When the Bulls came into being in 1966, Chicago
had already been home to half a dozen failed and forgotten pro basketball franchises.
The Tigers, featuring George Halas as owner and head coach, had survived from
1927 to 1929. They were followed by the Duffy Florals, the Studebakers, the
American Gears, and the Stags. As recently as 1963, Chicago
had lost its two-year-old NBA franchise, the Zephyrs, to Baltimore.
Chicago was, in the
words of The Sporting News, “long regarded
as the burial grounds of professional basketball.” In 1947, the American Gears
won the championship of the National Basketball League, while the Stags were runners-up
for the Basketball Association of America title. Chicagoans yawned.
Both the Gears and the Stags were defunct by 1950.
The National Basketball Association, formed by the merger of the two earlier
leagues, did not see fit to grant Chicago
another franchise until 1961, when the Packers were born. Their 6-foot-11
center Walt Bellamy was Rookie of the Year, but the Packers finished 18-62 and
didn’t draw flies to their home games at the International Amphitheatre. Owner
Dave Trager announced that the franchise would move to Baltimore as soon as the promised new arena
there was ready. That turned out to be not as soon as he had thought. The team
remained in Chicago the next season, changing its name to the Zephyrs and playing its
home games in the Coliseum—the ancient building that had been forsaken by the
Blackhawks more than 30 years before. The Zephyrs improved slightly, to 25-55,
and featured another Rookie of the Year, forward Terry Dischinger, but few
people noticed and fewer cared when the team packed its bags after the season.
Along came Dick Klein, a former player for Northwestern University
and the Gears who believed that an NBA franchise could not only survive but
flourish in Chicago.
First, he tried to purchase the Zephyrs to prevent their move to Baltimore. When that
effort failed, he began campaigning for an expansion team and rounding up
investors. “He was a P.T. Barnum-type guy,” said Johnny “Red” Kerr. “He could
sell anything to anybody.”
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DICK KLEIN, AL BIANCHI, JOHNNY KERR
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Selling the NBA on Chicago was the greatest challenge of Klein’s
career as a salesman. The league was in a bad way itself. It had no national
television contract, NBC having bailed out in 1962, and had little inclination
to try another Chicago
experiment. The owners of the nine existing clubs informed Klein that he could
get a franchise for $600,000, which was at least $400,000 more than he could
muster. Klein formally applied for a franchise on April 11, 1963, neglecting to
enclose the required $100,000 deposit. “I said the check would be forthcoming,”
he recalled. “Later, I learned my telegram had been filed in the wastebasket.”
Then, in 1965, ABC expressed
interest in carrying the NBA’s games. One of its conditions was that the league
place a team in Chicago,
the nation’s second-largest television market. All of a sudden Klein’s quest
seemed less quixotic, and several big investors signed on. But when Klein
reported to NBA commissioner Walter Kennedy that he had gathered the $600,000, he found that the
franchise fee had risen to $750,000. When he returned with $750,000, he was
told the fee was $1 million. By now there were seven or eight other groups competing with Klein’s for the Chicago franchise, and the NBA was taking full advantage of the situation. The fee was ratcheted up yet again, to $1.25 million.All of the prospective owners were summoned to the
league offices in New York
on January 26, 1966. “When I made the presentation,” Klein remembered, “they
asked me what single thing made my group stand out. I said, ‘I have
approximately half a dozen partners, and any one of them could buy the whole
league.’” Klein got the franchise. Employing
a bit of hyperbole to boost its image, the league announced that he had paid
$1.6 million.
Klein wanted a nickname for his team that would
evoke the stockyards and the brawny, big-shoulders character of Chicago. “Chicago had the Bears and
the Sox and the Cubs and the Hawks,” he explained, “all single syllables.” When
he hit upon “Bulls,” Klein knew instantly that he’d found the right name.
He also wanted a strong Chicago connection in his coach. His first
choice was Ray Meyer, whom he could not persuade to leave DePaul University.
He then received a petition on behalf of Kerr, a Chicago
native and former University
of Illinois star who was
just finishing up his playing career. “They had something like 1,600 names,”
Kerr recalled, “but I’m not sure all of them were real. It’s a little like how
they used to register people for voting in Cook County.”
Genuine or not, the petition worked. Kerr was hired.
The Bulls drafted two players from each existing
club in the 1966 expansion draft. Because Kerr and his intended assistant, Al
Bianchi, were technically still active players, both were acquired through the
draft. They promptly retired as players and signed on as coaches. The following
players were the first to become property of the Bulls: Kerr and Jerry Sloan
from Baltimore, Ron Bonham and John Thompson from the Boston Celtics, Nate
Bowman and Tom Thacker from the Cincinnati Royals, John Barnhill and Don Kojis
from the Detroit Pistons, Bob Boozer and Jim King from the Los Angeles Lakers,
Len Chappell and Barry Clemens from the New York Knicks, Bianchi and Gerry Ward
from the Philadelphia 76ers, Jeff Mullins and Jim Washington from the St. Louis
Hawks, and Keith Erickson and McCoy McLemore from the San Francisco Warriors.
Of all these players, only Sloan and Boozer would
make a lasting impression with the Bulls. Thompson retired to go into coaching
and later led Georgetown
University to the NCAA
championship. King and Mullins were traded to the Warriors for point guard Guy Rodgers.
At the Bulls’ first training camp at North Central
College in Naperville, Rodgers and the 14 remaining
players from the expansion draft were joined by nine rookies picked up in the
college draft. The apparent plum of the latter group was Dave Schellhase, who’d
led the nation with 32.5 points per game and had signed a contract for the
considerable sum of $35,000. Unfortunately, it took only a few workouts to show
that Schellhase wouldn’t make it. “He had been a nice player at Purdue,” Kerr
said, “but he didn’t have the size to be a pro forward or the quickness to be a
guard. He came to training camp about 20 pounds overweight and was eaten up by
our veterans.”
The 1966-67 Bulls had 179 season ticket holders,
each of whom paid four dollars per game for a courtside seat at the
Amphitheatre. Their front office “staff” was general manager Klein, marketing
director Jerry Colangelo, public-relations man Ben Bentley, and a receptionist.
The Bulls organized a parade down State
Street to publicize the season opener. It
consisted of two trucks and a car. “The press that came to the parade might
have been giggling,” Klein said, “but at least they were talking about us.”
Klein actually put an ad in the papers calling for
players, and about 180 showed up for an open tryout. Kerr was not amused. “I
told Al [Bianchi] to line them all up against a wall and have them count off by
twos,” he said, “then have the twos go home. We did that, and later on we sent
all the ones home, too.”
The Bulls played
their first game on October 15 at St.
Louis with a starting lineup of Sloan and Rodgers at
guards, Boozer and Kojis at forwards, and Chappell at center. They won 104-97 behind
Rodgers’s 37 points. Three nights later they made their home debut against San Francisco. Newspapers
estimated that the announced crowd of 4,200 was padded by about 1,000. In any
event, the few fans on hand got their money’s worth. The Bulls rallied late to overcome a 13-point deficit and won 119-116. Sloan scored 26 points and Rodgers had 20 assists. The Bulls were young and quick, and they played an
entertaining style built around the fast break. When they won four of their
first five games, Chicagoans sat up and took notice. On October 23, the Bulls
had their first sellout. “We could have sold 30,000 seats that night in a
7,000-seat arena,” Klein asserted. “We let 9,000 in and the fire marshal came
to me and said, ‘Dick, you gotta close the doors.’” Officially, the crowd was
8,472, the largest crowd ever for an NBA game in Chicago up to that time.
“They got people who can’t get into the game,”
said Sloan. “It’s sold out. I thought, ‘My goodness, we’re not that good, are
we?’ We certainly found out that night. The Knicks waxed us pretty good, and
reality started to set in.”
A nine-game losing streak in November and December
dropped the Bulls into last place in the West Division at 8-15. “I remember how
cold it was that first winter,” sportswriter Bob Logan said, “and how small the
crowds were.” The Great Blizzard of ’67 struck in late January, dumping almost
30 inches of snow on the city. On January 29, the Bulls lost to Los Angeles by 20 points
before an announced crowd of 1,077. Klein later admitted that the actual
attendance, “including security guards, was something like 72 people.” Since
the Lakers were stranded in Chicago
after the game, Klein treated them to a steak dinner.
By the end of February, the Bulls were 25-44 and
still mired in last place, three games behind Detroit for the final playoff berth. On March
1, they traveled to Evansville, Indiana, to take on Philadelphia.
(Sloan had played his college ball at Evansville,
and the Bulls played five “home” games there to capitalize on his popularity.)
The 76ers were en route to a 68-13 record and the world championship, but the
Bulls upset them 129-122. The game was a turning point for the Bulls—they won
eight of their last 12 to qualify for the playoffs.
The Amphitheatre’s management did not consider the
NBA playoffs as big an event as the boat show it had already scheduled, so
the Bulls’ postseason home games were relegated to the decrepit Coliseum. The
Bulls were swept by St. Louis
in the first round, with the lone home game drawing a mere 3,739.
The Bulls’ first season was more successful
on the court than at the ticket windows. Their 33-48 mark was the best ever by
a first-year expansion team, and Kerr was selected NBA Coach of the Year. Rodgers
led the league in assists; both he and Sloan were all-stars.
Center Erwin Mueller was named to the all-rookie team.
After the Bulls’ second season, Colangelo left to become general manager of the Phoenix Suns and took Kerr with him as head coach. Klein was forced out as general manager by his fellow investors (“I rubbed a few furs the wrong way,” he remarked), but not before he had hired Dick Motta, the untried young head coach who would work with new GM Pat Williams to build the Bulls team--led by Sloan, Chet Walker, Bob Love, Tom Boerwinkle, and Norm Van Lier--that topped 50 wins for four consecutive seasons beginning in 1970-71 and ensured that the Bulls were here to stay.
“The thing I really feel a little bit of pride
in,” Sloan said many years later, “is the fact that we kept the franchise here. Otherwise it
would have been gone.”
