The Scranton Aces lasted for just one last-place season in the minor league Continental Basketball Association. The Aces marked the end of the road for long-time Scranton minor league basketball promoter Art Pachter, who threw in the towel after 20 years at the end of the campaign. On the positive side, the Aces helped jumpstart the prospects of ex-Villanova star Rory Sparrow, who leapt from the Aces to a 12-year NBA career.
The Long Beach Chiefs were a professional basketball team that played at Long Beach Arena during November & December of 1962. The Chiefs were members of the American Basketball League (ABL), a wanna-be rival to the NBA formed by Harlem Globetrotters promoter Abe Saperstein the previous year. The team started out as the Hawaii Chiefs during the ABL’s debut season of 1961-62. Owner Art Kim moved the franchise to Long Beach for the league’s second season. But the league folded on New Year’s Eve 1962 without completing its schedule, taking the Chiefs down with it.
The Mississippi Coast Sharks were a doomed minor league basketball team that played just 16 games out of a planned 56-game schedule at Biloxi’s Mississippi Coast Coliseum before its league, the Global Basketball Association, folded in midseason in December 1992.
The Boston Steamrollers were a minor league football team that played for one season in Everett, Massachusetts, a small city on the northern border of Boston, during the autumn of 1965. The ‘Rollers had a strong season on the field (8-5) but moved at the end of the season to become the Lowell Giants in 1966.
The small Oklahoma city of Ardmore (pop. 20,184 in the 1960 census) hosted Class D ball in the Sooner State League during the post-WW II minor league baseball boom, but the Ardmore Cardinals folded along with the rest of the Sooner State League following the 1957 season. The city lucked into a Class AA ball club in the spring of 1961 when Derrest Williams, owner of the Texas League’s Victoria Rosebuds, grew weary of losing $500 per night playing to puny crowds in that Texas city. 43 games into the season, Williams gained approval from his fellow league owners to pull up stakes and move to Ardmore’s 2,800-seat Cardinal Park.
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