service.
"Most of my three- and four-year guys who are left out of the pension were in World War II," Tosheff says, "and then we went to college, and then we played in the NBA, and we don't get [credit for] military time. That is a kind of a hook in there that really bothers me a lot because we were all in the same war."
"It was a mishmosh in 1946; it was a league just starting out," says Walt Budko, 79, who returned to his studies at Columbia University after getting out of the Navy that year. He later played four years for the Baltimore Bullets and the Philadelphia Warriors. "I went back to school, graduated in 1948. I wasn't going to jeopardize my education to try out. In fact, I didn't even know they had tryouts."
Isaacs, the basketball historian, finds the military service rule ironic. "My thinking goes like this: Here's [NBA commissioner] David Stern arguing, with his 19-year-old minimum age, kids should stay in school, at least for a while," he says. "Now the guys who come out of service and go back to school, and then come into the league, are punished because they went back to school. It makes no sense."
A call to the league seeking comment from Stern or his deputy, Russ Granik, was not returned.