Worcester Counts

World Basketball League (1989)

Tombstone

Born: November 1988 – WBL expansion franchise
Folded: 1989

First Game: May 10, 1989 (W 115-114 vs. Youngstown Pride)
Last Game: August 25, 1989 (L 155-122 @ Illinois Express)

WBL Championships: None

Arena

Worcester Centrum (13,800)
Opened: 1982

Branding

Team Colors: Burgundy, Royal Blue & White

Ownership

Owner: Robert W. Shoemaker, III et al.

Background

My God…I remember watching this team on SportsChannel New England when I was in the eighth grade. By “watching” I mean clicking over to catch a few minutes of World Basketball League action during the commercial breaks on Dear John or Head of the Class.

There were two things about the Worcester Counts and the World Basketball League that intrigued me. The first was that the ball they played with was awesome. It was a bright white globe with all of the continents of the world painted on in maroon. (Years later former WBL PR Director Jimmy Oldham told me the league only had 2-3 of these balls and they were shipped around the country for use on SportsChannel games).

The second was that the Counts had Keith Smart. I wasn’t a huge hoops fan. But I vividly remembered watching Smart hit “The Shot”for the University of Indiana in the 1987 NCAA Championship game to beat Syracuse with only four seconds left.

At 13 years old, it made an impression on me that Smart could go from the pinnacle of the college basketball world to playing minor league ball in a nearly empty Worcester Centrum in just over 24 months.

On The Court

A large crowd of 7,056 fans turned out for the Counts first game at the Centrum on May 10th, 1989, goosed by a massive give away of free tickets by the team’s PR man, Rob Ekno. Attendance plummeted like a stone shortly thereafter.

Perhaps Worcester fans simply weren’t interested in the WBL’s perplexing line-up of opponents. Since the WBL had only five franchises, league officials imported the (terrible) clubs from Europe to pad out the schedule. The Counts played geographically irrelevant “rivals” from places like Youngstown, Ohio and Calgary, along with European tomato cans like the Estonian National Team and Computerij of Holland. During the summer of 1989 the Europeans posted a collective record of 1 win and 49 losses against the five WBL clubs.

Demise & Epilogue

By August of 1989, the Worcester Counts were out of gas. Owner Rob Shoemaker moved the team’s final home game halfway across the country to his hometown of Anderson, Indiana. The Counts beat up on a hapless team of Norwegian pros at the Anderson High School Wigwam on August 20, 1989. The team folded quietly shortly thereafter.

The WBL hung on for three more years. The entire thing collapsed in 1992 after teams discovered that league founder Mickey Monus underwrote the league’s substantial losses by embezzling millions of dollars from his Phar-Mor discount pharmacy chain. The league folded midway through its fifth season.

Keith Smart played a decade in the American minor leagues and in the Phillipines. In the 2000’s he served stints as the head coach of the Cleveland Cavaliers, Golden State Warriors and Sacramento Kings.

Voices

“The guy who owned the Counts, his name was Rob Shoemaker. He was a Harvard Business School graduate. So, presumably well-versed in business. He was promised by the World Basketball League that he was going to make “X” amount of dollars and there would be “X” amount of attendance and so on. When I got to meet Rob, he told me the league said to him that he could expect about 6,000 or 7,000 people a game.

To cut down on travel expenses and stuff, the Counts and the World Basketball League set up the schedule with back-to-back games. A team would fly in from Youngstown, Ohio, for example, and they would play us at the Worcester Centrum on Friday night and then play again on Saturday night.

I told <Rob>’ Listen, this is Worcester. You’re in the middle of Massachusetts. People either go to Cape Cod on the weekend or they go to Misquamicut State Beach down in Rhode Island, or wherever. Not a whole lot of people stay around Worcester on the weekend. You’re playing your games on Friday and Saturday nights. Back-to-back games against the same exact team that people don’t know anything about. I know that this league promised you certain things, but I’m just giving you my experience from the Arena Football League and I don’t believe you’re going to get the attendance you are expecting.’

Shoemaker put his trust in the league, of course, because he had already sunk his money into the team and he didn’t want to think he was investing in a failure.”

– Rob Ekno, Director of Public Relations 1989 (2012 FWiL Interview)

“We did have Keith Smart. All the guys were great guys. They all had dreams, obviously, of playing in the NBA. The whole premise of the WBL was that you had to be 6’ 5” and under. It was all about the passing and the speed. You didn’t see a whole lot of slam dunking and if you did, it was of the more spectacular, fast break variety. The idea was to get the ball up and down the court as quickly as possible, get it in the hoop and play a little defense.

We had Norm Van Lier, the former Chicago Bulls star, who was the assistant coach. Norm was promised an apartment and all this other stuff but it never came through for whatever reason. So Norm and I ended up being roommates for the summer. That was an interesting experience for sure. I learned a lot about the behind-the-scenes workings of pro and college basketball from Norm. He would have been the dominant personality on that team.

We also had a gentleman named Keith Gatlin and he was actually Len Bias’ roommate when Bias OD’d and died. So that was quite the learning experience from him as well.”

– Rob Ekno