Growing up around the Denver Nuggets came with its own responsibilities. My brother Kevin had to stand outside the locker-room door in 1976 and ask for the coach’s autograph after every game until a long winning streak came to an end.
Coach’s orders.
My father, Ralph Moore, was The Denver Post’s basketball beat writer from the team’s inception in 1967 until his retirement in 1983.
As the father of eight and holder of four (season tickets), Ralph often towed a line of us behind him throughout the underbelly of the team’s old haunts in the Auditorium Arena and McNichols Sports Arena. We were a sight.
After each game, it was back to The Post, where he’d write up his stories for the afternoon edition, while we annoyed the heck out of colleagues and parents of better-behaved kids.
Larry Brown was a superstitious coach, a stylish creature of habit they called “The Modfather.” So when Kevin randomly asked for his autograph on the night that ’76 win streak got started, Brown made it a part of his routine.
He would stop at the locker-room door after each win and ask, “Where’s Ralph’s kid?” (We rotated a bit, but it’s not like anyone could tell us apart.) The streak lasted 10 or 12 games, but when we tell the story today, it’s more like 32. We do that. We also talk about when former center Julius Keye turned around an 11-point play against Utah. OK, so it was seven.
“Growing up Nuggets” defined our childhood. It made us feel privileged, even though Dad never made more than $30,000 a year. Standing among athletic giants, we had a knee-eye view to every significant milestone in Denver basketball history.
We loved those flashy ABA days of 1967-76 the best. The three-point shot. The red, white and blue ball. The superfly afros that grew out to the rafters. That first-ever slam-dunk contest between David Thompson and Julius Erving. Thompson’s 73-point game. Alex English’s silky-smooth shot.
We were hard-core fans. I still have my scrapbook with pages dedicated to players such as Dave Robisch, Claude Terry and Mack Calvin. But school always was our involuntary priority. Ralph never let us forget about the player who literally could not sign his own name on his contract. Instead, he signed an X. “Let that be a lesson,” Dad said. Still is.
But priorities totally blew on the night the Nuggets had a chance to clinch the 1976 ABA championship against the New Jersey Nets. We missed it. Not only was I made to appear as George Washington in my regrettably scheduled grade-school play instead, my displeased older brothers were made to come watch me.
Just as I was about to start my big song, “The Cherry Tree Chop,” I could hear — well, everyone could hear — a tortured scream from brother Danny that pierced the quiet.
“Webster missed?!”
He had been furtively listening to the game on a transistor radio. I knew no details, but I knew the Nuggets lost. My heart was cherry-tree chopped.
Going through my father’s interview tapes after he died was like reliving the history of the team and my family. Ralph recorded the historic news conference in 1975 announcing that the team had acquired the rights to Thompson. He called it the greatest day in team history because he knew landing a player of Thompson’s caliber would hasten a merger with the big-dog NBA.
Pulling off that deal meant the team had to be sold just to afford Thompson’s record salary, which was only about $500,000. The team had a new name, a new arena and the expectation of winning 60 games every year. So when the floor was opened for questions, my dad, the gentleman dean of basketball writers, stood before team management and publicly thanked them for bringing a winning formula to the Mile High City.
This blatant act of sentiment would make my colleagues today cringe. But it was no more out of its place for its time than smoking in the office.
Things were very different then. When Dad found out about the drug abuse that would drive Thompson out of town — and eventually into prison — he wanted to report the real reason this great star who once averaged 27.2 points a game would, by 1984, be putting up only 12.6. Dad thought it would force him to get help, maybe even rescue his career.
Talk about a different era: The sports editor said that whatever Thompson did off the court was his own business. The story never ran, and it haunted my father for years.
There also was a cassette of the day in 1977 when Danny and Kevin put me up to calling Dad while he and a whippersnapper named Woody Paige were guests on a KOA sports-talk radio show. I called in and asked, “Ralph: If the season were to start today, who would be the starting five?”
Without missing a beat, he responded, “Well, John — if I’m not mistaken, that’s my youngest son . . .” to which host Al Albert cracked back: “Don’t you talk to your son at home?”
Dad dutifully rattled off five names (Thompson, Dan Issel, Bobby Jones, Calvin and Jimmy Price), and I was allowed a follow-up:
“Mom wants to know when you’re going to be home for dinner.”
Theater critic John Moore was the Post’s deputy sports editor until 2001. Reach him at 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
