Like Davidson in '74, Gores Has Work Cut Out For Him

Bill Davidson was a graduate of that old school you keep hearing about. Whatever it was, that’s where Davidson learned about business.

It was a school that said loyalty meant something, and a contract was worth not just the paper it was written on but the forest that produced the trees that made that paper.

It was a school that mandated that you represent your company with the utmost dignity and respect, and that no one individual was greater than the whole.

Davidson brought these credos to the NBA when he bought the Detroit Pistons from Fred Zollner in 1974.

Zollner, for his part, had brought the NBA itself to Detroit, bringing with him his Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons and staking out his big top inside Olympia Stadium, which would be his basketball team’s home whenever the tradition-rich Red Wings weren’t in town.

The Pistons immediately became Detroit’s redheaded stepchild of pro sports.

Zollner’s team failed to draw at Olympia, and then the Pistons moved into brand-new Cobo Arena in 1961 and they failed to draw there, too. Pro basketball wasn’t moving the sports fan in Detroit, not like it did in hoops-rich towns like New York, Boston and Philadelphia.

Zollner’s franchise was Goofus to the other Detroit teams’ Gallant. It seemed to exist only to serve as a cautionary tale. It was perpetually the “before” in one of those before and after success stories.

The Pistons went through coaches like a Broadway cattle call audition. They made trades that were outshined by the contestants on “Let’s Make a Deal.”

The Pistons couldn’t do anything right. They drafted funny.

By the mid-1960s, it was touch and go as to whether Zollner would pick up his tent and move to another burg.

Then the Pistons got lucky, even when they thought they hadn’t, and drafted a skinny guard from Syracuse named David Bing, when the guy they really wanted, forward Cazzie Russell from Michigan, went to the New York Knicks. This was 1966.

The Pistons lost a coin toss for Cazzie, and so settled with Bing, who only happened to become the man who would save pro basketball in Detroit.

Still, by 1974, Zollner had become a recluse owner, jetting to Detroit from his home in Florida maybe twice a year to see what his basketball players did to earn the paychecks that bore his signature.

Zollner’s was an unsuccessful franchise, though it had two big stars: Bing and center Bob Lanier.

Bill Davidson, Zollner’s neighbor in Florida, had wanted into the pro sports ownership business in the worst way. You know the rest of the joke.

Davidson had bid on Tampa’s World Football League franchise in 1974, but the price was too high. So he turned his attention to his neighbor’s pro basketball team.

The Pistons hadn’t made a dime of profit in the 17 years they’d been in Detroit. Even a 52-win season in ’73-74 failed to spin the turnstiles with much speed or frequency. They were the Edsel of Detroit sports.

Davidson forked over a grand total of $6 million to buy the Pistons from his neighbor Fred Zollner.

The team Davidson purchased was still mostly dysfunctional and by far the fourth favorite in a city with four choices for pro sports.

Fast forward to Thursday afternoon at the Palace, the House That Bill Davidson Built.

On the dais sat a tanned, handsome, 46-year-old man—only five years younger than Davidson was when he bought the Pistons in 1974.

Tom Gores spoke to the media on his first day as Pistons owner. Gores, the day before, had finalized a transaction of mega proportions. In the package came the Palace Sports and Entertainment Group and a dysfunctional basketball team that is by far the fourth favorite in a city with four choices.

The parallels between the state of the Pistons now and their state when Davidson bought them 37 years ago are uncanny.

The Pistons were off the radar in ’74, and they pretty much are now, too. The TV cameras don’t lie. Games televised from the Palace the past couple of seasons were conspicuous by the absence of fans in the stands. The camera shots looked like an NBA game in the closing seconds of a blowout. Only, it was like that for entire games.

In fact, you could make a case that the Pistons of ’74 were in better shape than the ragtag bunch of today, because at least the former had two bona fide superstars in Bing and Lanier.

The Pistons, 2011 vintage, have no one remotely close to being a star, let alone a superstar.

But Gores is plunging into the NBA waters anyway, a Flint kid made good—and how many of those are there? Flint has been kicked, crapped on and stripped of its economy for the better part of 20 years now.

Yet here’s Gores, a Flint guy, with hundreds of millions of dollars to throw at the Pistons and the entertainment conglomerate of which they are part.

The price tag that Gores paid for the entity that Bill Davidson paid $6 million for in 1974 is thought to be in the $320 million range.

Oh, and Davidson managed to turn a profit a time or two—along with winning three league championships.

The Pistons team that Gores has inexplicably bought is filled with unlikable, petulant players who have defiled the team’s motto of “Going to Work.”

It’s a bunch that has won a grand total of 57 games over the past two seasons, not coming close to the playoffs in either year. Attendance is way down, befitting the overall interest in the team throughout metro Detroit.

It is, in effect, 1974 all over again when it comes to pro basketball.

From this embarrassment of non-riches, Tom Gores plans on making money and winning another championship and leading a resurgence of NBA basketball in a town that could, right now, pretty much take it or leave it.

Just like what Bill Davidson hoped to do 37 years ago.

Oh, and there’s a lockout looming in less than a month.

Gores is either about to show off his mad skills as an astute businessman, or he’s a damn fool.

But a guy from Flint who’s just managed to come up with $320 million couldn’t be a fool, could he?

Pistons Could Have Left Detroit When No One Was Watching

They were a ramshackle pro basketball franchise, with a history of slapstick. Their story seemed to have been written by Mel Brooks in collaboration with Albert Camus.

Since moving to Detroit in 1957, the Detroit Pistons in 1974 had, at various times: hired their radio guy as the team’s GM; made a 24-year-old player the head coach; played playoff games in a Grosse Pointe high school gym; had a coach quit on the spot after just 10 games into the season; and had an owner that was so absentee, he only knew of his team’s nightly fate via the wire services.

All that, and more, played out against the backdrop of losing in a vacuum. A typical Pistons season in those days finished at 26-56, with home games attended by only a few thousand of Metro Detroit’s most curious. The Pistons didn’t have fans, they had gawkers.

But Bill Davidson liked pro basketball in the worst way, so the Detroit Pistons were perfect for him.

It was a perfect time, too. 1974 was pet rocks and mood rings and polyester and Richard Nixon out, Gerald Ford in. It was Patty Hearst with a machine gun and boycotts of lettuce. It was like the country threw up in its throat a little bit.

So what better time to lead a group of investors in buying the Pistons, the NBA’s deadbeat son? 1974 did very nicely in that regard.

Davidson, the millionaire from Guardian Industries, came from a world where a deal was a deal. So imagine his umbrage when Dave Bing held out for more money.

Davidson wasn’t the Pistons owner for more than a few months when superstar guard Bing wanted a raise from his 1973-74 salary, even though Bing was under contract at that rate.

Davidson didn’t understand. In his world, a contract was a contract.

The Pistons had just completed, finally, a relatively successful season in 1974. They went 52-30. Their coach, Ray Scott, was named Coach of the Year. The blind squirrel had found its nut. Every dog really did have his day.

Now Dave Bing wanted more money. He threatened not to attend training camp unless Davidson ripped up Bing’s contract and wrote another one.

Davidson looked at Bing and saw a petulant player who was using his team’s only good season in Detroit as leverage.

A year later, Davidson traded Bing away—for Kevin Porter. Davidson went from the frying pan to the fire; Porter’s photo could have been found next to Webster’s entry for petulant.

Such went the beginning of Bill Davidson’s foray into pro sports ownership.

Somehow, the Pistons remained in Detroit throughout the 1960s and early-1970s after moving from Fort Wayne, Indiana, even though the teams were lousy and the crowds were skimpy. The Pistons were dinner theater; the Red Wings, Tigers and Lions were Broadway.

Davidson’s predecessor, Fred “The Z” Zollner, was committed to Detroit. It would have been so easy to up and move the Pistons. He could have fled town with them and had gotten a one year head start before the team would have been reported missing.

But Zollner stayed in Detroit. He’s one of the most under-celebrated figures in Detroit sports history, for showing such resilience.

Today, Bill Davidson’s widow has shown how smart she is.

Karen Davidson, from the moment her husband passed away in March, 2009, made no bones about it: she wanted no part of being the owner of an NBA team.

Women usually are the brains of the group.

Karen Davidson has no delusions of grandeur, like her late husband did when he purchased the Pistons in 1974, thinking owning a pro team would be swell. She knows how shark-infested the waters can be.

“I think you need an owner that’s passionate, engaged,” she told the media during the latest basketball season.

What she didn’t add because she didn’t have to, was that she is not the passionate, engaged owner that the Pistons need. She’s the Accidental Tourist.

The Pistons are for sale. Only those sleeping under rocks don’t know that.

Karen Davidson stands to make quite a haul when she gets someone’s signature on a receipt. The Pistons are just part of the deal. She’s selling Palace Sports & Entertainment (PS&E), too—which includes the DTE Energy Theatre, Meadowbrook Theater, and the Palace itself.

The irony is that, after all those wretched years in Detroit in the pre-Davidson era, after all the times Fred Zollner could have moved the Pistons elsewhere, there are rumblings that after this upcoming sale, the Pistons might not have Detroit as their prefix.

“It’s always our preference to keep the sold team in its market,” NBA Commissioner David Stern told the media this week. “But we haven’t always been successful in that endeavor.”

Cue the foreboding music.

The Pistons would leave Detroit now , after all they’ve been through and all they’ve overcome? It’d be the couple divorcing after 53 years of marriage.

For what it’s worth, Karen Davidson doesn’t think that will happen. She thinks the lure of PS&E would make moving the Pistons unattractive to potential buyers.

But the fact that Stern didn’t slam the door shut on such a notion is a little troublesome.

The Pistons leaving Detroit? After 53 years?

We’ve already lost Stroh’s and Uniroyal and Towne Club. Vernor’s, too. And Hudson’s.

Karen Davidson thinks that’s not going to happen. David Stern says, cavalierly, who knows?

If the Pistons leave Detroit now, decades after having no business even being an NBA franchise—and after three championships and many near-misses—then the franchise’s story will not have been written by Brooks and Camus, after all.

It sounds like something LeBron James’s biographer would pen.

Ford's Eulogy One For The PR Types

They eulogized Bill Davidson yesterday. The place was filled with a Who's Who of Detroit and national sports. As well it should have been.

There's no riddle when it comes to the legacy of Davidson, Mr. D, who passed away last Friday at age 86. There's no need for a spin master or a cadre of P.R. types to punch up his bio and his legacy.

It's all there: championships; the resuscitation of a moribund franchise; a star-studded player roll; an entertainment empire that reaches beyond sports.

You don't have to be clubbed over the head to "get" why Davidson's legacy will land among the greatest of those in Detroit sports history.

I wonder what Bill Ford Sr. is thinking today.

It's ghoulish and morbid, but whenever one in a small clique passes, the other surviving members are looked at cross-eyed.

Ford is on the clock. So is Mike Ilitch -- in the legacy department. Unseemly, but true.

Ilitch is going to be 80 this summer, but by all accounts he seems to be in pretty good physical condition. Besides, he's a four-time Stanley Cup champ with the Red Wings, and a World Series participant with the Tigers. He's won enough to keep even the vermin-like fans among us from wishing his obituary to be printed.

But Ford? You don't want to know what they're wishing about his health. It's not very nice.

But that's what happens when you take a franchise and drive it into the muck, repeatedly, for 45 years.

Davidson, actually, was much like Ford -- in the beginning. He, too, emerged from a group of potential owners and bought out the syndicate so that he could run a team all by his lonesome. Davidson did it in 1974, ten years after Ford did it.

One of the folks who Ford bought out was Ralph Wilson, the longtime owner of the Buffalo Bills. Yeah, I know what you're thinking.

As I read of Davidson's funeral, and all of the A-list folks who attended and spoke on his behalf, it was hard not to think of what they might say about Ford, who turned 84 last Saturday, when it's his time.

What will the legacy be?

The sports broadcasting heads like to say, "If the playoffs started today..." as an excuse to talk, today, about things that are better talked about in the future -- like when they actually happen. So I'll borrow from that and say, "If Bill Ford's funeral was today..."

Morbid? Maybe. But it's a question worth asking: Just what WILL Ford's legacy be, should they lay him to rest before another pro football season is in the books?

Lemme see...

Well, I suppose they could speak of his integrity and his family's car company contributing greatly to the NFL's success in the 1960s and '70s, courtesy of advertising dollars. They could talk about how nice of a man he was. They could say that he wasn't a loud-mouthed buffoon, like so many of his contemporaries. They could talk about his loyalty to his employees and how he was, by what we've read and heard, simply wonderful to work for.

They will not, however, be able to say that he was a winner. Like Bill Davidson. Like Mike Ilitch. That part will have to be left out.

Ford's failure to field a championship-caliber football team won't, I maintain, determine the size of his funeral or the stature of folks who'll fly in for the event. He'll still draw the A-listers, mainly because of his longevity. The NFL will throw tons of bouquets at his memory. You really can't blame them; Ford has been, indeed, one of the league's classiest owners when it comes right down to it.

None of that nice guy, classy, loyal stuff means much to the hard-working, blue collar football fans in Detroit, however. And it's not like you can have one and not the other; we've seen how Davidson operated (and how Ilitch still does), and Mr. D was all those things that they'll say about Ford -- PLUS he was a winner. So it CAN be done.

It just wasn't done with the Lions, like it was done with the Pistons. Davidson took over a team that was in far worse shape than the Lions, in terms of fan support and tradition, bought out his partners, and went to work. He stumbled along the way (see Vitale, Dick) but then corrected himself in short order (see McCloskey, Jack). Davidson was bold, unwavering, and generous. Ford, sadly, has been only the last of those three.

I have no idea when the need will come to eulogize Bill Ford. I'm not one of those hoping for his demise. But time is running out to fashion a legacy of success that won't need to be camouflaged with flowery talk of how nice of a man he was.

All they had to do at Davidson's funeral was recite his resume. It'll take more than that to celebrate the Ford Ownership, when that time comes. A lot more.

Vitale, Davidson Have Each Other To Thank For Hall Of Fame Careers

It was nearly 29 years ago, and two men were at crossroads in their professional lives – crossroads that materialized because of their failed partnership.

Bill Davidson was a five-year loser in the world of professional basketball. He had wanted badly to get into ownership. You could make the old joke here: He wanted to own a team in the worst way – and that’s exactly what he did.

Davidson bought out his partners in 1974 and took over sole ownership of the Detroit Pistons, but only because a look-see into owning a football team didn’t come to pass. In an interview with Mitch Albom of the Detroit Free Press, published this week, Davidson said his first inclination was to own the Lions, if they were available. He and former Lions coach Joe Schmidt, Davidson said, explored owning another football team, which he didn’t identify. But football wasn’t his destiny. Davidson would be stuck with the Pistons – an apt word. The team had been in Detroit for 17 seasons, and in only two of them did their wins exceed their losses. Their time in the Motor City had been more slapstick than serious. But they were Davidson’s, and his alone, after he bought out his compatriots.

Dick Vitale was an abject failure as Pistons coach when he was fired by Davidson in November 1979. Davidson hired Vitale in the spring of 1978, having fallen under Dickie V’s spell and his snake oil salesman act. Vitale promised Davidson “ReVITALEization” and spoke of “Pistons Paradise.” For the owner’s time and trouble, Vitale delivered a 34-60 record.

Bill Davidson is a lot smarter now, by the way.

So here Davidson and Vitale were, losers in basketball, and, by extension, in life. The notion that either of them would survive in the game, let alone become enshrined in its Hall of Fame, was folly.

Then one man changed all that, for both parties.

Jack McCloskey was a grizzled former college basketball coach and a vagabond NBA head coach and assistant, minding his own business on the bench of the Indiana Pacers, helping his old friend Slick Leonard, when Vitale approached him. Dickie V told McCloskey that Davidson was looking for a “basketball man” to run his operation in Detroit. Vitale and McCloskey knew each other from their time spent coaching along the Atlantic Coast – McCloskey at Penn and Vitale in high school in New Jersey.

And Vitale, deposed in Detroit, held no grudges toward Davidson. In fact, not only did Dickie tell McCloskey about the vacancy in Detroit, he whispered McCloskey’s name in Davidson’s ear.

A meeting was set up, between McCloskey, Davidson, and Pistons legal counsel Oscar Feldman. McCloskey impressed, and Davidson wanted to hire him as his new GM, right away. But the Pacers were reluctant to let McCloskey out of his commitment. It looked like Davidson wouldn’t get Vitale’s referral after all.

But the Pacers came around, and Jack McCloskey took over the woeful Pistons in December, 1979.

“To this day, whenever I see Dick, I thank him,” McCloskey told me a couple years ago, on the verge of his induction into the Michigan Sports Hall of Fame.

Speaking of thanks, Vitale has long spoken of how thankful he was that he got canned by the Pistons.

“Mr. Davidson probably saved my life,” Vitale said in a recently-published interview.

Vitale quit the University of Detroit in 1977 because of ulcers. And his early days with the Pistons were pock-marked with stomach ailments, too.

“I probably would have been dead before I was 50,” Vitale said.

Davidson, in the five years prior to hiring McCloskey, had presided over a mess with the Pistons, culminating with a controversial move from downtown to the Pontiac Silverdome in 1978. After the Vitale Era proved to be a colossal failure, Davidson looked almost as much of a clown as Vitale himself, which is saying something.

McCloskey changed all that.

By the end of the 1980s, the Pistons were one of the NBA’s elite. They won championships in 1989 and 1990, and came damn close in 1987 and ’88, too. All of it – ALL of it – was due to the drafting and coaching hires orchestrated by McCloskey.

Vitale, meanwhile, turned his failure into success after being hired by the newly-born sports network ESPN to be a college basketball analyst.

Friday, Vitale and Davidson were both enshrined into the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass. Davidson went in for his accomplishments as an owner and as a guardian of the league, and Vitale was inducted for his tenure behind a microphone and, peripherally, for his authoring several books about the game. They may laugh at Dick Vitale, but it’s irrefutable that he got a whole bunch of folks interested in the college game simply because of his brash, catch phrase-tinged style.

“They need a T.O., babyyyyy!”

“He’s a PTPer!”

And so on.

Neither of the two men – Davidson and Vitale – would have been in Springfield, being honored along with such greats as Patrick Ewing and Hakeem Olajuwon and Pat Riley and Adrian Dantley, if it wasn’t for their parting of ways in November 1979.

Davidson saved Vitale’s life by firing him. And Vitale saved Davidson’s face by recommending he hire Jack McCloskey.

Sometimes we don’t see how funny life is, until, say, 29 years later.