Wrong-Way O'Keeffe and Lowering the Boom on Australian Basketball

Basketball fans crowd around to see what an

American sports writer says in his game report.

One night in the middle of my basketball writing life, I was in the Townsville Suns team bus hurtling along the A49 for Newcastle after a lightning tournament in the coastal town of Terrigal. First stop was a bottle shop. While I tried to type a story in the back of the bus, the other occupants hoed into the cartons of beer. After about half an hour, the club’s CEO, Dennis O’Keeffe, looked out a window and said, “Shouldn’t the ocean be on our right side?”

We were usually a little smarter than that. Though the Suns were still new to the National Basketball League back then, from an early point the club had realised the league was heading in entirely the wrong direction. Not that it did them much good.

American basketball fans would be forgiven for thinking that, with at least seven Australians playing in the NBA, the men's game in this country is in a healthy state. They'd be wrong. Women's basketball and male basketball at the development levels might be in robust good shape, but the men’s elite competition, the NBL, is struggling for exposure and relevance. That wasn’t always so. The NBL was the “boom” professional sports competition in Australia in the 1980s and 1990s. Then just about everything went bust.

I was reminded of the glory days when on Australia Day this week Cal Bruton was honoured with a Medal of the Order of Australia for service to basketball. The glory days are a distant memory. The ongoing problems faced by the NBL are entirely of its own making, and have little to do with the finest young Australian players heading overseas to hone their skills in the US college system and the NBA. Indeed, by far the greatest amount of publicity now afforded basketball in Australia concerns the game-to-game performances of our NBA players. Australian basketball followers have at least something to be thankful about. For professional sports in this country, plentiful exposure on free-to-air TV is the be-all and end-all of their existence; Australians have been spoilt for so long with free access to televised sport that they remain loath to fork out to watch those sports which, because of our anti-siphoning regulations, are mainly confined to pay TV. The NBL is buried away on SBS On Demand and SBS Viceland (which has a viewing share of 1 per cent!).

In 1979 Australia was ripe for a professional basketball league. Its national team, the Boomers, had advanced in Olympic Games and World Cup events and in high scorer Eddie Palubinskas, Australia had produced a player worthy of NBA consideration (he was a 1974 NBA draftee but didn't play in the NBA). State leagues flourished and had started to make the game attractive, even to the uninitiated. It wasn't until 1988 that the NBA was televised free-to-air on the national broadcast network, the ABC, and Australian basketball fans loved this more exciting, entertaining spectacle. But the NBL wasn't the NBA, not least because zone defences were allowed here, and that made our basketball a subtly if significantly different game.

In 1991 Luc Longley became the first Aussie to play in the NBA. That so many other young Australian basketballers have since made it to the highest level in the game is in large part a lasting legacy of the work done by those evangelist (purely in the basketball sense) Americans who came to Australia for the start of the original NBL. Most were players (NBL clubs were allowed two "imports" each) but many were coaches. One thing they had in common was their "missionary zeal" - they had an inexhaustible capacity to promote and publicise basketball, and to capitalise on the Australian public's appetite for knowledge about what was a very new and different professional sporting competition in this country. Until 1979, the only team sport competitions approaching full professionalism were cricket and two of the football codes. A five-a-side game played indoors with a large round ball and an enormous amount of specifically - some might say artificially - generated hoopla took some getting used to.

An excellent summary of the “American conversion” is contained in a paper published by former Australian National University historian Scott Bennett in the Australian Society for Sports Historians’ Sporting Traditions in November 1986. Called “The Cannons and Canberra”, it is available online in the LA84 Foundation’s digital library.

One of the first imported "stars" mentioned by Bennett is Bruton, from Jamaica, Queen's, New York City. During the 20 years I covered the NBL (for spurious reasons, my accreditation was cancelled in 1999), and occasionally since that time, Cal and I have had many conversations about "what went wrong" for the Australian men's “elite” competition. The NBL reached the point in 2008 when its own chief executive, Chuck Harmison, described it as a "train wreck". It was in a “semi-induced coma” and on life support, he said. "While it’s not dead," added Harmison, "it’s the victim of a pretty horrendous train crash." Harmison, who came here from Ohio State University, said he felt the sport wasn’t ready for the explosion in popularity it experienced in the 80s and 90s and "took its eye off the ball".

A telling reason it wasn't ready (and distracted by non-consequentials) was a failure reflected both on-court and in the NBL's head office. In hindsight, perhaps the NBL should have considered importing referees as well as US players and coaches when it started out. Australian referees were not equal to the challenge which emerged with an NBL involving 18 savvy, fast-moving, fast-talking Americans. But NBL officials stamped on any criticism of the refereeing standards, courtside or in the Press. They used a fine system to prevent coaches from making adverse remarks about referees - always a major mistake, in that it denies the paying public their right to know what coaches are thinking. Australian fans, passionate but often bemused and sometimes angry about on-court decisions, were thirsty for the knowledge that coaches with American experience could impart, but for fear of being fined could not. Spectators were entitled to the benefit of their wisdom. When Chris Anstey returned from playing in the NBA and said referees were ruining the game in Australia, he was heavily fined. Rather than stifle comment, the NBL needed to face the facts that people with expertise were pointing out. Failure to do so lowered the boom on the NBL.