San Antonio – Before pro basketball moved to gated communities, before fans paid the equivalent of a down payment on a house to get good season tickets, a spacey, scruffy league called the ABA helped change the game.
It did the same to a young man named George Karl.
Years before his five NBA coaching gigs and the millions that came with them, the Nuggets’ head man was a fan favorite as a 22-year-old pest as an original San Antonio Spur in 1973-74.
“I’m a wealthy man now, but I never felt wealthier than when I was making $50,000 a year as a Spur,” Karl said. “My rent was 300 bucks. I had no bills. I had no loans. My car was paid for. A per diem in my pocket. That was incredible.”
When Karl arrived fresh from the University of North Carolina without enough talent to make the NBA, by his own admission, football was the only game in San Antonio’s vocabulary.
“Nobody knew who we were, and nobody really cared,” recalled Coby Dietrick, Karl’s roommates on that first team and the man for whom Karl named his son, Coby. Karl’s five injury-shortened seasons as a backup guard weren’t Hall of Fame material, but they were entertaining.
On a team with no marketing department, Karl and Dietrick were given a list of wealthy area fans and asked to recruit season ticket-holders. Dietrick laughs when discussing the two shaggy-haired young men in the office of an old-money San Antonio figure named Bo McAllister, who wasn’t buying what they were selling.
But Karl connected plenty with the regular fan base. At a time when the fans and players knew each other in a way that almost never happens anymore, Karl drank beers with a group of die-hard fans called the Baseline Bums. The Bums were led by a portly man known as Big George.
“He was a scrappy stiff, basically,” said Nuggets assistant Doug Moe, who coached Karl in San Antonio, as did Tom Nissalke and Bob Bass. “We gotta call him a stiff. Everybody likes those stiffs that play 100 percent. That’s the way George was. He was all over the place.”
Karl’s favorite restaurant at the time, Paesano’s, has changed locations from his playing days and gotten nicer. Karl still likes to go there when in town but said he misses the older, dumpier place with red-and-white checkered, plastic tablecloths and a shrimp dish-and-garlic bread combo with a dairy’s worth of butter on the side. This blue-collar, military town agreed with the fiesty point guard.
“This is not Austin, Texas,” said Dietrick, who played 13 years in the pros and still lives here. “This is not L.A. The way we played captured the imagination of this town and George was definitely a part of it.”
Fans seemed to love the notion of an under-talented but unafraid player who once jabbered with the menacing 7-foot-2 Artis Gilmore. Indiana Pacer great George McGinnis labeled Karl “The Flea” for his annoying defensive style. Karl took it as a great compliment.
Former Nugget Mack Calvin played briefly with Karl in 1976-77, after the ABA’s merger with the NBA. Calvin still remembers a charge Karl drew on McGinnis.
“McGinnis absolutely ran his guts through the stands,” Calvin said. “George got up and wanted to fight him. That was the kind of player George was.”
But for all Karl’s bombast, Calvin said he doubted Karl could deliver.
“If it came down to fighting, I don’t know if George can box apples,” he said.
Karl still reflects warmly on those times, as well as the day he was in Mexico in 1976 when he heard the news the ABA had landed four teams – San Antonio, Denver, Indiana and the New York Nets – into the NBA.
Of the ABA, he said: “It was serious basketball in an unserious atmosphere. We got paid money, but it didn’t seem like we were a business. It was just go to the gym. The demand that we put on players to be professional now would be hard to do (then), because organizations weren’t very professional. We were always shaky. See if we were going to pay the bills. But it survived.”
A bum knee forced Karl to retire four games into the 1977-78 season, a time when Moe handed him his first assistant coaching work. With that move Karl began a coaching journey around the basketball world. Many of his teammates on those Spurs team, among them Dietrick, who remains a good friend, Mark Olberding, Paul Griffin and the great George Gervin, stayed here.
San Antonio grew to a city of 1.2 million people. The Spurs moved from HemisFair Arena to the Alamodome to their current home, the SBC Center. In Dietrick’s opinion, the team priced out many of its original hard-core fans. Big George the super-fan stopped buying season tickets to watch the Spurs, now an NBA gold standard for polish and professionalism.
“Those were good, young days,” Karl said. “I was free and wild. The city had the same personality. It was a young city, growing up.”
Adam Thompson can be reached at 303-820-5447 or at athompson@denverpost.com.
