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.

Coming To A Basketball Arena Near You: Coach Joe Dumars

The Pistons were in the midst of another search for a coach. It was typical, for a franchise that had two winning seasons on its resume in 26 seasons in Detroit.

It was the spring of 1983. General Manager Jack McCloskey was rumored to have interviewed several candidates. A couple, it was whispered, turned him down. One of those rejecters was supposedly the revered Dr. Jack Ramsay, a future Hall of Famer. McCloskey, it was reported, turned to an old friend from his days with the Lakers, Jack McKinney. McKinney, too, said no.

Other names bobbed to the surface. The days dragged on. Then it occurred to me.

Jack McCloskey wants to coach this team himself.

He could have done it, you know. McCloskey was a successful coach in the Ivy League, back when some of the best college basketball in the country was played in the small arenas of Princeton, Brown, and Yale. And Penn, where McCloskey roamed the sidelines in the 1960s. In the NBA, McCloskey coached the woeful Portland Trailblazers, getting fired just before the team drafted Bill Walton. He assisted his friend Jerry West with the Lakers, and did the same thing for McKinney with Indiana.

It was while on the Pacers bench as an assistant that McCloskey was recommended to Pistons owner Bill Davidson as just the basketball man the dysfunctional franchise needed to recover from two years of Dickie Vitale’s destruction. That was in December 1979.

So I was bracing myself for the announcement that I was sure to come, that McCloskey had tired of the coaching search and was going to assume the role himself.

He made a fool of me. He hired Chuck Daly, another former Penn coach. I suppose it was a good decision.

I hit McCloskey with my theory in 1989, the summer after the Pistons’ first-ever championship.

“If I thought it was the best decision for the team, I would have taken the job,” McCloskey told me with a shrug. But no, it wasn’t his intention.

I wonder if Joe Dumars will ultimately show the same restraint.

Flip Saunders is the Pistons coach, but he isn’t where the buck stops when it comes to in-season personnel matters. They do things a little differently in Detroit. Most NBA coaches bristle when it’s suggested that he’s not the one pulling all the strings all the time – during the season. The GM’s role for those teams is to make trades, look at free agents, and sit in a suite somewhere during the games. And keep the pie hole shut when it comes to who should play when, and for how long, and against which teams.

Dumars doesn’t play that.

Frequently he’s consulted, and I wonder how much of it is Saunders consulting Dumars, or Dumars consulting Saunders, if you get my drift.

The coach was talking to the media last week about veteran Lindsey Hunter, idle for over a month and resting – getting ready for the playoffs, when he’ll once again coax energy and ball-hawking defense out of his 37-year-old body.

When, it was asked, will it be time to suit up Hunter and begin blending him back into the rotation, the playoffs about a month away?

“Not sure,” Saunders said. “Gotta talk to Joe (Dumars) about it. See what Joe thinks.”

You can count on one hand how many NBA coaches would be comfortable with such an idea, and have some fingers left over.

Gotta talk to the GM first? See what he thinks?

Hey, if it works for Saunders and the Pistons, then everyone has my blessing. But it’s starting to crystallize now – why Joe Dumars has burned through coaches like a teenager does with his allowance.

Let’s take a look back. Dumars canned Alvin Gentry in 2000, promoting assistant George Irvine. Irvine was gone a little over a year later. Dumars then brought in Rick Carlisle, who lasted two seasons – both 50-win seasons, by the way. Despite leading the Pistons to the conference finals, Carlisle was fired. Larry Brown was hired. Brown flamed out in two seasons, as well – with a championship and a runner-up on his record. Enter Saunders, who’s actually survived into a third season – a record for any man that Dumars has hired.

Dumars, letting another coach go (Carlisle, in 2003)

I wonder how much of this is Dumars being aggressively restless and risk-taking, and how much of it is that he can’t get along with coaches? Or, rather, that they can’t get along with him?

I’m not castigating Dumars here. There’s no crime in running things the way you see fit, especially if the success rate is high. But something tells me that Joe Dumars may not be totally content until he seizes control of the team himself, as coach someday. He already is mega-involved in personnel decisions. Don’t kid yourself here. One of the reasons you see Saunders’s rotation fluctuate and change so often – in an ongoing effort to bring the youngsters Dumars has drafted into the fold – is because Dumars has ideas. And he isn’t shy to flex his muscles with his coach when it comes to those ideas.

Is Flip Saunders a puppet? That’s far too strong of a word. But it’s not inaccurate to describe Dumars as a sort of micro-manager, and those types aren’t ever happy unless they can do things themselves – like coach basketball teams.

Gregg Popovich is maybe going to go into the Hall of Fame one day as a coach, leading the San Antonio Spurs as the team of the 21^st century. But Popovich was an accidental coach himself. He was a little-known GM when he fired his coach one day, took the job on an interim basis, and never gave it up.

Saunders will coach the Pistons next year, odds are – barring a total meltdown in the playoffs, i.e. a first or second-round exit. Beyond that, it’s anyone’s guess. And I’ll again brace myself, as I did back in 1983, for the Pistons GM to announce that, guess what, he’s the new coach, too.

McCloskey made a fool of me in ’83. I doubt that Dumars will.