The Last in the League
June 26, 2006 12:53 AM | General
June 26, 2006
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Tony Robertson woke up, grabbed the Detroit Free Press off his parents’ kitchen table, opened it up to the sports section and found out that he was drafted by the Los Angeles Lakers.
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| Tony Robertson played two NBA seasons with the Atlanta Hawks in 1978 and the Golden State Warriors in 1979.
WVU Sports Communications |
As he was scanning the sports page Robertson got his first telephone call from an agent wanting to represent him in his upcoming contract negotiations. Then another one called … and another. That’s how a good number of the star college players in the late 1970s prepared for professional basketball.
Today, West Virginia’s Mike Gansey and Kevin Pittsnogle have crisscrossed the country holding private workouts for teams, choosing which teams to work out for and telling the others, “Thanks, but no thanks.”
Gansey says 21 of the 30 NBA teams have called his agent wanting him to work out, and he plans on fitting in as many of them as he can before Wednesday’s night’s NBA draft. Both Gansey and Pittsnogle were advised not to play in the NBA pre-draft camp.
Back in 1977, that was Tony Robertson’s only opportunity for exposure.
“Sometimes those pre-draft camps can get you into more trouble than they help you,” says Robertson, 50, now living in Dallas, Texas. “That camp is what I call dog-eat-dog. It’s either the point guard or the center.”
Robertson played well enough to be taken in the fourth round. Although he was eventually released during training camp, through the help of Los Angeles coach Jerry West, Robertson managed to catch on with the Atlanta Hawks for the 1977-78 season.
Three years later, guard Lowes Moore was drafted in the third round by the New Jersey Nets and played 71 games with them in 1981. Two years after that he appeared in 37 games with the San Diego Clippers in 1983.
Moore's '83 season is the last time a West Virginia University basketball player has appeared in a National Basketball Association game – some 23 years and counting.
Slim Pickings
West Virginia’s modest list of NBA-drafted players is stuffed deep in the back of the school’s media guide, between Postseason Appearances and West Virginia (Teams) in the AP Rankings. There’s a good reason. Only one player has been drafted (Gordon Malone) in last nine years and only three have been picked in the last 20 (one of those, forward Eric Semisch, was drafted in the seventh round by family friend Harold Katz, the owner of the Philadelphia 76ers).
Since 1998, only five programs from the six major basketball conferences (ACC, Big East, Big Ten, SEC, Pac-10 and Big 12) have failed to have at least one player drafted: Rutgers, South Florida, Kansas State, Washington State and West Virginia.
At the other end of the spectrum, Duke has seen 14 of its players selected in either the first or second round; Arizona has had 13 drafted, UCLA 11, and North Carolina nine since 1998. Even Fresno State has had six players taken since then.
More surprising is the list of schools that have had at least one player picked during the same period of time: Northern Arizona, Pacific, Long Beach State, Hofstra, North Dakota State, Detroit, Manhattan, Valparaiso, Florida A&M, Illinois State, Central Connecticut, Austin Peay, Eastern Illinois, Morehead State, Western Carolina, Louisiana Monroe, Texas State, Arkansas State, Louisiana Lafayette, and yes, Marshall.
Gansey was caught off guard when informed recently that either he or Pittsnogle (or both) will end West Virginia’s streak of being shut out of the draft if they are picked Wednesday night.
“Wow,” said Gansey. “That’s hard to believe.”
It is hard to believe.
“I can’t figure that one out,” Robertson said. “It goes through my mind sometimes when I look back. During (West Virginia’s run through) the NCAAs I thought about Lowes. He came out in 1980 and it’s pretty hard to believe because there have been some pretty decent players come through here.”
“I thought there were a number of players that had the potential (to play in the NBA),” Moore, 49, added. “You definitely have to have one great thing you can do in order to play in the league; or you have to be multi-dimensional.”
Many in the know insist that 6-4 guard Dale Blaney had the Lakers team made in 1986. Blaney was taken late in the fourth round and played well enough in training camp to earn a roster spot. But he mysteriously left camp before the start of the season. Perhaps the NBA lifestyle was not to his liking.
Three years earlier in 1983, Mountaineer guard Greg Jones was a third-round pick of the Indiana Pacers and had a decent shot of making the club. He didn’t and wound up spending the next 10 years playing in the CBA.
“When I was there a few years ago (WVU’s 100th basketball anniversary celebration) and I saw Greg Jones I was like, ‘How did he not make it? It’s kind of weird to me,” Robertson said.
Gordon Malone had both the size (6-feet-11 inches) and the skills (11.6 career scoring average and a 56.2 percent career field goal average) but he couldn’t stick with the Minnesota Timberwolves in 1997.
Even with the NBA later swelling to 30 teams, good West Virginia players like Lester Rowe, P.G. Greene, Chris Brooks, Damian Owens, Calvin Bowman, Marcus Goree and Darryl Prue had flaws in their games that they couldn’t overcome in the eyes of NBA scouts.
And now on the draft board are Gansey, a 6-4 shooting guard, and Pittsnogle, a 6-11 shooting center. Many are projecting both to be late first or early second-round picks. If they can somehow move up into the first round they will receive guaranteed contracts. That was what Lowes Moore and Tony Robertson were shooting for more than two decades ago.
Gunning for the Guaranteed Money
When Tony Robertson was trying to break into the league in 1978 things were bad – real bad. Before Larry Bird and Magic Johnson arrived to save the NBA, the game was coked out and nearly cooked. Despite a recent infusion of talent from the ABA, the NBA Finals were not broadcast on live TV, shown instead on tape-delay near midnight.
“I came in during a funny year when the NBA wasn’t doing that well (financially) and they cut (team rosters) down to just 11 players,” Robertson said.
Robertson, a 6-5 guard, was a rare two-year 1,000-point scorer at West Virginia. He shot nearly 50 percent from the field for his career and had the size, the athletic ability and the shooting stroke to play big-guard in the NBA.
Jim Amick, West Virginia’s assistant coach at the time and responsible for recruiting both Robertson and Moore to WVU, remembered being extremely impressed with Robertson watching him play for an opposing junior college team in Arizona.
“He was at Eastern Arizona Community College and the coach there had gone to school at the University of Arizona and I think they were kind of thinking he was going to go there,” Amick said. “It wasn’t written in stone and I knew the coach before I had gone to West Virginia.”
Amick was somehow able to convince Robertson to sign with West Virginia sight unseen.
“He signed the papers on the back trunk of my rental car outside the dorm at Eastern Arizona,” Amick said. “There was no big ceremony. He was standing there, I got the papers out, he signed them, we shook hands and I said, ‘I’ll visit your dad and mom when I get to Detroit.’ That was the end of that.”
Robertson was the 88th overall player drafted after his senior season and was in Lakers camp playing for Coach Jerry West, who undoubtedly got an earful from former college teammate Joedy Gardner – Robertson’s head coach at WVU.
“I had made that team right up until the last hour,” Robertson said. “Jack Kent Cooke owned the team and his buddy was (Providence guard) Ernie DiGregorio. Jerry was the one who nicknamed him ‘No-D Ernie.’
“Jack Kent Cooke signed Ernie right under Jerry’s nose and when he brought him in that turned out to be the last spot. Jerry told me that night not to worry because I was going to play somewhere that year. The next morning Atlanta called.”
Robertson spent the entire 1978 season with the Hawks, which had a good team with an established NBA performer in forward John Drew.
“We made the playoffs that year,” said Robertson. “The next year they had three high draft picks (Butch Lee and Jack Givens in the first round and Rick Wilson with the third pick in the second round) and they were all guards. They couldn’t hold my water because I knew how to come off the bench.”
But the thing those three did have was guaranteed money invested in them and in a financially strapped league like the NBA was at the time that superseded talent.
“They weren’t going to cut all that money,” Robertson said.
Amick recalled a conversation he once had with Paul Silas of the San Diego Clippers.
“He said, ‘My hands are tied. I can’t cut anybody,’” Amick said. “He could have had the best rookie in the country and he couldn’t make the team because all his players were veterans with multi-year contracts. And they couldn’t trade them because nobody wanted to take on their salary.”
Robertson caught on with the Utah franchise in the upstart World Basketball League, created to fill the void left after the demise of the ABA. Two months into the 1979 season, Golden State signed Robertson to a contract for the remainder of the year.
“I don’t know what happened after that,” Robertson said. “When I got ready to go back to Golden State they said they weren’t going to bring me back. I wasn’t done (with pro basketball) but I was discouraged. At the time I needed a job. I had gotten married my senior year and had my first child. I didn’t know what I was doing because I was only 21. I think I was like the fifth-youngest player in the league my first year.”
Moore ran into the numbers game, too.
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| Lowes Moore averaged seven points per game as a rookie for the New Jersey Nets in 1981.
WVU Sports Communications |
The dazzling 6-1 guard learned his craft on the New York City playgrounds and came to West Virginia University as one of the most highly-sought-after recruits in the country.
Amick had put a lot of time and energy in wooing Moore to Morgantown. In fact, he stopped an Eastern Airlines flight about to leave LaGuardia to sign the top prospect.
“It was a fairly young guy at the counter and I told him I was a basketball coach and I needed to see this young man on the airplane,” Amick laughed. “He said, ‘Just a minute.’ The plane was out on the tarmac and I had to run out there, they let the door down and here I am boarding the plane with (scholarship) papers in hand.
“The stewardess was kind of looking at me like what in the world is going on? I asked the one, ‘Do you have a young black man on here somewhere?’ She said, ‘Oh yeah, he’s in the back.’ I walk down the aisle and there is Lowes sitting in the back of the plane.
“I said, ‘Lowes, you’ve got to sign these.’ He signed the papers and I jumped up and said, ‘Have a good tournament.’ He was going to Dayton or somewhere to play in an all-star game.”
The persistent coach was afraid if he didn’t sign Moore right then another team might sneak in and steal him.
“I told him, ‘I don’t feel comfortable with you going over there and all those guys putting their arms around you telling you how much they love you.’ He just laughed.
“If I ran across that tarmac today I would have been shot,” Amick said.
Moore was dubbed “Mr. Excitement” by the school’s sports information department and he was once talked into taking some publicity photos dunking a basketball behind his head dressed in a white tuxedo with matching top hat and tails. The pictures that did come out in focus made him look more like a cross between Superfly and Willy Wonka than the college basketball showman he was.
By the end of his third season at WVU and his first under new coach Gale Catlett, Moore put the word out through some emissaries back home that he was interested in entering the NBA draft a year early. When it was determined that he didn’t hire an agent (thus restoring his college eligibility) and Moore realized that he wasn’t going to go high enough to make it worth leaving school, he returned for his senior season.
Moore wound up being selected as the 52nd overall pick in the 1980 draft by the lowly New Jersey Nets and he made the club after a strong preseason camp.
“Going in I didn’t doubt that I could play and that I was going to make the team,” Moore said. “I believed I was better than most of the guys I was going up against.”
Moore appeared in 71 games for the Nets, averaging 7.0 points per game and shooting 44.4 percent from the field. New Jersey went through two coaches that season before the third, Larry Brown, decided to clean house.
Moore thought he played well enough to make the team in 1982.
“They picked up Otis Birdsong and Ray Williams,” Moore recalled. “They were veterans and they were signed to guaranteed contracts so it became a numbers game. The next thing I know I was out and I was at Cleveland.”
Moore appeared in four games with the Cavaliers during the 1982 season, averaging 11.3 points per game and shooting 50 percent from the field.
“At that time Cleveland was so disorganized because they had like 30-some players under guaranteed contracts. Even though I played well in the preseason they weren’t looking to sign another player,” he said.
Moore’s last extended duty in the NBA came in 1983 when he played 37 games for the sordid San Diego Clippers – basketball’s version of the Pittsburgh Pirates.
“San Diego was moving from place to place and there was just no stability,” Moore said. “If you wanted to have stability you needed to be in the organizations that were making the playoffs consistently.
“A couple of my bouts with teams were because they were not willing to release a player that was already guaranteed a contract,” Moore said. “They would rather keep them and have them sit on the bench instead of wasting the money.”
Because the NBA’s financial condition is dramatically improved today, Robertson believes rookies have a much fairer chance of making NBA rosters.
“What I like about the system now is at least if you get drafted in the first and maybe the high-second-to-mid-second round you can get a decent contract that will keep you there,” he said. “Years ago, basically what is now the first or the mid-second was the top four rounds where I ended up going.”
Robertson never signed a guaranteed contract and got just $30,000 his first year. If he would have made it to the fourth year with the Hawks he would have received $100,000.
Moore made $40,000 his first season with the Nets.
“When you are a little kid that’s your dream and while I was there I enjoyed it with a passion,” Moore said. “That’s where I was supposed to be and I had the ability to be there. I just could not get with the right team to get any longevity.”
Little Opportunity
Robertson had limited options when Golden State cut him loose after the 1980 season. At the time foreign leagues had a quota on the number of American players they could take and they were mainly interested in signing 6-8 players or taller. Robertson soon drifted away from the game.
“I don’t regret anything,” he said. “I met some good people.
“I didn’t even really know what the NBA was,” Robertson added. “I played basketball because I loved to play. When I was coming up (NBA games) weren’t on TV a lot and you had to be in certain areas to catch certain games. There was no ESPN so it wasn’t how it is nowadays where the kids are thinking about it when they’re eight years old. I didn’t think about it until the day I got drafted.”
Moore, on the other hand, was consumed with the thought of playing in the league. The concrete court he grew up on was the same NBA training ground for players like Gus and Ray Williams, Earl Tatum, and the McCray brothers Rodney and Scooter. Connecticut’s Ben Gordon carries on the tradition today.
Moore spent the rest of his basketball career chasing his NBA dream in places like Billings, Montana, and Albany, New York.
“I was kind of stuck in the CBA,” Moore said. “I learned a lot and it was a great experience. My first two years I played in Billings, Montana, and it gave me a different experience that I didn’t appreciate so much at the time.”
Moore played six successful seasons in Albany -- not too far from his Mt. Vernon, N.Y., home.
“When I realized that I was not going to get back to the NBA I was playing for Phil Jackson in Albany,” Moore said. “Phil was my assistant coach when I played for the Nets. I was close to home and was starting to have a family. We won two CBA championships so it was a great experience, especially since we were winning. If we were losing I would have probably been miserable.”
Moore’s last attempt at making an NBA roster came in 1989 with the New York Knicks.
“I had a shot with the Knicks and played pretty well but I don’t know …,” Moore sighed. “Bob Hill was coaching there at the time.”
Moore began coaching junior college basketball and then went on to become an assistant coach at Albany State. He also coached in the CBA.
For the last 14 years he has been the director of the Mt. Vernon Boys and Girls Club – the same one he joined as a youngster to get off the streets.
“It was pretty popular when I was growing up but it had deteriorated over time,” Moore said. “When I came back we had about 25 members and here we are 14 years later and we have 1,700. We’re looking to build two new facilities.”
His daughter Shireyll is a sophomore forward on the Fairfield (Conn.) women’s basketball team.
Robertson is currently working for the Dallas independent school district and is trying to complete his college degree.
“It’s tough when you can only take one or two classes at a time,” he said.
Robertson only wishes he would have come along a few years later.
“I always told my dad, ‘You had me too early. You should have had me 10 years later.’” Robertson laughed.
Robertson has seen enough of both Gansey and Pittsnogle on TV to offer this analysis: “Mike’s a team player – even Pittsnogle. They need to be in team-oriented systems. But to be honest, that’s how the NBA is nowadays.”
Both of them will find out for themselves soon enough.
