Forty years ago this month, NBA players finally got a pension. The league's owners capitulated when Oscar Robertson, Lenny Wilkens and other union representatives refused to leave the locker room for the 1964 All-Star Game. Only a threat of boycott gave the players what they long deserved.
The same conviction should not be expected of Kevin Garnett, LeBron James and Steve Nash this all-star weekend in Denver. They're well compensated, taken care of financially in ways the Big O and others never imagined.
Were the legends born at the wrong time? Undeniably. NBA players who retired after 1965 receive an annual pension of less than $4,300 for each year they played, up to 10 years. On average, those players spent only six years in the league. Unlike most professions, their earning power was tethered to their physical prime for a finite number of years.
"Some of them had bad marriages, made bad business decisions," said Jack Marin, the former Baltimore Bullet. Marin serves as outside counsel for the NBA's retired players. He is lobbying the current players and owners to increase the pension in concert with new law.
"This has been a safety net and a lifesaver for a lot of guys," he said. "Some guys you would be surprised to hear about them needing help."
Mel Davis, the president of the NBA Retired Players Association, estimated last summer that 20 percent of former NBA players are in "bad shape." He mentioned financially and physically destitute players, as many as six of them with accelerated cases of AIDS.
The multimillionaires preparing to laugh and dunk on Saturday and Sunday don't want to hear that. But it's true.
It's not that the NBA neglects its history. But it often trots out its legends on a convenience-only basis, like this weekend.
You'll hear about Denver as the place where the dunk contest was born in 1976. It's where 5-foot-7-inch Spud Webb shocked his peers in 1986, defying physics while becoming the tiniest man to win the event. David Thompson, one of the game's early sky-walkers, spent seven of his nine professional seasons with the Nuggets. He'll be there this weekend, along with all the old ABA and NBA Nuggets.
At the players' association annual gala tomorrow night, the union has invited a little of the old and the new. Nelly will perform, followed by George Clinton and Parliament/Funkadelic. Cedric the Entertainer has been hired to emcee the retired players' brunch. Like most all-star weekends, the merging of athletics and entertainment into some cultural cornucopia will go on.
When the league needs nostalgia to make you forget about some of their troubled youngsters, out pops George Gervin or Julius Erving or Willis Reed, smiling and waving at midcourt. Afterward, they are deposited back into the shadows of retirement.
Walt Frazier was asked last year if Stephon Marbury or any other Knicks guard ever asked the Hall of Famer for advice. "No, they vaguely know who I am or what I did," he said. "That's how it is today."
Earl Monroe's wife, Marita Green, told of a disturbing story at the 2004 All-Star Game in Los Angeles. The woman distributing credentials to the Magic Johnson tribute had never heard of Earl Monroe. When a credential was finally obtained, the couple strode toward the red carpet and heard a monstrous applause. "I thought, finally, Earl gets his due around here," she said. The cheers turned out to be for Dennis Rodman, not the Pearl.
The retro jersey fad gave some of the legends cachet. But they're still the stepchild of the players and owners, completely at the mercy of the people for whom they paved the road.
The hotel where most of the legends and retired players are staying this weekend is not even located in downtown Denver. It's a half-hour out of town, away from the fans, the current all-stars and the bacchanalia of the weekend. Again, they get pushed aside.
The NBA's radical generational shifts almost exacerbate the out-with-the-old, in-with-the-new mind-set. But it's high time to take care of this pension issue.
Neither Commissioner David Stern nor Billy Hunter, the players' union executive director, has shot down the proposal. Twice in the past 10 years, both sides have increased the pension for retired players. But Hunter is privately worried about diverting current players' retirement funds toward another pension increase for the retired players. In an ideal world, he would like to maintain the benefits that current players now receive, such as their 401(k)s, while also receiving an enhanced pension benefit that would immediately help the retired players.
If this issue gets pushed aside in collective bargaining, it would reflect awfully on the league and the current players. It would speak volumes about their commitment to the people who helped build the NBA into a $3 billion conglomerate.
In 2002, the NFL increased its pension payments for pre-1977 players, 800 of whom were in the league before 1959, by $110 million. Major League Baseball agreed last summer to grant $375 lifetime monthly payments to 27 former Negro League players who were excluded from playing in the majors because they were black. This is not charity; this is called taking care of your own.
Should current players and owners be responsible for improving the pensions of players who competed before salaries exploded? If they have any concern or care for the players who came before them, yes.
NBA owners and players will divvy up $2.8 billion -- the richest pot in NBA history -- in negotiating a new agreement this summer. To increase the pension to the new Internal Revenue Service maximum, current players would have to contribute about $12 million annually to the pension fund that would have gone to a 401(k) plan started in 1999. That's $12 million out of the players' take of roughly $1.5 billion.
That's a drop in the bucket for the pioneers who looked out for them 40 years ago.
