Thursday's Things

(every Thursday at OOB, I rant in list fashion. Last week it was "Things Mickey Redmond Says That Ya Gotta Love")

Absurd Things That Happened In The Pistons' First 50 Seasons In Detroit
(this season the Pistons are celebrating their 5oth anniversary of moving to Detroit from Fort Wayne, IN)

1. Playing a playoff game in a high school gymnasium*. It happened in the early '60s against the Lakers. Both Olympia and Cobo were unavailable, and so was Calihan Hall at UDM. So the Pistons played not one, but two playoff games in a Grosse Pointe High School gymnasium. And the Pistons won both, but lost the fifth and deciding game in Los Angeles.

2. Hiring the Lions' GM to be their GM*. The Pistons figured that since Nick Kerbaway was a successful NFL GM with the Lions, that he'd be good in the NBA, too. Kerbaway's hiring in the late '50s was met with some resistance by the Lions, but he joined the Pistons anyway. He wasn't able to transfer football success to that on the basketball court -- to the surprise of no one, except Pistons brass.

3. Hiring their radio announcer to be GM*. Don Wattrick was the Pistons' radio announcer in the mid-1960s when the Pistons elevated him to GM. Another failed experiment, made tragic when Wattrick died in the offseason after his first year on the job.

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"MUCK FOTTA"
--Sign hung at Cobo Arena taunting Bulls coach Dick Motta
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4. Making Dave DeBusschere player-coach. It wasn't just that they gave DeBusschere, local hero that he was, the coaching job while he was playing. It's that they did it when DD was just 25 years old. The team eventually stripped him of the coaching duties after two terrible seasons, then they ....

5. Traded DeBusschere to the New York Knicks. DeBusschere was traded to the Knicks in a lopsided deal that helped the New Yorkers win the 1970 and'73 titles.

6. Selecting Marvin Barnes in the ABA dispersal draft. This was the player the Pistons chose in 1976, when Moses Malone and others were available instead. "Bad News" Barnes spent less than two tumultuous seasons in Detroit, a player with a record of questionable character and work ethic when the Pistons plucked him from the St. Louis Spirits when the ABA folded.

7. Playing games in the Pontiac Silverdome. Somehow, the Pistons ended up playing 10 seasons in the cold, drafty, poorly-lit Silverdome on the jerry-rigged basketball floor. Remember the huge blue curtain that shielded the rest of the massive Dome? The Pistons did set league attendance records there, but of course they did, when you can cram 40,000 in the place -- 20,000 in the nose-bleed section.

8. Hiring Dick Vitale as coach. The absurdity was evident at Vitale's opening press conference, when he burst thru a paper backdrop of Detroit's skyline and rambled on for nearly 30 minutes before taking one question. He talked of Pistons Paradise and had t-shirts and bumper stickers made that said, "ReVITALEization." Oh, he was so clever!

9. Returning to Cobo when the Dome's roof collapsed. Whenever the Silverdome's roof would collapse due to heavy snow -- and it happened more than once -- the Pistons would play at Joe Louis Arena. But on one occasion, JLA was booked, so the Pistons played one more regular season game at Cobo, in 1985.

10. Dancing Gus, the roly-poly vendor. Gus (his last name fails me) was a legitimate Cobo Arena vendor who worked in the balcony. During timeouts in the '70s, Gus would dance -- gyrating, twisting, and damn near falling over the railing on occasion. The Cobo scoreboard would implore, "DANCE FOR US, GUS!"

11. The best sign at a sporting event -- ever*. I'm sorry, but I love this one. The Pistons played the Bulls in a famous, seven-game playoff series in 1974. The Bulls, coached by Dick Motta, won. But at one of the games at Cobo, someone had hung a large banner made out of a bedsheet. It read, simply, "MUCK FOTTA." Pistons coach Ray Scott looked at it and commented, within earshot of the media, "That's not very nice."

(*note: some of these memories were found courtesy of Jerry Green's outstanding book, "The Detroit Pistons: Capturing A Remarkable Era," published in 1991).