Vitale, Davidson Have Each Other To Thank For Hall Of Fame Careers

It was nearly 29 years ago, and two men were at crossroads in their professional lives – crossroads that materialized because of their failed partnership.

Bill Davidson was a five-year loser in the world of professional basketball. He had wanted badly to get into ownership. You could make the old joke here: He wanted to own a team in the worst way – and that’s exactly what he did.

Davidson bought out his partners in 1974 and took over sole ownership of the Detroit Pistons, but only because a look-see into owning a football team didn’t come to pass. In an interview with Mitch Albom of the Detroit Free Press, published this week, Davidson said his first inclination was to own the Lions, if they were available. He and former Lions coach Joe Schmidt, Davidson said, explored owning another football team, which he didn’t identify. But football wasn’t his destiny. Davidson would be stuck with the Pistons – an apt word. The team had been in Detroit for 17 seasons, and in only two of them did their wins exceed their losses. Their time in the Motor City had been more slapstick than serious. But they were Davidson’s, and his alone, after he bought out his compatriots.

Dick Vitale was an abject failure as Pistons coach when he was fired by Davidson in November 1979. Davidson hired Vitale in the spring of 1978, having fallen under Dickie V’s spell and his snake oil salesman act. Vitale promised Davidson “ReVITALEization” and spoke of “Pistons Paradise.” For the owner’s time and trouble, Vitale delivered a 34-60 record.

Bill Davidson is a lot smarter now, by the way.

So here Davidson and Vitale were, losers in basketball, and, by extension, in life. The notion that either of them would survive in the game, let alone become enshrined in its Hall of Fame, was folly.

Then one man changed all that, for both parties.

Jack McCloskey was a grizzled former college basketball coach and a vagabond NBA head coach and assistant, minding his own business on the bench of the Indiana Pacers, helping his old friend Slick Leonard, when Vitale approached him. Dickie V told McCloskey that Davidson was looking for a “basketball man” to run his operation in Detroit. Vitale and McCloskey knew each other from their time spent coaching along the Atlantic Coast – McCloskey at Penn and Vitale in high school in New Jersey.

And Vitale, deposed in Detroit, held no grudges toward Davidson. In fact, not only did Dickie tell McCloskey about the vacancy in Detroit, he whispered McCloskey’s name in Davidson’s ear.

A meeting was set up, between McCloskey, Davidson, and Pistons legal counsel Oscar Feldman. McCloskey impressed, and Davidson wanted to hire him as his new GM, right away. But the Pacers were reluctant to let McCloskey out of his commitment. It looked like Davidson wouldn’t get Vitale’s referral after all.

But the Pacers came around, and Jack McCloskey took over the woeful Pistons in December, 1979.

“To this day, whenever I see Dick, I thank him,” McCloskey told me a couple years ago, on the verge of his induction into the Michigan Sports Hall of Fame.

Speaking of thanks, Vitale has long spoken of how thankful he was that he got canned by the Pistons.

“Mr. Davidson probably saved my life,” Vitale said in a recently-published interview.

Vitale quit the University of Detroit in 1977 because of ulcers. And his early days with the Pistons were pock-marked with stomach ailments, too.

“I probably would have been dead before I was 50,” Vitale said.

Davidson, in the five years prior to hiring McCloskey, had presided over a mess with the Pistons, culminating with a controversial move from downtown to the Pontiac Silverdome in 1978. After the Vitale Era proved to be a colossal failure, Davidson looked almost as much of a clown as Vitale himself, which is saying something.

McCloskey changed all that.

By the end of the 1980s, the Pistons were one of the NBA’s elite. They won championships in 1989 and 1990, and came damn close in 1987 and ’88, too. All of it – ALL of it – was due to the drafting and coaching hires orchestrated by McCloskey.

Vitale, meanwhile, turned his failure into success after being hired by the newly-born sports network ESPN to be a college basketball analyst.

Friday, Vitale and Davidson were both enshrined into the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass. Davidson went in for his accomplishments as an owner and as a guardian of the league, and Vitale was inducted for his tenure behind a microphone and, peripherally, for his authoring several books about the game. They may laugh at Dick Vitale, but it’s irrefutable that he got a whole bunch of folks interested in the college game simply because of his brash, catch phrase-tinged style.

“They need a T.O., babyyyyy!”

“He’s a PTPer!”

And so on.

Neither of the two men – Davidson and Vitale – would have been in Springfield, being honored along with such greats as Patrick Ewing and Hakeem Olajuwon and Pat Riley and Adrian Dantley, if it wasn’t for their parting of ways in November 1979.

Davidson saved Vitale’s life by firing him. And Vitale saved Davidson’s face by recommending he hire Jack McCloskey.

Sometimes we don’t see how funny life is, until, say, 29 years later.

Time Stopped At UDM After Vitale Left

There was no Mercy at the University of Detroit when Dickie Vitale coached there – and there also was no mercy.

Vitale is one of the finalists for induction into the James Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame this year in Springfield, Ma. He’s eligible because of his work blabbing into a microphone – certainly not for his prowess on the sidelines.

Not that he was lacking in that area. Vitale coached at U-D – long before the school merged with Mercy College and grew a third initial: UDM. It was a grand time at McNichols and Livernois in those days, from 1973-78. Players running thru papered hoops with the lights out and faux pyrotechnics going off as they were being introduced. Making the NCAA tournament a couple times. Upsetting powerhouse schools like Marquette on the road – and with Vitale dancing a jig at center court afterward, captured by the TV cameras that beamed the images back home.

I have mixed emotions as I mull over Dickie V’s candidacy – because I’m not sure if being a loudmouthed basketball analyst on TV and radio qualifies one for Hall status, and because it made me pause and think about what’s happening now at UDM, which isn’t all that good.

Vitale came to Detroit from out east, where all the basketball coaches seemed to come from in those days. He started at a New Jersey high school. And he talked his way onto the campus at U-D, promising the fathers there that he could put the university’s basketball program back onto the map. There had been some success at U-D prior to Vitale’s arrival, but not for several years. We ARE talking about the school of Dave DeBusschere and Spencer Haywood, after all.

So Vitale invaded living rooms in the southeastern Michigan area and convinced some of the top high school players to come play at his university. Talking was never Dickie’s weak suit.

And it worked. Vitale built a powerhouse – a basketball program that began to give Michigan and Michigan State a run for their money. Terry Tyler. John Long. Terry Duerod. Earl Cureton. All were recruited by Dickie V, and all spent various lengths of time in the NBA – and all for the Pistons. But more on that later.

U-D was an independent in those days, and it opened up the schedule for top hoops schools from conferences across the Midwest. DePaul would come to town, sometimes Marquette. And there were road games against Michigan, Notre Dame, and other big boys. And U-D acquitted itself well; sometimes the Titans would pull off the upset – only it wasn’t an embarrassment to lose to U-D, because Vitale’s teams were pretty damn good. Calihan Hall, smack in the heart of campus, was bedlam in those days. The big boys stopped wanting to play there, because it was such a hornet’s nest.

I find myself in Calihan several times a year now, working for the fine folks at Catholic Television Network of Detroit, helping them with their high school basketball coverage. And not much has changed at Calihan, which is part of the problem.

Oh, it’s still intimate. And cozy. But now, those words are just polite substitutes for antiquated and outdated.

There’s not much excitement around the Titan program nowadays, and the ancient Calihan Hall does nothing to help that.

The Titans are gamely coached now by Perry Watson, who gained his chops by steamrolling over his opponents in the Detroit Public School League, at Southwestern High. Then Perry was an assistant at Michigan for a few years, before taking the UDM gig. Watson, though, is now out – taking an extended leave of absence for an undisclosed personal issue. The team is lucky to win once every five games or so. They scrape the bottom of the Horizon League.

But Watson has done some good things at UDM. He’s led the team to some NIT appearances, and even won a few games during March Madness. But his strong ties to the inner city coaches hasn’t done what Vitale was able to do in the 1970s, as an outsider from New Jersey.

The entire campus at UDM looks like time forgot it. It’s terribly devoid of any new construction, and Calihan is now, to me, nothing more than a glorified high school gymnasium – which may have been fine 30+ years ago, but now it must be a recruiting nightmare for Watson and his staff. How can you get any top high school kid excited about playing in a 50+ year-old dungeon like Calihan Hall? And for a school that rarely gets any TV or media exposure?

Vitale’s been gone for about 30 years now from campus. He quit, sobbing at a press conference, because of stomach problems. He was kicked upstairs, as the school’s athletic director. Then he started lobbying for the Pistons’ coaching job.

The man he convinced to make such a bad hire was owner Bill Davidson, who in wonderful irony is up for induction into the Hall along with Vitale this year. It would be enough to make me choke on my pancakes if they both went into the Hall together. My belly would hurt, I’d be laughing so hard.

Yet it might happen, and that’s OK, I suppose. Vitale was a disaster as Pistons coach, demonstrating almost immediately that he had no clue what he was doing. He had a fetish for local players, drafting Long, Tyler, Duerod, Phil Hubbard from Michigan, and Greg Kelser from Michigan State. You almost wanted to show Dickie V a map, and let him know that there were other states in the Union that he could draft his players from.

Davidson is a no-brainer for induction, as far as I’m concerned. He’s been a pillar of an owner with the Pistons, and he’s helped the NBA immensely. He committed a personal foul when he hired Vitale, but it wasn’t the only bad hire he made. However, his good choices have far outweighed his poor ones – which is one reason why he’s a Hall candidate.

We laugh at Dick Vitale today, for his buffoonery on the air – though he’s mellowed some. And we laughed at him as Pistons coach, mainly because the only alternative was to cry. We even laughed at him at U-D, even while he was winning basketball games and creating a frenzy on campus.

Wish we could laugh at something at UDM today, other than at its old, dilapidated gym. Even a smile would be nice.