Cleaning out the inbox

The inbox cleaning begins with three passings of note from the entertainment and sports worlds.

Florence Henderson passed at the age of 82.
Henderson,who along with Shirley Jones,was the mother of the nation's children in the 70's from her iconic role as Carol Brady on "the Brady Bunch" was known for being a Broadway star and comedian before landing the role for Carol Brady,which brought her lasting fame,if not a bit of typecasting.
Henderson was also known to people my age after the Brady Bunch with her long time association with Wesson Oil.
I mean those commercials were around for years and often featured Henderson singing the "Wessonality" jingle and floating around the kitchen.
Henderson never really left the spotlight in the 40+ years after the Brady Bunch's cancellation,as she was involved with every reincarnation of the show as well as more stage work,guest appearances on television and lots of game shows spot when game shows still ruled morning television.
I'm not sure anyone under 60 wasn't a little sad upon hearing of the loss of Florence Henderson.



The other entertainment loss was actor Ron Glass at the age of 71.
Glass was best known for his role of Harris on the 70's sitcom "Barney Miller",but gained cult fame over the last decade for the role of Shepherd Book on the cult sci-fi drama "Firefly".
I wasn't a massive Barney Miller fan,although in the three channel days,I watched my share of it,but I did enjoy the brief run of Firefly and its movie sequel Serenity.
Glass acted in various tv shows that didn't really catch on such as an 1980's version of the Odd Couple with Demond Wilson of Sanford and Son...

The sports loss was Ralph Branca at the age of 90.
Branca won 21 games in 1947 for the Brooklyn Dodgers,but was better known for allowing "the shot heard round the world" home run to Bobby Thomson in 1951.
Branca never was the same pitcher after the home run as he would win just 20 games over the next (and final) five years of his career after a back injury the following spring..
Branca came off bitter and angry in my opinion on the HBO documentary on the 1951 pennant race between the Giants and Dodgers with an insistence that Thomson knew the pitch that was coming via a stolen sign in the famous game,but watching the program it was pretty easy to see that Branca and Thomson had become friends over the years and seemed to enjoy being linked together in baseball history...

The New York Times writes about the huge James Webb Telescope that will be launched in 2018 to see even further out into space than the Hubble telescope.
The Hubble was expected to be out of use by the time of the Webb's entry into space,but it looks like the two will be in service for at least a few years together.
The Webb's rotation will be around a million miles away from Earth and with its infrared equipment will be able to see things that even the Hubble would be unable to see.

Some of you that listen to the podcast might remember when we had Ricky Cobb of the Super 70's Sports show on the podcast.
Ricky gets some great guys and he recently landed my favorite ABA player of all time in Dan Issel to do his show.
It's a great hour and basketball fans of all ages should enjoy it.
I wrote a post on Issel back in 2008 as a member of our Forgotten Superstars universe and it can be found here.

SABR always has great articles from contributors that offer biographies of players that are forgotten by the regular fan.
This one was just listed on the site features 1970's righthander Lynn McGlothen,who would die in a fire in 1984.
McGlothen was an erratic pitcher that was once compared to Bob Gibson.
McGlothen never approached the level of Gibson,but did have his good days with an All-Star game appearance.
My favorite memory of McGlothen comes from his 1977 Topps baseball card as he is wearing the 1976 Bicentennial hat of the St.Louis Cardinals.
A few teams wore the "Cake Pan" hats in the 1976 season (The Pirates continued to wear theirs for years after) and the 1977 cards are the only cards to features those hats for teams other than the Pirates..

The best team that you never saw....

Is it possible to love a team that you NEVER saw play?
Really, not once.

Not the occasional once-a-year or two national game appearance or only when they played a game against your local team -NEVER.

Well, I am here to tell you that it is possible, as I did, and believe it or not, at the ages of seven and eight.

I was a junkie from day one, and my dad started and fed my addiction through the weekend games, to live games when we lived in Ohio, the constant stream of magazines in the era before ESPN and sports radio, and most important of all, trading cards.

I bought them all: baseball, football, hockey, and maybe best of all at that time- basketball.

The rural store in our area sold just about all of them, and I vividly recall even before school age turning down Popsicles and other treats for walking to the store with either my mother or grandmother in favor of the latest pack of cards from whatever sport was available at that time from Topps, as no other company could make cards.

Fleer made these game-action NFL cards with team logo stickers, but they didn't have the NFLPA's approval to use names, so they were generally cool-looking cards that lacked the trading ability of the Topps cards.

As much as I loved baseball and football at that age, I think I loved basketball the most.
In 1975, I hadn't truly discovered the Cavaliers yet and watched the NBA as a Kareem fan more than anything.
The NBA had a CBS TV contract (with that neat opening that I post here on YouTube occasionally and Brent Musberger screaming his lungs out), but the ABA had no contract at all.
However, I had a small radio that picked up pretty long distances for such a small radio.
I suppose at the time, with fewer stations, there was less interference and signals (especially AM ones) could travel a long way.

And one of the best signals to my room at that time (we would move across the street in 1978, literally, and the signals that my new room grabbed were different than my old one) was 840 WHAS AM out of Louisville, Kentucky, and a gentleman named Van Vance and the Kentucky Colonels.

Vance was the "voice of the Colonels," and to me, Vance ranks right there behind Joe Tait as the elite of pro basketball radio announcers for the ability to create that "spoken word picture" of the game in the listener's eye.

As I have written before about other things as a child in a rural community (although size-wise calling it a community is a stretch), I always got a huge kick out of feeling like I knew about this secret that few others knew about, and the Colonels were one of those for those two years.

The only thing that I had to connect me to those teams was the basketball cards.
No ABA shirts, hats, etc nothing but those cards and the voice of Van Vance, first next to my bed and then under my pillow after the first radio broke.

Sidenote- the second radio I obtained by selling the most "booster tickets" for my little league team, and a few years back, I was going through an Ohio flea market and found the exact "Spirit of 76" radio in its box with original instructions. I bought and have it here, but haven't had the heart to fire her up...

I would use her for the next few years until my brother and I's first good stereo for better reception.

There was just one other child in the neighborhood who collected basketball cards, with the soon-to-be basketball famous name of Chris Mullin, and for the two years that I was a Colonels fan, I would bet that I completed a Colonels team set for both seasons through packs and trades.

The best part was after the ABA/NBA Merger, when he decided that he didn't want his basketball cards anymore, and I traded for all his cards for doubles of baseball cards.

I also remember quite a few one-on-one games on his backyard hoop between the Colonels and the Capital/Washington Bullets, where Dan Issel took on Elvin Hayes!
Another Colonel's/Cavaliers memory for me was the old game BAS-KET, which used levers to flip a ball through the net.

Amazingly, this simple game is still available!
I cannot remember how many hours Shane and I spent with basketball cards sprawled out around this game, playing it.

The Colonels also had one other thing in their favor for those two seasons-Dan Issel.

Issel (His forgotten superstars' post can be found here) was my favorite Colonel, and one day I wrote his name on a book cover or something, and my gym teacher, Brad Keller (what a great guy and influence on me as a child), saw it and told me about seeing Issel play when he was at Kentucky.

Mr.Keller was cemented in my mind as a great guy then, I mean, my gym teacher SAW Dan Issel play!!
Issel could score with the best of them, as he showed after the merger with Denver.

Artis Gilmore was the dominant ABA post player of the league's existence, and few could shoot with Louie Dampier, who spent the entire nine years of the league with the Colonels.

Hubie Brown, the noted NBA analyst, was the coach of the 74-75 Colonels and he insists that the title winners were the best team that he ever coached, and that includes some pretty decent NBA clubs.

The Colonels were good in the 1975-76 season, but things weren't the same after John Y. Brown (yes, the KFC guy) sold Dan Issel to Baltimore and after the Claws went under to Denver.
John Y. somehow managed to parlay selling the Colonels (and the Colonel) into quite a career that saw him buy the Celtics after selling off the Colonels, become governor of Kentucky, and marry Phyllis George.

The Colonels lacked the second scorer that the team truly needed to keep teams from sagging in on Gilmore and to keep bigger guards from swarming the smaller Dampier on the outside without Issel, and after a seven-game semi-final series loss to ironically Issel and the Nuggets, the Colonels were history.
To this day, I have seen two Colonel's games on NBA TV, and they were quite a treat for this aging fan.

I realize this was more about my memories of the Colonels than the Colonels themselves at times, and maybe down the road, we can write more about the team of my initial youth than about my memories.
They still are the best team that I have never seen..



Photo Credits

Colonels logo-Sportslogos.net
Others-Unknown

Forgotten Superstars-Dan Issel

We hit the hardwood for today's Forgotten Superstars with a star from the old American Basketball Association and one of my all time favorite players-Dan Issel.

Issel was a two time All-American at Kentucky in the days that players could only play three years of varsity sports and was drafted by both the NBA (Detroit Pistons) and the ABA's Dallas Chapparals.
Issel tells the story to Terry Pluto in Loose Balls about how he signed with the ABA in that when Dallas talked to Issel to gauge his interest in the league,Issel told them that the only team in the ABA he was interested in was Kentucky.
The next time that he heard from an ABA representative,his rights belonged to the Colonels!
The ABA worked loosely and was able to have players that wanted to play in certain markets be able to sign there as part of a "best for the league" policy.
The 6'9 Issel made an immediate impact in Louisville leading the league in scoring and was named Rookie of the Year in the 1970-71 season.
Issel was never lower than third in the league in scoring in any of his first four seasons in the league and played in the All-Star game in each of his six ABA seasons.
"The Horse" helped the Colonels to their only ABA title in 1974-75,but the bloom was short-lived as the Colonels traded him to a team that would never play a game in the Baltimore Claws.
Many basketball observers believe that had Issel remained in Kentucky for the final season of the ABA that the Colonels would have been one of the four ABA teams to enter the NBA as part of the merging of the two leagues.
Issel would wind up in Denver,where he would spend the final ten years of his career with the Nuggets,where his point average remained high,but yet surprisingly made just one All-Star game in the NBA.
Issel coached the Nuggets for three seasons in the early 90's with the most memorable event being his 8th seeded Nuggets eliminating the top seed in the West (Seattle) in the first round of the playoffs.
That was the first time an 8 seed had ever defeated a 1 seed.
Issel would leave in the 94-95 season,but would return a few years later for another run as coach and general manager.
Dan Issel was voted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1993......

The Ohio State Buckeyes travel to Madison for a battle with Wisconsin.
Wisconsin was upset last week and they are hungry for a win.
The Badgers have had the most success of any Big Ten team against Jim Tressel.
I have a bad feeling about this one.
Prediction:Wisconsin in a shocker 21-20.


Photo Credit-Remember the ABA.com