The good ol’ days of NBA travel were, if you happened to do the traveling, actually bad ol’ days. You played a game the next morning. You woke up early. You stood in line at the airport and suffered the gawking and the inquiries. (A flight attendant once asked Bob Lanier, he of the size-22 shoes, if he played a sport. “Soccer,” she was told.)
Indeed, one of Dick Vitale’s famous coinages — the All-Airport Team — has become an anachronism. When last did you see an NBA team queued up for Sbarro at Hartsfield-Jackson?
Every team in every major pro sport takes charters now. The Pistons had their own plane for decades, but it was only in the late 1980s when the Bad Boys began winning titles that the rest of the NBA saw Detroit as having a Decided Competitive Advantage because they didn’t fly commercial.
Good for players. Bad for those who took some pleasure in seeing the big-money moneymakers stuff their expensive luggage in tiny overhead bins like the rest of us. Bad for those who treasured a good Marvin Barnes yarn.
It was Marvin Barnes, known as “Bad News” for manifold reasons, who became, during the heyday of the careening ABA, the most famous traveler since Gulliver. (Read Terry Pluto’s classic history, “Loose Balls,” for a fuller accounting.) One legendary logistical story involved a flight leaving Louisville at 8 a.m. EST and arriving in St. Louis at 7:59 CST. According to the Spirits of St. Louis radio broadcaster Bob Costas (via Pluto), Barnes said: “I ain’t goin’ on no time machine.”
Today NBA teams fly after games on their charters and are ensconced in their Ritz-Carltons — gone are the days when you would see Dr. J in the lobby of an airport Marriott — before the 1 a.m. “SportsCenter” airs. Teams have traveling security men to further insulate these skilled craftsmen from the great unwashed.
Received NBA wisdom holds that shoot-arounds — light workouts held the morning of games — were established by Lakers coach Bill Sharman in 1971 solely to rouse the noted insomniac Wilt Chamberlain. (In truth, Sharman tried shoot-arounds when coaching in the ABA.) But those Lakers won 33 consecutive games and won an NBA title, and more copying took hold.
Now every team shoots in the mornings and flies after games and bunks in luxury digs, and the torpor of the road has been replaced by corporate regimen, which is boring in itself. Where’s Bad New Barnes when we need him?
The other great Barnes travel tale: He missed three different flights from LaGuardia Airport to Norfolk, Va., leading coaches and teammates to believe there was no way he would show for that night’s game. According to Costas (again via Pluto), Barnes entered the locker room 10 minutes before tipoff.
According to Steve Jones, then a teammate, Barnes was wearing a full-length mink coat and carrying a McDonald’s sack. “Have no fear,” he allegedly said, “‘BB’ (another nickname) is here.”
Barnes opened the coat to reveal his Spirits uniform. He scored 43 points that night. He had chartered a plane. The man who shunned time machines was a man ahead of his time.
