Heartland: The Waiting Game

A heartbreaking and triumphant look at the quest to get justice -- and pensions -- for the legends of the upstart American Basketball Association.

For Heartland Film Festival schedule and tickets, please click here.

If you were to watch a professional basketball game in the late 1960s or early ‘70s, it came in two flavors: the National Basketball Association and the upstart American Basketball Association. The contrast between the two games was like night and day: tight, fundamental basketball played below the rim in the NBA, while over in the ABA with their trademark red, white and blue ball it was a symphony of behind-the-back passes, crossover dribbles and ferocious dunks.

“Ghetto ball” the folks in the NBA called their counterpart, with a not-at-all hidden racial subtext for a league that was overwhelmingly Black, while their own still featured plenty of white guys with crewcuts.

“The Waiting Game,” the excellent documentary about the plight of former ABA players, states something overtly something any hoops fan knows but maybe has never been articulated so starkly: the modern NBA much more closely resembles the ABA than its own league of that era.

Three-point shots, dunk contests, a hyperfocus on superstars — that’s all ABA.

You may know the basic history. The ABA came into being in 1967 as a challenge to the NBA — though, as we learn from director Michael Husain and his team, not so much competition as wannabes. The 12 teams then in the NBA were largely confined to big-city markets, and the ABA owners came from smaller towns that wanted entry into the “big” league.

Eventually, four teams did in 1976, including the Indiana Pacers, while the rest of the teams folded and the ABA dissolved. The more talented players were snatched up by the NBA, mostly notably superstar Julius “Dr. J” Erving, and the DNA of the ABA melded with that of the NBA and eventually came to dominate it.

But what about those ABA players who did not make it to the NBA, or retired before the merger? They had been assured they would receive the same pension as NBA players, but they never did. Eventually many of them found themselves in their declining years, mired in poverty often brought on by failing bodies as a result of the pounding they took from the game.

Some ended up like George Carter, working as a limo driver in Las Vegas while battling throat cancer. Mounting medical bills threatened to force him out of his home and onto the streets. Others took jobs as care salesmen or, in the case of Sam Smith, as a foreman at the Ford plant in Indianapolis. Most earned little more than middle-class pay during their playing careers.

“Game” looks at the effort to get justice, in the form of pensions, for the ABA players as they were promised. Specifically, it focuses on the Dropping Dimes Foundation, which was established 10 years ago with this express purpose.

The three principles are Scott Tarter, a lawyer; John Abrams, an eye doctor for the Pacers; and Ted Green, a Hoosier filmmaker and media guy. All were rabid ABA fans as youngsters and committed themselves to helping out their former heroes.

Dana Hunsinger Benbow, sports columnist for The Indianapolis Star (and a former colleague of mine), took up the cause through a series of columns on the topic, initially focused on former player Sam Smith, who lay dying in a hospital while waiting on his pension to kick in. He insisted a photo be taken of him with an ABA ball by his head, and in a single moment the cause crystallized into action — not unlike what the infamous casket photos of Emmett Till did for the civil rights movement generations earlier.

The documentary features an impressive array of interviews with ABA players including Dr. J, James Jones, Spencer Haywood, Ralph Simpson, Bob Netolicky, Darnell Hillman, “Jumbo” Jim Eakins and more.

Eakins, who was ABA players association president at the time of the deal with the NBA, expresses his eternal remorse at not being more of a guardian for his guys. He’s hardly to be blamed, though, as the legal maneuvering happened very quickly and the players were literally given a day to endorse the contract, or lose their jobs with nothing to show.

Broadcasting legend Bob Costas, who started his career as an ABA announcer, weighs in with the appeal to history, and common sense. With just $35 million needed to fully fund the pension for the living players — hardly even a star-level player salary now in a league that generates over $10 billion a year — why wouldn’t they do what’s so clearly the right thing?

“Ralph Simpson was as good a player as I was a broadcaster. Why did things turn out the way it did for him?” Costas laments.

We also meet Harvey Benjamin, one of the NBA lawyers who crafted the deal, who matter-of-factly states that their job was to ensure their clients were exposed to as little risk as possible — and a vaguely defined pension plan for hundreds of players represented an undue financial burden. “That’s just sound lawyering,” he says.

There’s an amazing moment where Tarter, who has pored through the legal document like an archaeologist discovering the Red Sea Scrolls, admits the other attorney is right — and that he’d have done the same thing in his shoes.

The key point is that what the two leagues executed was not a merger — which has all sorts of clearly defined legal ramifications — despite that being what everyone called it at the time. It was just an expansion of the NBA, with four ABA teams as the new franchises.

Another pivotal moment in the film: Tarter discovers that his dad, who toiled seven days a week for Ford, actually reported to Sam Smith on the job. He himself learned to shoot hoops a the church courtyard a few blocks away.

Eventually the NBA acquiesced, though it was not a total victory — and more ABA players died while waiting for their pension. Echoing the careful language from 1976, the NBA did not call it a pension, but “recognition” payments. Still, we get to rejoice alongside the trio from Dropping Dimes when they finally get the news.

Perhaps just as meaningfully, the NBA also agreed to count all statistics and records from the ABA in its own books. So now a lot of forgotten names have gotten the shine they deserved.

I’m a huge NBA fan and cheer the Pacers lustily. After seeing “The Waiting Game,” I’ve got even more respect for the franchises that graduated from the ABA, and for a league of rebels who played the game the way they wanted it to be played.

As it turned out, it was everybody’s game.