ZestVlog

As soon as Connie Hawkins walked into Civic Arena on May 4, 1968, he heard the hum of the crowd. It was still several hours before the Pittsburgh Pipers and New Orleans Buccaneers would tip in Game 7 of the inaugural American Basketball Association championship, and the seats already were starting to fill.

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See, the best debut season in Pittsburgh pro sports history belongs not to the Steelers, the Penguins or the Pirates, but to the Pipers. In a city where two pro basketball teams — the Ironmen and the Rens — had folded quickly, the Pipers had stormed to a 54-24 regular-season record and a spot in the ABA finals, led by Hawkins, the league’s first MVP and a future Hall of Famer.

By the time Game 7 began, the crowd had swelled to nearly 11,000, which was almost four times the Pipers’ average attendance at Civic Arena.

“This crowd is something else,” the team’s executive director Gabe Rubin excitedly told reporters that night. “Maybe the fans finally have adopted us.”

The six previous games each had been decided by single digits, and the seventh was no different. The Pipers surged ahead, and New Orleans clawed back. Pittsburgh’s Charlie Williams scored 35 points. Hawkins had 20 points, 13 rebounds, nine assists and the red-white-and-blue ball in his hands at the end. As he dribbled the last seconds off the clock, the crowd pressed close to the baseline. The scoreboard showed Pittsburgh 122, New Orleans 113, and zeroes.

The fans rushed onto the court and hoisted players in the air. Rubin watched all of it unfold, awestruck, and remarked, “It makes you feel like it was all worthwhile.” The celebration carried into the locker room. The Pipers sprayed champagne and drank beer. They were champions, and — just as importantly — the Pipers believed they’d proven Pittsburgh could be a pro basketball city.

Somewhere in that swarm of shouting fans was 18-year-old Walt Szczerbiak.

Less than four years later, after graduating from George Washington, Szczerbiak signed a one-year, $24,000 contract to play for Pittsburgh. It was a dream come true, in a way. Szczerbiak had grown up in Pittsburgh’s South Side neighborhood, a few blocks from the team’s practice facility, the Market House, and a short bike ride from Civic Arena. Now Szczerbiak — whose son Wally would go on to be an NBA All-Star — was suiting up for his hometown team.

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But by that point, that team wasn’t the Pipers.

No, the Pipers had left Pittsburgh less than two months after winning the ABA title. Rubin, claiming “a conspiracy of silence” had kept the team from finding a radio or TV sponsor, moved the franchise to Bloomington, Minn. The Pipers filled a vacancy left by the Minnesota Muskies, a team that had drawn so poorly the previous season that they’d moved south, becoming the Miami Floridians. Unsurprisingly, the Minnesota Pipers had terrible attendance, too. They lost $400,000 and moved back to Pittsburgh after one year away.

“It was a shame they left,” Szczerbiak said. “Pittsburgh fans got really angry.”

“After that team went back to Pittsburgh, it became the Devil’s Island of the ABA,” added former ABA player Steve Jones in the book “Loose Balls.” “A player’s worst nightmare was to be traded there. We all did jokes saying that if Pittsburgh wasn’t basketball’s end of the world, you could see it from there.”

Back in Pittsburgh, the Pipers floundered. Hawkins had jumped to the NBA. Attendance cratered again as fans refused to fall for a team that had left them. Rubin sold the team to New York-based Haven Industries, and the new owners decided a name change was in order. In 1970, the Pipers became the Condors — named, rather appropriately, after a bird that was officially endangered.

“How do I say this gently?” former Pipers and Condors guard George Thompson said last week. “(The franchise) was in shambles.”

So, Condors executives hatched a harebrained plan to save the franchise. They paid $25,000 to persuade the defending NBA champion Milwaukee Bucks — and their stars Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Oscar Robertson — to come to Civic Arena for an exhibition on Oct. 10, 1971. It would be the biggest day for Pittsburgh pro basketball since Game 7. Condors general manager Mark Binstein was betting on a sellout, and that the attendance boost would last.

Binstein’s bet was all wrong. For one, the timing hurt. The exhibition was the night after the Penguins’ season opener at Civic Arena, the same day as a Steelers game in Cleveland and the same night as Game 2 of the 1971 World Series. The Pirates and Orioles were rained out, but it impacted Condors’ ticket sales anyway. The announced attendance at Civic Arena was 9,888, the second-largest crowd in franchise history. And all 9,888 walked away angry.

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Before the game, Bucks coach Larry Costello took a paper placemat from a local restaurant and scribbled a short sentence. Costello handed it to a Condors staffer, who announced it to the crowd: Abdul-Jabbar, the NBA’s reigning MVP, was sitting out. He had been poked in the left eye, and the team doctor advised him not to play. The crowd booed. The Condors begged for Abdul-Jabbar to make an appearance, and so he sat on the Bucks bench in street clothes until halftime, when he headed for the team hotel. The game went on as planned, and Robertson’s triple-double downed the Condors, 129-115.

“People were all upset,” said Szczerbiak, a rookie who scored six points off the bench in that game. “That was just one way to get off on the wrong foot.”

The Condors’ last season in existence had started with a whimper and would only get worse. While some Condors fans have blamed the downfall of their franchise on Abdul-Jabbar’s no-show, the franchise was already failing fast.

Within nine days, the Condors were preparing to sue the Bucks.

“We didn’t pay $25,000 for Bob Dandridge,” a Condors official grumbled to Pittsburgh Press. (Dandridge had been the exhibition’s second-leading scorer.)

It was the first in a wave of lawsuits filed that season. The Gimbel Brothers department store sued the Condors for $7,500 for a failed promotion that left the company with 2,500 red, white and blue basketballs, and 4,971 unsold tickets. Hertz, the rental car company, sued the team for $2,785 over three cars they had rented. Then the Condors sued star guard John Brisker to prevent him from negotiating with the NBA’s Philadelphia 76ers during the season.

For one Condors game, Koppers, a Pittsburgh-based chemicals company, offered to give away a new car to one of their employees in attendance. But there was a mix-up, and the winning ticket was held by a non-employee. Koppers refused to hand over the keys. So, the fan sued for the car.

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Then there was the time the Condors held a cupcake night and promised to give away 1,000 cupcakes to a lucky fan. When the winner was announced, he said he was diabetic. The crowd booed. (This one did not turn into a lawsuit.)

In January 1972, Binstein led a Post-Gazette reporter to a storage warehouse and revealed the mother lode — a gold mine of promotional items the Condors couldn’t give away. There were 4,350 red, white and blue basketballs; 9,600 Condors warm-up jackets; 300 boxes of T-shirts and sweatshirts; 576 decorative serving trays; 500 watches; and stashes of cufflinks, banners, caps, key chains and berets. In total, it was $70,000 worth of items ordered for themed nights. The Condors were averaging fewer than 1,000 fans per game.

“The money is not lost,” Binstein told the reporter. “In 10 years the jackets will be relics. Can you imagine how hard it will be to get a Condors jacket?

“Everyone will be screaming for them.”

(He was right about that. Old ABA jackets are hot items on eBay today.)

The Condors’ 1971-72 season — and the future of the franchise — was circling the drain. Binstein had fired head coach Jack McMahon after a 5-6 start and taken the reins himself. The Condors, with Binstein at the helm, would go 20-53 the rest of the way. “Comparatively,” the Post-Gazette’s Jimmy Miller wrote as the end of the season neared, “McMahon looks like John Wooden.”

“I remember coming home after a road trip,” Condors forward Dave Lattin recalled the other day. “We landed at the airport, and we couldn’t get our cars back because there was so much snow. They said, ‘Come back in a week and you can get your car.'”

Lattin laughed.

“Other than that, it was a great basketball town.”

On March 26, 1972, the Condors played their last game at Civic Arena, squaring off against Julius Erving and the Virginia Squires. The Condors were riding a 12-game losing streak. There were 681 fans in attendance. A photo in the Post-Gazette the next morning showed a man asleep in the stands.

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“It was demoralizing to play your heart out and not get acknowledged as a group of really good players,” Thompson said. “It just didn’t happen.”

The Condors already were all but gone. They had tried everything to lure fans. One night, Muhammad Ali boxed four local opponents over 10 rounds at Civic Arena, and the Condors played directly afterward. The fans dispersed. The Condors were relegated to hosting some home games at local high schools. Ownership began peddling the club to other cities, playing “home” games in Birmingham, Ala., and Tucson, Ariz. The likeliest option was El Paso, Texas.

So, that last night at Civic Arena, one fan waved a sign: Go Condors (to El Paso). The organist played “Deep in the Heart of Texas” a few times, and then played “Taps” toward the end of the game. But the Condors went out on their terms. Despite Erving’s 41 points, the Condors won, 131-130, on Lattin’s late jumper.

When a reporter asked Binstein what he had planned for his next step, the Condors head coach/general manager replied, sarcastically, “I’m going to say I just took over as president of the Milwaukee Bucks and I’m going to get rid of Kareem (Abdul-)Jabbar … because nobody in Pittsburgh knows who he is.”

But the players were sorry to see the Condors crumble. Szczerbiak relished the chance to live at home for one more year, in the second-story bedroom at his mother’s home in South Side. He made more money that year than either his mother, a dishwasher, or his father, a busboy, made in five years. Szczerbiak remembers how the Condors used to leave practice at Market House and stop into the bar a block away on Carson Street. They’d sit there and swap stories.

“I would have loved to have a 10-year career in Pittsburgh,” Szczerbiak said.

A lot went wrong between the first ABA final and the collapse of the Condors.

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“I thought if we would have been winning, we would have been drawing (fans),” Szczerbiak said. “They didn’t build upon winning a championship that Pipers season and they didn’t win since they came back.”

After the 1971-72 season, the Condors’ plans to relocate to El Paso were scuttled. ABA trustees voted to dissolve the Condors and the Floridians and divvy up their players. So, the Condors went extinct four years before the ABA/NBA merger, and Pittsburgh has not had a pro basketball team since. In the end, the newspapers remembered the Condors as “the club nobody loved.”

(Top photo of the Condors’ Mike Lewis and John Brisker: Harry Cabluck / Associated Press)

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