My First NBA Game

In the fall of 1957,I was living in Windsor, Connecticut. I was 14 and very interested in sports. In the fall, The Hartford Courant began advertising for an NBA exhibition game that was coming to Hartford. It was to be a game between the Minneapolis Lakers and a pickup team that was supposed to include some former Harlem Globetrotters. It's hard to imagine 50+ years later that a real NBA team was actually going to play a pickup team. The reality is that back then professional basketball was a minor sport that was happy to show up if you had the money.

My Grandfather, John Casey, got us tickets to the game. The Minneapolis Lakers had won five straight NBA championships in the late 1940's and early 1950's with George Mikan as their star. Those days were gone and the franchise was having hard times and would soon become the Los Angeles Lakers. All of the advertising for the game touted the newest Laker, Hot Rod Huntley. He would go on to have a long association with the NBA, but is probably remembered more for his announcing than for his playing. Hot Rod didn't get into the game until a couple of minutes were left and he didn't impress me. In fact nobody on the Lakers made much of an impression.

However, I really enjoyed the game because of one of the players on the pickup team. The player that I enjoyed went on to become fairly famous, but it wasn't because of his ability to play basketball. Those days were years away. On this night, he was the star of the game. His name was Chet Forte. He had been an All American basketball player at Columbia University in New York City.

Chet never got the opportunity to play basketball in the NBA.  Although he had averaged 28.9 points per game for the 1956-57 season and won the national collegiate player of the year award, beating out Wilt Chamberlain and Hot Rod Huntley, Chet had a problem. By basketball standards Chet was short; the universal belief in the NBA was that short people could not play because they would be unable to play acceptable defense. So, he was never given a chance. It was a long time before Calvin Murphy showed that remarkable offensive skills could overcome questionable defensive skills.

On this night, Chet was incredible. He could not be stopped and the crowd was buzzing all night because of the array of ways that he was able to score. Before the game was over, he had scored well into the 30's.

Chet went on to have a terrific career in sports, but it was as a director on television. Among his accomplishments: he was the first director of Monday Night Football and he was the director of the first two Olympics shown on ABC.

Oh, the game - the Lakers were, after  all, an NBA team and they did win the game despite Chet's terrific performance.

Another oh - when everybody knows something (short people can't play in the NBA), what they know is yesterday's news.  Making decisions based on yesterday's news will not lead to likely success.  Unfortunately, for 99.9999% of us (including me), we always make decisions based on yesterday's news.  The other .0001% change the world.