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Time of My Life: Part 10: Recalling Blazermania

The world came down with Beatlemania in the 1960s, but my hometown became afflicted in the 1970s with something called Blazermania.

My job as a sportswriter for the Oregon City Enterprise-Courier allowed me in June 1977 to see Blazermania up close, as in really up close.

I grew up in Portland, Ore., a nice city to call home; it’s about 15 miles north of Oregon City. It had a minor-league baseball team, the Portland Beavers. It had a minor-league hockey franchise, the Portland Buckaroos, which lasted until 1974. No pro football. In 1970, the National Basketball Association decided Portland needed to join the NBA family of cities. So it granted Portland a pro basketball franchise.

The Portland Trail Blazers struggled through six seasons of futility; they lost more games than they won in each of those years. Then came the 1976-77 season. The team had drafted a fellow out of UCLA named Bill Walton and had acquired some talent from the defunct American Basketball Association; the big name from the ABA to join the Blazers was Maurice Lucas. The two of them formed the foundation of a team coached by first-year coach Jack Ramsay.

They finished the regular season 49-33. They made the NBA playoffs for the first time ever. They defeated, in order, the Chicago Bulls, the Denver Nuggets and the Los Angeles Lakers to win the Western Division championship. Then they faced the Philadelphia 76ers for the league title. The Sixers possessed some high-powered talent as well. Julius Erving, George McGinnis, Doug Collins and Darryl Dawkins suited up for them.

The Blazers won the NBA title in six games. The city went ballistic. Heck, the entire state of Oregon and a good bit of southwest Washington went nuts, too! Blazer fans cheered themselves hoarse.

My editor assigned me to cover the Blazers’ victory parade throughout downtown Portland. I went gladly.

I walked along the parade route, following the cars carrying the men who won the title. The crowd throughout the parade route was roughly 500,000 or so; I am going to presume that over the years, the number of people who said they were at the parade now numbers in the millions.

I snapped pictures, interviewed fans and collected notes for a feature story I would write for my newspaper.

I ventured to the top of a building overlooking Schrunk Plaza in front of a 40-story bank tower downtown. I wanted to grab a picture of the crowd assembled in front of the podium. It was huge, man!

Then I noticed a solitary figure standing near the rail looking down on all the madness. I looked carefully. It was the late Stu Inman, the Blazers’ general manager — the guy who built the team that won the NBA title!

I walked up to Inman, introduced myself and asked, “Why aren’t you down there with the rest of them?” His answer spoke volumes about him. “Oh, no,” he said. “That’s for someone else.” He didn’t care to bask in the glory, which he reckoned belonged to the players and the coach.

So it went. The Blazers had taken their first journey into the postseason all the way to the NBA mountaintop.

I was so proud to have been able to chronicle a small part of it.

Sports news

Remembering a humble pro sports executive

inman

I shared a story with a young friend of mine this week, and I want to share it here. It involves a now-deceased professional sports executive who embodied the kind of humility we see little of in today’s world of pro sports.

On June 5, 1977, the Portland Trail Blazers won the National Basketball Association championship. They beat the Philly 76ers in six games, winning the final game in Portland.

Oh, and Portland is my hometown. I didn’t attend the game, but watched it on TV. You’ll recall that the Sixers had some pretty good athletes: Julius Erving, Darryl Dawkins and George McGinnis come to mind.

I was working at the time as a sports writer for a small suburban daily paper in Oregon City, about 15 miles south of Portland. I was not yet 28 years of age.

The Blazers scheduled a victory parade through downtown Portland a few days after the big win. My editor assigned me to cover it, to shoot pictures and write a story about the event for the next evening’s paper.

Off to Portland I went.

The parade commenced. I followed the open cars along several streets, shot some pictures of the players waving to their fans and then ended up in Terry Schrunk Plaza, a park in front of a 40-story bank building.

The crowd was enormous. I looked across the way and saw a smaller building attached by an overhead walkway to the skyscraper. I went to that building, which overlooked the plaza and the crowd of about 60,000 or so fans; all told, the parade drew perhaps a half-million folks into downtown Portland.

The players were introduced. Bill Walton! Maurice Lucas! Terry Gross! Lionel Hollins! All of them took their bows. Head coach Jack Ramsay said a few words.

Then I looked across the platform where I was standing and noticed another familiar figure. He was all alone.

It was Stu Inman. And who is this man? Oh, he was just the guy who built the team that was being honored below. Inman was the general manager of the Blazers. He negotiated the deals that signed Walton, Lucas and the others who had just brought much glory to the city.

Why wasn’t he down there, soaking up the love that was being thrown at the team? I walked over to him, introduced myself — and asked him directly, “Stu, why aren’t you down there?”

“Oh, that’s for someone else,” he said. He wanted the players and the coaches to collect all the adulation. It wasn’t his thing, he said.

Fair enough. I thanked him, congratulated him and said so long.

Humble. That’s the word that comes to mind today as I look back on that man and that time.

I’m trying to imagine: Do you think Dallas Cowboys owner/general manager Jerry Jones would stay away?