Documentary Brings To Life Crazy World That Was Aba

Fiction could not have accounted for the bizarre, amusing, very 1960s nine seasons of the American Basketball Association.

In the ABA, Freddie Lewis, the most valuable player of the 1975 All-Star Game, won a quarterhorse named Tough Julie who dropped dead within three weeks. The Miami Floridians distracted free throw shooters with bikini-clad ball girls. One team had Morton Downey Jr. as general manager, another had Pat Boone as owner. And Darnell Hillman taught Julius Erving how to groom an Afro for maximum size and aerodynamics.

“The bigger the Afro, the better,” Steve Jones, the NBC analyst who played for seven ABA teams, says in “Long Shots,” a rollicking, delightful documentary made for HBO by Black Canyon Productions.

The ABA’s fathers fashioned a league that revolutionized the sport with the mesmerizing red, white and blue ball, All-Star Game slam dunk contests and the 3-point shot.

The ABA may as well have been a bunch of hippies to the National Basketball Association’s squares.

“We thought it was a bunch of guys trying to become pests,” says Red Auerbach, paterfamilias of the Boston Celtics and Great Satan to the ABA. “I felt, ‘Let ‘em rot.’ “

“Long Shots” is a time capsule, back to the Oakland Oaks and Memphis Tams; to Levern “Jelly” Tart, the former Net, and Wendell Ladner, the beefcake idol; to Dennis Murphy, the ABA’s creator, and George Mikan, its first commissioner, and to the young Hubie Brown and his Kentucky Colonels, the younger Larry Brown’s first meeting with Downey, the basketball know-nothing in charge of the New Orleans Buccaneers, and the still younger Bob Costas, the baby-faced voice of the Spirits of St. Louis, the former Carolina Cougars.

“Long Shots” recounts games played on ice, players shooting or dribbling with the slippery, funny-colored basketballs, and teams able to count the number of fans in the substandard arenas.

But eventually, the league irked the NBA with its raucous style, raids on NBA stars such as Rick Barry and Billy Cunningham, and “hardship drafts” created to reel in underclassmen such as Spencer Haywood.

“Long Shots” lacks the import of “Rebels With A Cause,” HBO’s 1995 film on the American Football League. But the ABA posed a smaller threat to the establishment than the AFL, which played a wide-open style, raided National Football League talent and, most importantly, had a network deal.

The NBA preferred to ignore the ABA than hate it.

“The AFL owners had a lot more money than the ABA owners did,” said Steve Stern, the co-producer. “The ABA’s plan was to merge, but they had no vision of how to do it.”

There was no merger: in 1976, four teams - the Nets, the Nuggets, the Pacers and the Spurs - bought their way into the NBA, as if they were expansion teams.

Black Canyon produced “When It Was A Game,” a 1991 baseball gem, mostly from home movies, but made “Long Shots” mainly from footage found at local TV stations. “What we found was the entire library of Lavern ‘Jelly’ Tart,” Stern said. Only three full games were found, including Game 6 of the the last ABA finals in 1976 between the Nets and the Nuggets, shown by HBO.

Stern and George Roy, his co-producer, uncovered more, though still not enough, of the young Dr. J playing for the Virginia Squires and the Nets. Erving became the ABA’s central attraction, carrying the league when it was bleeding cash.

“I think I might have recognized my role after the league merged with the NBA,” Erving said in a conference call. “I focused on being the kind of guy others rallied around. I didn’t view it at the time as a one-man league.”

In a mini-tirade, he added: “I think it is a tragedy and travesty that the accomplishments of the ABA or the statistics of the ABA don’t get recognized and publicized when people start talking about all-time standards. Even my own network. They put up graphics all the time and they start talking all the time about the top three scorers, and they leave me out, they leave Dan Issel out, they don’t give Moses Malone his ABA points.”

For the record, Erving scored 11,662; Issel, 12,823, and Malone, 2,171 in the ABA.