Remember the Philadelphia Tapers?
St. Louis, which has trouble holding onto NFL teams, lost the Rams last week. Sorry if I can't work up any sympathy for Missouri's football fans.
St. Louis, which has trouble holding onto NFL teams, lost the Rams last week.
Sorry if I can't work up any sympathy for Missouri's football fans.
I'm a Philadelphian and, to paraphrase Allen Ginsberg, I've seen the best teams of my population destroyed by madness.
Other cities have lost franchises. Most departed for financial reasons. Others simply couldn't compete. Some had civic inferiority complexes.
But only Philadelphia has been abandoned by what arguably were the two most successful teams in its long history.
The NBA's Warriors left for San Francisco in 1962 despite having captured two league titles in 16 seasons here.
The Athletics, meanwhile, won five World Series and nine American League titles before departing for Kansas City in 1954.
The A's departure was especially odd, since they ceded the city to a Phillies franchise that had won neither a World Series nor Philadelphia's heart.
In other two-team baseball towns, when one franchise exited, it was always the least successful. The Braves in Boston. The Browns in St. Louis. Even the Brooklyn Dodgers, whose departure for L.A. was particularly traumatic, were only the second-best - and occasionally third-best - baseball team in New York.
Through the sporting life of any city, teams come and go. Some relocate. Some die. We mourn deeply for a few, briefly lament some, and, as is the case with the Philadelphia Tapers, completely forget others.
I've maintained a spot in my crowded memory for the Tapers. As unloved and unwatchable as they were, they helped ease the loss of the Warriors and their homegrown superstar, Wilt Chamberlain.
The Tapers' stay here was notably brief, just 28 games in a little more than two months. But it was fascinating in a comical way. The American Basketball League team squeezed a decade's worth of oddities into those two months.
They were the descendents of a successful semipro, New York-based team called the Tapers, which was sponsored by the Technical Tape Corp. When the ABL was born in 1961, that company purchased a franchise, gave it the Tapers name, and placed it in Washington.
They proved as popular in the nation's capital as term limits. The Washington Tapers bombed so badly that, in the middle of their inaugural season, the tape moguls who ran them moved them to a sure-fire basketball hotbed, Commack, N.Y.
Success and big crowds eluded them there as well. So, with the Warriors' departure having created a void here, the Tapers moved to Philadelphia for the 1962-63 ABL season.
Seeking a fresh start, they fired their coach and replaced him with Mario Perri. Perri's hoops resumé was akin to Commack's.
He'd been the athletic director at, surprise, the Technical Tape Corp. He did, it must be noted, guide one of that company's teams to a national title. Unfortunately for the Tapers, it was the softball team.
Perri's best player was a New York playground legend named Sy Blye who worked for - drum roll, please - the Technical Tape Corp.
Blye had had a noteworthy career at Seattle University - though it lasted just one game. School officials there ended it when they learned Blye had played professionally for the Harlem Clowns, a minor-league Globetrotters.
One of Blye's Philadelphia teammates was Bill Chmielewski. The 6-10 center was a good fit for the Tapers since he often played as if his oversize sneakers were taped to the court.
Actually, Chmielewski made history that season, though not on the court.
As a Dayton sophomore the previous March, he'd helped the Flyers win the 1962 NIT. But after he got his girlfriend pregnant, he was asked to leave the Catholic school.
Like the NBA, the ABL then banned anyone whose college class hadn't graduated. But an exception was made for the desperate Tapers. And so, years before Spencer Haywood's historic lawsuit opened the door for underclass players, Chmielewski became a groundbreaker.
But perhaps the Tapers' most historically significant moment came on Nov. 15, 1962. Eager to be different, the ABL had planned to play doubleheaders - two 30-minute games involving the same two teams.
The debut of that hare-brained scheme - still the only doubleheader in pro basketball history - took place that night in a near-empty Convention Hall.
The Tapers and Chicago Majors split the games, the home team taking the opener, 51-46, and losing Game 2 in overtime, 65-63. The players hated the concept nearly as much as the fans.
Discount coupons for the game appeared not in the sports sections of newspapers but in their food pages. In the Delaware County Times, for example, the Nov. 14 coupon for tickets to the Tapers twin bill was included in a Penn Fruit ad, surrounded by notices for 53-cents-a-pound lamb and 29-cent ham.
The public didn't bite. The doubleheader attracted a crowd estimated at 1,712 fans. No one asked why an estimate was necessary. Could counting 1,712 fans have been that challenging?
The Tapers concluded their lone season here with a 10-18 record. They averaged 700 fans a game. And according to a new book on the ABL, their last several games attracted crowds of less than 100.
Technically, they were gone from Philadelphia even before that second and last ABL season concluded. Their final game, which had been scheduled for Convention Hall, was, for reasons that perhaps only the executives of the Technical Tape Corp. understood, played in Cleveland.
Philadelphians never got to say goodbye.
Those still regretting that fact now have an outlet for their grief.
The website PrepSportswear.com sells replica Tapers jerseys and hats.
If anyone spots one of those hats or shirts, please call me. And if you can't reach me, try the Technical Tape Corp.