It Doesn’t Take An Einstein To Pick Eicher

Few have tested basketball’s theory of relativity which says that everything is relative quite like Dick Eicher.

He once got his shot swatted by Bill Russell and fenced salary figures with Wilt Chamberlain. He turned down a chance to play in the National Basketball Association and later stashed No. 1 draft choices away from the persuasive wiles of NBA general managers. He played in the Olympic Trials, in third-world arenas, all over. And one December night he led the Eastern Washington College of Education Savages to a 23-point smoking of Washington State, which would eventually miss out on the eight-team NCAA Tournament because of two narrow losses at UCLA.

Not bad, any of it.

“But I could never get my team into the B Tournament,” Eicher complained.

Sad but true. He was the pride of Palouse in the years just after World War II, and the Falcons were Whitman County’s third bananas behind Colfax and St. John - which happened to be the best two teams in the state.

So on Saturday they inducted Dick Eicher into Eastern’s athletic hall of fame on the strength of all he achieved post-Palouse - though, in truth, you could never take the Palouse out of the boy.

“When I was in the service I got hurt and I couldn’t get home that summer to put my dad’s hay crop up,” he recalled. “Some of my buddies got together and did it. I called the pool hall there and said, ‘Chuck, I want to buy all those guys all the beer they can drink for two weeks,’ and he said OK.

“A while later I got into town and stopped and asked him what I owed. He said, ‘You don’t owe me a thing. In fact, you’ve got 480 beers in the tank they bought for you.”’

Later on, when he was playing midwife to professional basketball in Denver as general manager of the Rockets - later to become the Nuggets - Dick Eicher made sure one address was on the mailing list to receive publicity releases:

Chuck’s Place, Palouse, Wash.

The Dick Eicher they knew in Palouse was a “6-foot-2, 128-pound pistol-butt guard” whose dad had sold a Montana homestead, moved the family to Washington and opened a Gambles store. By the time Eicher left Eastern, he’d been the leading scorer on two of Red Reese’s better basketball teams, grown to 6-6 and was filling out to the 220 pounds that made him a rugged customer in the decidedly rugged circuit that was the National Industrial Basketball League.

The Phillips 66ers, the Akron Goodyears, the Denver Bankers - those were the Celtics, Lakers and Knicks of the NIBL, where the teams were a means of marketing tires and tractors and a big part of the players’ benefit package was entree into corporate America.

“I was the No. 1 territorial draft choice of the Lakers,” recalled Eicher, who retired a few years ago after 16 years as director of community affairs for the Adolph Coors Co. “They’d offered me $4,500 on a make-good basis. Then I started hearing from some NIBL teams, so I talked to some friends playing in the pros - one of them being Ed Gayda from WSU.

“He said, ‘Did they send you a ticket or tell you to buy a ticket and come on back?’ I said they told me to buy a ticket. And he said, ‘Don’t go. They get you back there and if you don’t make the club, they won’t reimburse you.”’

So Eicher cast his lot with the NIBL, eventually becoming a fixture in Denver with the Bankers and later the D-C Truckers. If the nicknames sounded Little Leaguish, the players were big league. Bob Kurland - the George Mikan of the NIBL - was twice MVP of the Final Four. George Yardley played with the NIBL first and later led the NBA in scoring. Hall of Famer Clyde Lovellette bridged the jump from the Olympic team to the NBA in the NIBL.

For Eicher, an All-American in 1956, it was an education on two fronts: basketball and business.

“I’m playing against guys from Kansas, North Carolina, Duke, UCLA, but I wasn’t out of my league,” he said. “I’d had great coaching at Eastern. If you played for Red, you didn’t make mental errors and you understood defense. After that, it was a matter of being good enough to play.”

And sometimes that was relative. Eicher remembers an exhibition game against the Olympic team in 1956.

“I’m going in for what should have been a layin and thinking this was duck soup,” he said. “All of a sudden this big hand came out and pinned the ball on the board, flipped his wrist and threw it downcourt and K.C. Jones stuffed it.”

That was his introduction to Bill Russell.

Eicher retired from basketball in 1958 but not from D-C, his employer for another nine years. Then in 1967, rival Rocket Truck Lines took control of the city’s franchise in the American Basketball Association - and asked Eicher to be the general manager in the wildest and wooliest days of pro hoops.

He never did sign Wilt, but he did sign Byron Beck - the only B Tournament alum to play in the big leagues. The Rockets won 89 games in Eicher’s two years - but just as important, went 8-0 in the ABA’s sideline sport, lawsuits.

“We were in Pittsburgh and we had our own plane - it was an ancient Martin 404, but it was a plane,” Eicher remembered. “We got wind that WilkesBarre was going to file a lawsuit over Larry Jones, who’d played for them in the Eastern League, and the last thing we wanted to do was fight it in Pennsylvania.

“I was up in the owner’s box with Gabe Rubin, the Pittsburgh owner. Our coach, Bob Bass, got the trainer to get Jones in a cab and send him out to sit in the company plane, like he wasn’t on the trip. The process server is waiting on our bench the whole game to serve the papers. I go outside to see if we’ve gotten Jones out of there and the damn door closes behind me. I knock to get back in and this tough dude working the door answers. I try to tell him I’m the GM of Denver and I’m sitting in the owner’s box.

“And he says, ‘Right, Mac, let me see your ticket.’ I had to go around and buy a ticket to get back in. Wild and wooly? You bet.”

But a good tale to tell in Chuck’s Place. Or anyplace else, for that matter.

, DataTimes MEMO: You can contact John Blanchette by voice mail at 459-5577, extension 5509.

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review