Miami’s First Pro Basketball Team: Remembering the Floridians 1968-1972

Mack Calvin was a 5-time ABA All-Star. (Photo courtesy of RememberTheABA.com)

With no Mel Daniels, the Miami Floridians made their debut in the Sunshine State on November 6, 1968. The local sportswriters weren’t expecting there to be much interest in the new team. They had been telling their readers for months that Miami was not a basketball hotbed – and they were right. Only 4,317 fans turned out to see the Floridians’ 123-109 win over the New Orleans Buccaneers. The small gathering was wild and enthusiastic—they gave the hometown team several standing ovations, but it was not the most sophisticated basketball crowd –curiously, during the final minutes of the game, they booed every time the visiting Bucs made a basket.

The players, though, were excited and looked forward to playing in front of such passionate fans. “It was fantastic,” Floridians’ guard Donnie Freeman said after the game. “That’s the kind of crowd that makes us go.”

Attendance was better for the next game as 6,894 were there to see Rick Barry and the Oakland Oaks. But Barry, the University of Miami star, poured in 30 points as the Oaks blew out the Floridians.

The Floridians got off to a pretty good start in their inaugural season, but the crowds dwindled. Most of the games were played at the Miami Beach Convention Center where average attendance was only 3,202 for the year, and nearly half of that was freebies. The games started at eight p.m. when most of Miami’s winter residents were already in bed. And the Floridians were not given top billing – games had to be re-scheduled when the ice show, boxing, wrestling or even pingpong came in. Some games were played at Miami Dade North Junior College and a few were played in West Palm Beach. The new owners would lose $300,000 in the first year.

On the court, the first season was the franchise’s best. The Floridians finished in second place in the Eastern Division with a 43-35 record. Donnie Freeman, Les Hunter and six-foot-ten center Skip Thoren were the stars. They beat Connie Hawkins and the Minnesota Pipers in the first round of the playoffs in seven games but then were eliminated by the Indiana Pacers led by Mel Daniels (ugh) in the division finals, four games to one. A playoff game at West Palm Beach Auditorium drew a disappointing 1,700 fans.

The Cuban Comet

The next season— 1969-70 would be the team’s worst. Plagued with poor attendance, the Floridians’ owners wanted to get a player who could appeal to Miami fans, so they acquired the rights to Al Cueto from the Denver Rockets. Cueto, a local kid from Coral Gables High School, was born in Cuba and lived there until he was fourteen when his family fled the island after Fidel Castro took over. The six-foot-seven forward from Tulsa University was offered $100 a week by Floridians’ general manager Dennis Murphy to come back home. When Cueto balked at the paltry sum, saying that he could “make more money bagging groceries,” Murphy upped his offer and eventually signed him for $15,000 a year. The only problem was – Cueto really couldn’t play. Even Murphy admitted that Cueto was only a fair player, but that didn’t stop the Floridians from giving him top billing in their advertising campaign – hyping him as “The World’s Tallest Cuban”—a claim that actually wasn’t true, as the Cuban national team had three players that were six-feet-nine.

Dubbed the “Cuban Comet,” Cueto was an instant hit with Miami’s large Cuban population. He even had his own fan club, and initially, it appeared that maybe the kid could play. In his second game in Miami, he pulled down 20 rebounds but then told reporters afterward that he was so out of shape, he didn’t think he could make it through 75 more games.

The Cuban Comet turned out to be more of a flash in the pan. After his early-season heroics, his production fizzled out. He averaged only 6 points and 16 minutes per game and was second on the team in personal fouls. Cueto did make it through the year but was shipped off to the Memphis Pros in the off-season.

Front Office Turmoil

There were more front office blunders to come. The Floridians at the time had six or seven owners in addition to Larry Shields – two of them—Sandy Rywell and Dr. Thomas Carney began acting on their own—interfering with basketball decisions normally left to the coach and general manager. In October 1969, Rywell, a Miami stockbroker, engineered a trade with the Pittsburgh Pipers, getting veteran forward Art Heyman in exchange for cash and a future draft pick. He didn’t, however, let Dennis Murphy, Coach Jim Pollard, or the other owners know about the deal. Instead, he stopped by the press table during the middle of a game and announced the transaction to the writers, totally blindsiding Murphy and Pollard who said the team already had too many players on the roster.

In Artie Heyman, the Floridians got a colorful character who had a reputation throughout the league as a flake. The number one pick in the 1963 NBA draft was gregarious, funny, and enjoyed the night-life. The New York City native’s best buddy was New York Jets quarterback Joe Namath; the two would paint the town on many a night. On the court, Heyman was nasty. He played to win and wasn’t interested in making friends. The temperamental guard fought opposing players, teammates and coaches–he was the ABA’s bad boy.

Rywell hoped that Heyman could help put people in the seats, and playing in Miami, it didn’t hurt that Artie was Jewish. A Floridians season ticket holder told the Miami News that he was excited about the arrival of Heyman. “We used to razz him because he’s a Jewish boy,” said Norm Lesser. “Now we’ll cheer him for the same reason.”

Heyman had bounced around the league for years, having arrived in Pittsburgh in 1967 from the New Jersey Americans in a trade for Barry Leibowitz in what the Miami News called “one of the few straight-Jewish-player trades in sports history.” Heyman had helped the Pipers win the league’s first championship in 1968, but Rywell didn’t realize that Artie’s best days were behind him. Perhaps too many late nights out on the town with “Broadway Joe” had done him in. As a Floridian, Artie played in only 17 games averaging 7.8 points, and when new coach Hal Blitman took over for Pollard in December 1969, his days were numbered. Blitman, a former high school and college coach, had a lot of rules and imposed a team curfew, which did not sit well with the fun-loving Heyman. When he complained that the new coach “was treating us like children,” Heyman became the first player that Blitman cut.

Second Season Jinx

The 1969-70 season had started out promising. Coming off a second-place finish, the Floridians signed their first-round draft pick–Larry Cannon from LaSalle College and gave him a $250,000 bonus with a no-cut clause. It was the time of the bidding wars with the NBA, so signing Cannon was a big coup, but things soured quickly between Cannon and Coach Pollard. In an early-season game, Cannon was furious after Pollard pulled him after playing only 90 seconds. The two got into a shouting match and when Cannon kicked over a chair, Pollard told him if he didn’t like it, he could hit the showers–so Cannon did. Walking off the floor and into the locker room, he grabbed his stuff and left the building. “I’m an All-American and they are treating me like a bum,” Cannon told the press. He claimed Pollard was “messing up his game.”

Cannon was fined $250, and although he and Pollard eventually patched things up, the coach was soon fired and replaced by Hal Blitman. Cannon averaged only 11.8 points per game in his rookie year and was traded to Denver in the summer where he went on to have a great season –averaging 26.6 points for the Rockets in 1970-71.

The team got off to a slow start in its second season, and when six-foot-ten center Skip Thoren went out with a knee injury, things went downhill. Blitman, a cigar-smoking Philadelphian with an impressive 137-24 record at Cheyney State College was brought in to try to turn things around.

Any turnaround effort would be difficult, however, as the owners continued to make trades without any input from the coach or general manager. In addition, there was no team chemistry as players were swapped, waived and signed at a dizzying pace—22 different players wore a Floridians uniform during the 1969-70 season.

Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?

Not a smoothly-run organization, the Floridians didn’t even have telephone service in their home office during the summer of 1969. When the club moved its headquarters to Dinner Key Auditorium, employees had to put a dime in a pay phone to make a call. A Palm Beach Post reporter trying to contact Coach Pollard was given two phone numbers by Pollard’s wife and told: “Just let it ring— they’re both pay phones.” When Dennis Murphy finally answered the reporter’s call after the phone rang for about a minute, he laughed off the suggestion that the club pay its phone bill and explained, “You know how the phone company operates. It takes two weeks or more to get phone service.”

Most of the team’s home games in 1969-70 were played at Dinner Key Auditorium, which was probably the worst arena in professional sports. The former airplane hangar was drafty, had broken windows and no air conditioning – and this is Miami we’re talking about. Put a thousand people in there and it was literally a hot box. The doors had to be thrown open to let the breezes from Biscayne Bay cool off the place—the players had to adjust their jump shots accordingly. The joke was that at the center jump to start the game, there was a coin toss to see who would take the wind.

One night, the lights at Dinner Key went out with 3:07 left in a game with the Washington Capitals. The Floridians were clinging to a three-point lead when the lights blinked and buzzed for a second and then came back on very dim. When told it would take some time to get the lights back at full strength, the coaches—Al Bianchi and Pollard agreed to keep playing. In near darkness, the Floridians blew the lead and lost to the Caps by 10 points.

There were few bright spots during the 1969-70 season as the Floridians finished in last place with a 23-61 record.

Donnie Freeman, a six-foot-three guard from the University of Illinois, was the team’s best player– averaging over 27 points a game. Freeman would be traded to Utah during the off-season, as new owner Ned Doyle began making wholesale changes.

Instead of Firing the Coach, We Fired the Team

Ned Doyle had bought the team for $1,000,000 in May 1970. An advertising wizard, Doyle was the man behind the popular Avis “We Try Harder” and Volkswagen campaigns–remember the commercial where they tried to fit Wilt Chamberlain into a Volkswagen Beetle?

Under Doyle, the team would represent the whole state of Florida. Dropping “Miami” from its name, they became simply “The Floridians.” As a regional franchise, five games were scheduled at the Curtis Hixon Center in Tampa, ten at the Jacksonville Coliseum, one in West Palm Beach, and the remaining games were back at the more comfortable Miami Beach Convention Center.

Doyle promised the people of Florida a contender, so he knew that a fresh start was needed. His first move was to get rid of all the players on the team but keep Coach Blitman – and then he made the unusual maneuver the team’s marketing slogan— putting full-page ads in Florida newspapers that read: “Instead of Firing the Coach, We Fired the Team.” The ads also apologized for the team’s poor showing of the previous year: “What the Floridians lacked in size and defense, they made up for by being slow.”

According to the Miami News, the idea of firing the team actually came from Hal Blitman’s eight-year-old daughter Stephanie who came up to him after a particularly disheartening loss and said, “Daddy, we need a whole new team.”
Blitman thought his daughter was on to something. After careful analysis, Doyle and Blitman agreed that everyone on the roster had to go. It was a smart decision. They picked up some good players. Mack Calvin, an all-league rookie, and all-star forward Tom Washington were brought in from the Utah Stars. High-scoring Larry Jones came in a trade with Denver. Warren Davis, a strong rebounder, was picked up from the Pittsburgh Pipers, and three-point shooting threat Ron Franz arrived from New Orleans.

Mack Calvin flourished under Hal Blitman averaging 27.2 points per game. “I loved playing for Hal Blitman, said Calvin, now 71 and living in Los Angeles. “He played an up-tempo style. He was a guard’s coach.”

“With Mack Calvin and Larry Jones, we had two guards who could really light it up,” said Fran O’Hanlon the long-time coach at Lafayette University who was a backcourt reserve for the Floridians.

The games were fast-paced and high-scoring. The Floridians averaged 114 points per game in 1970-71 and that was near the bottom of the league in scoring. In the ABA, it was run n’ gun and have some fun.

The new-look team started off the 1970-71 season 14-15 under Blitman but when they won only 4 of their next 19 games, Doyle decided to fire the coach. So now, it was a whole new team and a new coach.

Blitman was replaced by Bob Bass the Texas Tech coach. Bass had coached the Denver Rockets for two seasons and would later become a successful general manager for the San Antonio Spurs and Charlotte Hornets—twice winning NBA Executive of the Year awards.

Bass played more of a slow-down style of basketball. He played a lot of guys and liked to work the ball inside. The team seemed to respond to the new coach and got hot—winning seven in a row at the end of the season to make the playoffs with a 37-47 record but were eliminated in the first round by the Kentucky Colonels, four games to two. Mack Calvin was a first-team ABA all-star, and Larry Jones poured in 24.3 points per game.

Though they made the playoffs, the team still couldn’t draw any fans. Financial problems continued under the new owner. Paychecks bounced on more than a few occasions. Calvin, the team’s highest-paid player, had a solution to that problem. “I got smart,” he recalled. “We would get our paychecks right before practice, so I would always fake an injury and run to the bank to get my money before the other players.”

Ball Girls in Bikinis

Doyle knew he had to get more people in the stands in order to meet the payroll, so the advertising whiz was always promoting. In a league that had cow-milking contests, halter-top nights and Victor the Wrestling Bear grappling with two fans during halftime, Doyle had quite a few gimmicks of his own. There were go-go dancing competitions and free pantyhose for the first 500 ladies. Live turkeys were given away at Thanksgiving. Fifteen pounds of smoked fish went to one lucky fan while another filled his trunk with 57 pounds of Irish potatoes. Fans went home with vats of gefilte fish and kegs of beer. Bagels were tossed into the stands during timeouts. Dolphin’s placekicker Garo Yepremian tried to kick footballs into a basket during halftime. The overhead scoreboard at the Miami Beach Convention Center blew out smoke every time a Floridan made a three-point shot. The Floridians even had their own fight song, “Get That Ball,” performed by popular singer Teresa Brewer. “Go on and get that ball, Floridians, gotta get that ball before we score! Defense! Rebound! That’s the way to win! Go till we’re No.1!”

On Irish Night, the names on the back of the players’ jerseys were changed slightly for the occasion. There was O’Calvin, O’Jones and O’Davis (no uniform alteration necessary for Fran O’Hanlon).  Fans could get in free if they had a name like Doyle, Murphy, or O’Sullivan. But the promotion was a flop as the announced crowd was only 2,107. Miami Beach was not exactly an Irish enclave. A lucky fan did win a trip to Dublin – Dublin, Georgia.

There were basketball-boxing doubleheaders featuring former heavyweight champion Jimmy Ellis.  Muhammad Ali gave boxing exhibitions. “The mistake they made was that they had Ali give a two or three round exhibition before the game and when it was over, half the people would leave,” Calvin said.

And of course, there were the ball girls in bikinis.

The novel idea came from the team’s new public relations guy – Ken Small, a former Miami sportswriter and magazine publisher. The girls wore red, white, and blue bikinis and white boots. They stood on the end lines behind the baskets and retrieved balls if they went out of bounds. Except for participating in ice cream and cake-eating contests at halftime, the girls really didn’t do much except look good.
“I don’t remember if they did any dancing – although, that’s something I really should remember because I was watching them all the time,” said Fran O’Hanlon with a laugh.

Eventually, the girls did put in a little dance routine. Calvin recalled, “The girls were pretty and attractive, but half of them couldn’t really dance. It was more like a wiggle. It was entertainment—no one in professional sports at the time had anything like it. It was the Miami Floridians who paved the way for the Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders and the dance teams that everybody in the NBA has today.”

The ball girls were a big hit throughout the league. They took their show on the road—going to Madison Square Garden in New York for an ABA doubleheader around Christmastime. Before the game, three of the girls popped out of a Santa Claus bag—the crowd went nuts. The next-day headline in a New York newspaper read: “Ball Girls Invade Garden.”

One of the job hazards for the girls was dodging the many advances from men that came their way. Surprisingly, it was the referees who were the worst offenders. One young blonde beauty told the Orlando Sentinel, “Oh those referees, they are always asking us for dates – even more than the fans and visiting players. But of course, it is strictly against the rules.”Under the category of things that would never happen today—two of the ball girls were under the age of 18.

Bikini-clad ball girls were Doyle’s most famous promotion but there were other unusual pitches, including having the players meet the fans as they came into the arena. “We would be in our uniforms 15-20 minutes before the game, and we would go out and greet the fans, shake their hands and thank them for supporting us,” Calvin said.

“On weekends, we would go to shopping malls to meet the people and give out free tickets. We were always promoting and selling.”

Unfortunately, the people of Florida weren’t buying. The regional franchise experiment didn’t work. Attendance was sparse in all of the cities that hosted games. The largest crowds were in Tampa where they would occasionally get over 5,000 at the Curtis Hixon Center. The inability to get fans to the Miami Beach Convention Center frustrated public relations man Ken Small, who lamented, “Miami Beach is for tourists and 85-year-old women.”

The ABA-NBA Rivalry

Basketball was a tough sell in Miami—and it wasn’t an inferior product that was being sold. The ABA had some great players.

“No question the ABA was just as good as the NBA,” recalled Calvin who played in both leagues and coached the Milwaukee Bucks and Los Angeles Clippers. Evidence of that, Calvin said, was that in the first all-star game after the two leagues merged in 1976, 10 of the 24 players were ex-ABA players. In addition, the two leagues started playing preseason exhibition games  in 1971 and in the overall interleague rivalry, the ABA won 79 games to the NBA’s 76. Not only that, before the start of the 1971 season, the Floridians defeated the Baltimore Bullets who were one of the best teams in the NBA. It didn’t matter. The Miami Dolphins were the only game in town, and the Floridians were lucky if they made it onto the fourth or fifth page of the local sports section.

Ned Doyle had other problems besides trying to get fans at the games. An older man when he bought the team—he was close to 70, Doyle had a much younger wife who would constantly flirt with the players. The joke among the guys was that if you flirted back, you would get traded.

Like the prior owners, Doyle also made some big personnel gaffes. He was a great promoter, but he wasn’t a great judge of talent. When Rick Barry was jumping from team to team, Doyle didn’t even make an attempt to get him, saying that Barry “wasn’t a team player and had bad knees.”

Boo Birds Inc.

Getting people in the stands was always Doyle’s main focus. The few fans that did show up to the games were passionate, loud, and some would say obnoxious. The Miami Beach Convention Center had its own specific “booing” section. The head boo bird was a guy named Bob Pearce. Pearce had started attending Floridians games after he had been tossed out of the Miami Jai-Alai arena by the Fronton’s owner for trying to incite a riot – yes, jai-alai in Miami was more popular than basketball in the early 1970s. Pearce, a jai-alai enthusiast, said he had never attended a professional basketball game before, but saw “there was a lot to boo.”
At a game in February 1971, they had Pearce roped off in the area behind the visitors’ bench and called it the “Bob Pearce Booing Section.” Pearce’s mission was to try to rattle the visiting Indiana Pacers. The fans loved him. Fifty more joined him at the next game. Pearce’s leather-lunged legion of followers wore hats to identify themselves and formed a club called “Boo Birds Inc.”

But things would soon get out of hand with the Boo Birds. In March 1972, one of them— Dan Webb, a local truck driver, filed assault and battery charges against Pittsburgh Condors Coach Mark Binstein. Webb claimed that at a game earlier in the year, Binstein went into the stands and punched him right in the eye. Webb admitted that he “vocally harassed” Binstein, but said it was his right as a paying customer.

Binstein said that Webb’s yelling got out of hand but that he would never go into the stands. He claimed that Webb used vile language and threw paper cups and boxes of popcorn at him—“and then he came at me while I was on the bench.”

Webb greeted Binstein that March night by holding up a “Welcome Back Slugger” sign, and then filed a $2 million lawsuit against the coach and the Condors.
The he said, he said case became moot though, as both teams folded within a few months. Good luck trying to get $2 million out of the Pittsburgh Condors.

The Final Season

The 1971-72 season would be the last for the Floridians. The team started slowly again and then played better after acquiring center Manny Leaks in a midseason trade, but Leaks got into a salary dispute after playing only 18 games and was suspended from the team. Without Leaks, the team still held onto a playoff spot with a 36-48 record and another fourth-place finish. Newcomer Warren Jabali averaged 20.2 points per game and Mack Calvin had another great season, averaging 21.0. The Floridians lost in the first round of the playoffs 4-0 to Julius Erving and the Virginia Squires – a series that Dr. J scored 53 points in game three and averaged 37.8 points and 19 rebounds. The two home playoff games in Miami drew only 2,965 and 3,126 fans.

There had been rumors throughout the season that the club was on the auction block, and when an attempt to sell the team and move it to Cincinnati fell through, Ned Doyle disbanded the franchise in June 1972.

The players were disbursed throughout the league. Mack Calvin went to Carolina, Warren Jabali and Willie Long to Denver, Ron Franz to Memphis, and Larry Jones to Utah.

When it was over, the Floridians had lost $2 million in the four years of their existence.

“I really enjoyed my days in Miami. It’s one of my favorite cities,” Mack Calvin reminisced. “I lived in Coral Gables. My daughter was born in Miami. It was a great time. We just didn’t have a great team.”

Actually, the Floridians weren’t that bad. The team made the playoffs three out of four years. They had some terrific players—Calvin and Donnie Freeman were both five-time ABA All-Stars, and Larry Jones was the ABA’s all-time scoring leader at the time, but they lacked depth and never had a dominating big man. They did, however, have some players with great nicknames – in addition to the “Cuban Comet,” there was Tom “Trooper” Washington, Ira “Large” Harge, and maybe the best of all – Les “Big Game” Hunter. The Floridians games were exciting and fun. It’s too bad the people of Miami missed it. Had the team been better managed, it might have been a different story. And if Larry Shields hadn’t traded away Mel Daniels, and Ned Doyle had shelled out some bucks for the selfish Rick Barry, maybe today we would still be talking about the Miami Floridians instead of the Miami Heat.