Memo to moviegoers: ABA was no joke of a league

Julius Erving led the New York Nets to a title in 1976, the ABA's final season. Manny Millan/SI

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There will be blood.

There will be fights, too, along with short-shorts and Afros and sideburns and Fu Manchu mustaches. There will be funk and disco and mink coats and Super Fly hats and cleavage.

There will be sleazy owners and sniveling general managers, lunkheaded big men and pint-sized point guards. There will be red (ink), white (lies) and blue (humor), all undeniably true in Semi-Pro, the new Will Ferrell comedy about a short-lived professional league best known for its red-white-and-blue basketball.

Ron Boone just hopes there isn't a Volkswagen Bug used as a stand-in for the team bus, with 12 players piling out of it for a cheap laugh. Because the American Basketball Association, while it was a lot of things in its nine-year run from 1967 to 1976, was never a clown league.

"That's what I'm wondering about,'' said Boone, who played eight seasons in the ABA and five in the NBA. "I want to know if they are going to look at this as exactly what the title is: Semi-Pro. I think myself and maybe a few other guys might take exception to that because [the ABA] was a professional league.''

As an alternative and a challenge to the NBA, the ABA landed somewhere between the AFL (vis-a-vis the NFL) and the WHA (in regards to the NHL) in ultimate success. It was a rogue league, a maverick league, a cool league, a rag-tag league and a league with considerably more style than substance in the battle of looking good vs. staying financially solvent.

But it also produced legendary stars, a few impressive teams, some brilliant marketing ideas and four eventual NBA franchises (Denver, Indiana, New Jersey and San Antonio). And none of its players wore greasepaint.

"If they treat us like that, I think it would be a slap in the face, as far as the ABA,'' Boone said.

Boone, a Utah Jazz broadcaster for 18 seasons, talks in future tense about Semi-Pro because, even though the movie went into national release Friday, he has yet to see it. Part of that is his reluctance to fight crowds or stand in line for something that still will be available tomorrow or next week. Part of that, though, is his hesitation to see the ABA portrayed too broadly, reducing it to Slap Shot status for those with hazy memories of the league or, based on your age group, no memory at all.

"You start checking into the ABA players who entered the NBA with the merger, you'll notice the number of players who held their own as all-league and on the All-Star teams. We had some great players in the ABA,'' Boone said. "The preseason games the ABA played against the NBA, I think we held our own.''

Better than that: ABA teams had a 79-76 record in exhibition games against the NBA. The year after the leagues "merged'' -- with the Nuggets, Pacers, Nets and Spurs accepted as legitimate members of the established league and 12 individual players absorbed through a dispersal draft -- 63 of the 84 players under ABA contract found jobs in the NBA for the 1977-78 season.

And at the 1977 All-Star Game in Milwaukee, 10 of the 24 players on the East and West squads had ABA roots. Julius Erving, traded by the Nets to the Philadelphia 76ers, won MVP honors that afternoon with 30 points. Denver's David Thompson, Dan Issel and Bobby Jones started across the front line for the West. Portland's Maurice Lucas, who had turned pro with the St. Louis Spirits (with whom Bob Costas broke in as play-by-play announcer), scored 17 points with 10 boards off the bench. Larry Brown coached the West team and Earl Strom, one of the NBA referees who had jumped leagues, worked the game.

As a kid attending Marquette University at the time, I weaseled my way into the building, the host Bucks generously granting me a credential to cover the event for the campus newspaper. They even let me vote for the MVP award and, treating it like a game, I foolishly picked Paul Westphal, whose two baskets and key steal in the final minutes saved the West's 125-124 victory. Obviously, I didn't grasp the significance of the moment: Erving carrying and planting the ABA flag that day, as well as his own as one of the game's most electrifying performers and soon the NBA's lead ambassador.

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