Jul 12, 2021
Pittsburgh’s dean of
sportswriters Jim O’Brien (Looking Up: From the ABA to the NBA the WNBA
to the NCAA - A Basketball Memoir; Looking Up Again - A Basketball
Memoir) has seen it all in his more
than 50 years of chronicling stories across the pro and collegiate
sports landscape - but perhaps no more deeply than in basketball,
and in more detailed fashion than during the old American
Basketball Association.
Throughout the life of the
league, you could find O’Brien’s reliable ABA reportage and musings
seemingly everywhere: essential weekly columns in The
Sporting News; meticulous pre-season team & player
profiles in the annual Complete Handbook of Pro
Basketball; and the hugely influential Street & Smith’s
Basketball Yearbook (which he co-founded in 1970) - where he
strove to ensure the challenger circuit's coverage was equal to
that of the legacy NBA's.
We merely scratch the surface of
O'Brien's treasure trove of stories from the old
"red-white-and-blue" in this week's episode - where you'll hear
personal reminiscences of legendary ABA figures like Connie
Hawkins, Julius Erving, and (Episode 132
guest) Dan Issel; the significance of the former
league's recent fiftieth anniversary; and why Pittsburgh was (both
in the antecedent American Basketball League, and thrice-versioned
in the ABA), and then wasn't a great pro hoops city.