Sometimes you can learn something about a book by looking at the footnotes.
Exhibit A would be the book, "Balls of Confusion," by Bob Kuska. There are references to interviews that he did in 2008. That was a mere 16 years before the book was actually published.
With that sort of dedication, it's a credit to the author that he stuck with it so long and figured out a way to get it published ... all right, the first part published. The book covers the first half of the "relationship" between the established National Basketball Association and the upstart American Basketball Association. It looks at the years from 1965 to 1970. The second part - which should examine the time period from 1970 to 1976 - is said to be coming at some point. There's little doubt that this two-part package is going to be the definite word on the subject of the relationship between the two leagues.
The discussion starts with one of the basic principles about professional sports leagues. If a national organization has a little success and doesn't expand into new cities, chances are quite good that a rival league will be born. In baseball, for example, the National League had a closely knit group of eight teams as members, and other cities wanted in. Thus, the American League was born. The National Football League had quite a few rivals come and go once it was past its formative years in the 1920s.
Such was the case for professional basketball. Once it settled down in the post-war period, the National Basketball Association carried the flag for pro hoops nationwide. But by the mid-1960s, there still were only nine teams stretched out across the country. Inevitably, someone would try to fill that vacuum, and the American Basketball Association was born to try to fill that gap in 1967.
The ABA's management and owners hoped that the teams involved would follow a certain path. They would slowly build to the point where a viable group was established, and then it would merge with the more established league. The American Football League followed that gameplan in the 1960s, and succeeded with a merger with the NFL. The catch was that a new league was bound to have a few hiccups along the way, and teams would have to change cities and some good-sized amounts of money would be lost in the process. Two leagues are good for players' salaries of course, due to bidding wars, but not so good for owners' bottom lines. Oh, and the lawyers would find plenty of excuses to pad their totals of billable hours.
As the book outlines in great detail, that's essentially what happened - particularly during the 1965-1970 time span covered by this book. The NBA expanded a few times in this era, eventually reaching 17 teams for the start of the 1970-71 season, in an effort to remain solvent. In 1970, the NBA and ABA had worked out many of the details of a potential merger, and the end of the basketball wars seemed inevitable. Spoiler alert: It didn't happen right away.
Kuska collected information from all sorts of sources. He came up with some documents, including extensive numbers of the minutes of the ABA's league meetings. That's rather valuable in a book like this. He also refers to plenty of newspaper stories written at the time as well as interviews with the people involved. There are some good personal nuggets thrown in along the way, The author uncovers some information here along the way that should be new and interesting to those who followed that era. He also has a little fun in the writing to keep us involved.
This book had to be written by someone with a love for the sport and that era. It was a long time ago - more than 50 years - and that's going to be ancient history to many. Admittedly such a story will have legal and technical complications along the way; I'm one of the few people who might consider this beach reading. This checks in at almost 500 pages, and it's only part one.
No, "Balls of Confusion" isn't going to be a best-seller. But in terms of getting an historical record of a pivotal era in basketball out there, this succeeds quite nicely. If you hit the sweet spot of interest, a read is quite rewarding.
Four stars
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