All-American Basketball Alliance (1978)
Tombstone
Born: 1977 – AABA founding franchise
Folded: February 1978
First Game: January 6, 1978 (W 100-97 vs. Indiana Wizards @ Louisville, KY)
Last Game:
AABA Championships: None
Arena
Winston-Salem Memorial Coliseum
Opened: 1955
Marketing
Team Colors:
Ownership
Owner: Richard Pollak
Background
The Carolina Lightning basketball team was a minor league outfit that lasted little more than a month in the all-but-forgotten All-American Basketball Alliance (AABA) in the winter of 1978. Based out of the Winston-Salem Memorial Coliseum, the Lightning played ten games between January and early February 1978. Then the comically under-capitalized AABA imploded around them.
The eight franchises of the AABA – which also included Indiana, Georgia (Macon), Kentucky (Louisville), New York (Westchester), Richmond, Rochester and West Virginia (Wheeling) – intended to play a 74-game schedule. The start-up league promised a standard base salary of $9,600 per player plus 4% to 8% of franchise profits (haha).
Building The Team
The Lightning were built by 23-year old player-Head Coach Mike Dunleavy. The University of South Carolina grad made the Philadelphia 76ers as a 6th round longshot in 1976. The Sixers cut him in November 1977 early in his second pro season. Dunleavy latched on with the new AABA shortly thereafter and in one month’s time cobbled together an experienced roster.
34-year old Ed Manning had nearly a decade of service in the NBA and the American Basketball Association. Manning’s 11-year old son Danny, a future #1 overall NBA draft pick, occasionally attended practice with his father. Bob Bigelow was the 1975 1st round draft pick of the Kansas City Kings, recently released and playing minor league basketball in the Eastern Association back home in Massachusetts when his friend Dunleavy called. Norton Barnhill was a Winston-Salem native who had earned a cup of coffee with the Seattle Supersonics the previous season as a rookie out of Washington State. Melvin Watkins was captain of the UNC-Charlotte 49ers Final Four team the previous spring of 1977.
Demise & Aftermath
The Lighting debuted on January 6th, 1978 against the Indiana Wizards in one half of an AABA doubleheader played at the Louisville Gardens in Kentucky.
The situation in Carolina quickly grew as bleak as the other AABA league cities. One Lightning home game at Memorial Coliseum drew only 170 fans. Team President Richard Pollak admitted to The Associated Press that the players only received $300 each for eight weeks work after his investment partners withdrew.
The league folded in early February 1978 after less than a month of play.
After their bizarre sojourn in the AABA, Mike Dunleavy and Bob Bigelow both returned to the NBA in part-time roles by the end of the 1977-78 season. Dunleavy went on to a lengthy NBA career. He later became a sought-after NBA Head Coach, leading the Los Angeles Lakers, Milwaukee Bucks, Portland Trail Blazers and Los Angeles Clippers in a twenty-year uninterrupted run from 1990 to 2010. He earned 1999 NBA Coach-of-the-Year honors with Portland in 1999.
Voices
“Indiana had signed a bunch of the old Pacers’ stars from the ABA. They had Freddie Lewis, Roger Brown, Mel Daniels. Roger was a great player. Not a Hall of Famer, but maybe he should be. They were all in their mid-to-late thirties by then and had probably been drinking more beer lately than playing basketball.
Roger Brown was going to guard me. I told Dunleavy ‘I’m going to run this old man into the ground!’ Mel Daniels was a terrific player. Maybe 6-9, 255 pounds. By this time he was huge – more like 6-9, 300 pounds. My biggest concern was that he was going to fall on me. We played them in that big 18,000-seat arena in Louisville. There couldn’t have been more than 500 people there.“
-Bob Bigelow, Forward, 1978 (Interviewed 2011)
“I was living in an apartment with Mike Dunleavy and his wife. One day the Carolina owner called up and told Mike ‘we’re cancelled’. Mike said ‘the game?’ And the guy said ‘No. The league.’ And that was it. I packed up my stuff and drove home to Winchester, Massachusetts, one day ahead of the big blizzard of ’78. I got home just in time to dig out my parents’ 80-foot driveway.”
-Bob Bigelow
Links
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3 Responses
Wow.. the AABA. My Dad took me to two Richmond Virginian’s games that (half?)season. I was 10 and don’t remember much other then we played the West Virginia Wheels one game. At one of the games, there were only about 5 kids in the building, some team official (I assume) grabbed us all and made us towel boys. How many people can say they wiped the floor in an AABA game? The only other thing I remember is reading the sports page in the paper one morning and the first line saying “A crowd of TWO, see Virginians lose at the Arena” The team couldn’t afford the newer Richmond Coliseum so they played in the Richmond Arena, which even before WWII had seen better days!
hey I played for that team,and I remember some kids running around with Virginians t- shirts. I was wondering where they got them because the team never had one.i still have my old uniform because we never got paid
Matt Hicks,
When I was 7 years old, you were my hero. My father took me to all the NIU games. FIrst one that I remember is when you guys blew out Wisconsin something like 81-57; I believe Wes Matthews was on that team. Biggest thrill though was when my mom found out you were student teaching at Chesbro Elementary and she got her friend who worked there to let me and my brother– who probably had no idea what the hell was happening– come by and get your autography and shake your hand. Don’t know what ever happened to that autograph.