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Matt Love
RED HOT AND ROLLIN'
A Retrospection of the Portland Trail Blazers' 1976-77 Championship Season
Introduction
Click on photos to enlarge.
Portland, Oregon
June 5, 1977
On a Sunday afternoon Portland radio play-by-play broadcaster Bill Schonely sat courtside in Memorial Coliseum ready to call the closing seconds of Game Six of the NBA Championship Series between the Portland Trail Blazers and Philadelphia 76ers. The Blazers led one hundred and nine to one hundred and seven, three games to two in the best-of-seven affair, and verged on winning the franchise's first crown. They also verged on becoming the youngest team ever to win a title and only the second team in league history to earn a championship after losing the opening two games of the finals.
Philadelphia would inbound the ball deep in Portland's end. A few seconds earlier, the NBA's superstar player, Julius Erving, the fabulous Dr. J, had blown a wide-open fifteen-foot jumper that would have tied the score and possibly sent the game into overtime. Philadelphia's Lloyd Free had rebounded Erving's miss and launched a short fade-away prayer from the baseline that Portland's Bobby Gross had blocked out of bounds.
Five seconds to go. Time enough for one last 76er chance.
Nearly thirteen thousand fans-Blazermaniacs as they were called-all came to their feet, zealous in support and worship of their team to a degree that appalled the jaded sportswriters from back East accustomed to some reserve, even cynicism from professional basketball fans. Really, what was one to make of the fact that seven hundred and eighty-one residents from the Willamette Valley farming community of Woodburn sent a telegram of well wishes to the Blazers on the eve of Sunday's game? Or that a female folk musician performed a song she wrote called "Rip City USA" around town? Or that a father counted among the thirteen thousand when his only daughter was graduating from high school a few miles away? Or that five thousand fans showed up at Portland's airport at four a.m. to welcome the team home after beating Philadelphia on the road in Game Five? Or that at least one Oregon grandmother shaped and baked gingerbread cookies that resembled her favorite Blazers? Or that the state's newspapers referred to the Blazers' fortunes imperatively in the first person plural. (We'll win it today!) They didn't do that sort of thing in New York.
But this was Portland, a provincial city of roughly three hundred and fifty thousand and home to only one major professional sports franchise, and a relatively new one at that (1970). Reserve and cynicism did not exist in the Coliseum that afternoon, nor had it with the Blazermaniacs at any point during an improbable playoff run that saw defeats over the Chicago Bulls, Denver Nuggets, and a stunning sweep of the Los Angeles Lakers in the Western Conference Finals that included Blazer center Bill Walton's legendary jam over Laker center Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Reserve? Oregonians had lost their minds! They fashioned homemade Blazer t-shirts. They decorated their houses and places of work. They dressed up for games, even if they didn't hold a ticket.
The playoff run also featured the unlikely comeback against the 76ers, galvanized by Portland forward Maurice Lucas coldcocking Darryl Dawkins from behind late in the fourth quarter of the Game Two blowout loss in the Spectrum after Dawkins took a swing at Blazer forward Bobby Gross. Lucas' roundhouse punch ignited a brawl but it also ignited something else. Portland won the next three games, including Game Five in Philadelphia, and now needed one defensive stop to become NBA Champions.
Schonely's call:
Philadelphia ball. Five seconds to go...Free will inbound. Here we go. The inbound to McGinnis. Drives, stops, pumps, shoots, short, no good! AND THE GAME IS OVER! THE GAME IS OVER!
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Blazermaniacs in the Coliseum went nuts, as did thousands of fans elsewhere in Portland and all across the state. "You can feel it all over," sang Stevie Wonder, in the chorus of "Sir Duke," his smash hit that served as the unofficial Blazer anthem and reached number one on the Billboard singles chart the very day Portland won it all.
"The whole of Oregon has gone bananas," as one sportswriter put it. A few minutes after the horn sounded, the Portland Police closed the Broadway Bridge for two hours as fans swigging from champagne bottles congregated there. At the same time, bedlam reigned in the Blazer locker room, although those watching on television would never see the full picture of the pandemonium because CBS cut away to its final round coverage of a generic golf tournament, the Kemper Open.
What did it all mean to us? What did it mean for Oregon? What was it like to get caught up in Blazermania? What was it like in Rip City? What was it about that basketball team that captivated us? How did they win?
These questions have remained in my mind for many years. I was an Oregonian residing in one of the ninety-six percent of Oregon households that watched the Blazers on television that glorious Sunday afternoon. Like many other purists, I turned off CBS' annoying broadcast team of Brent Musberger and Rick Barry to hear Schonely's immortal call.
In 1977, I was thirteen years old and living in Oregon City, twelve miles south of Portland. The good social disease known as Blazermania had infected me. Many people were similarly afflicted. I will never forget the moments after McGinnis missed, when Walton soared for the rebound, tipped the ball to a streaking Johnny Davis, the horn sounded, and the Blazers reigned as the World Champions. When this all went down, you could hear a low roar throughout my neighborhood and several minutes later, a few people, kids and adults, ventured outside on a suburban street to act out an unscripted celebration, unlike, say, the Fourth of July.
How had the Blazers done it against the vaunted, superstar-laden 76ers? Or for that matter, how had they even qualified for the playoffs? Heretofore, the franchise had never posted a winning record and the 1976 league merger with the American Basketball Association promised even tougher competition for the upcoming season.
In the off season, led by General Manager Harry Glickman, the Blazer front office hired a new coach, Jack Ramsay, the team's fifth head coach in six years. Glickman didn't stop cleaning house at the top. He traded away the Blazers' two leading scorers from 1975-76, Sidney Wicks and Geoff Petrie, and brought in seven new players, five with no previous NBA experience.
That made for uncertainty enough, but the physical condition of oft-injured center Bill Walton represented the biggest unknown for the team. Walton, the number one pick in the 1974 draft, who as a rookie had signed the most lucrative player contract ever in professional team sports, had never lived up to expectations. He played in just eighty-six of one hundred and sixty-four games his first two seasons and earned the enmity of the media and fans because of his perceived malingering, left-wing political associations, and unconventional lifestyle, including wearing his long red hair in a ponytail. Such was the animus directed at Walton from all fronts that he seriously considered giving up professional basketball during the second year of his career.
But Walton did not quit. Ramsay met with him and most of the players over the summer and shared his philosophy of unselfish team basketball and the wisdom and superiority of a fast break offense. Something implicit must have come together during training camp held at Willamette University in Salem, because it quickly manifested itself on the court once the regular season began. The Blazers won seven of their first eight games, the best start in franchise history, and kept on winning games, most in a fast break, team-oriented style that often destroyed opponents and stood in contrast to the flashier one-on-one play popular around the NBA.
The Blazers finished the 1976-77 regular season with a forty-nine and thirty-three record, second place behind the Los Angeles Lakers in the Western Conference's Pacific Division. Walton stayed relatively healthy and missed only seventeen games. Six players averaged double figures in scoring. Another one averaged more than nine, another eight. The Blazers weren't much of a road team, winning only fourteen out of forty-one games, but inside the Coliseum they posted a thirty-five and six record.
Then came the playoffs, exponentially expanding fan delirium, and an awareness by all sentient Oregonians that something unique was happening in Portland and all across Oregon as the Blazers culminated their Title run with Sunday's vanquishing of the 76ers. The next day, a victory parade - if parade is the word - made its way through downtown and climaxed at a rally at Terry Schrunk Plaza. An estimated two hundred and fifty thousand fanatics attended the spectacle and it became the largest public gathering in Oregon history, topping the number who took to Portland's streets to celebrate the end of World War II on V-J Day. The day after the madness ended, a fan wrote a letter to the Oregonian. "I would suggest that something larger is taking place which carries impact beyond the momentary Title at stake." I agree. But what was that something 'larger?'
For me, the answer to the question begins with the fast break, arguably the most beautiful play in all of team sports. I can still see the Blazers execute their version of the fast break with sheer fluid perfection. It's no exaggeration to claim that the Blazers circa 1976-77 ran the fast break better than any other team in the history of professional basketball. They destroyed opponents with it.
Can you see it still? Can you dream it still? Can you live it in the present tense?
Walton soars high for a rebound. He snares it easily because he's boxed out two players. He rifles an outlet pass before even touching the hardwood, in fact, before even reaching the zenith of his jump. Hollins or Davis catch the pass in full stride and push the ball hard up the middle. A Blazer sets a back screen to free up some space. Gross and Lucas or Twardzik and Neal fly down the wings. Nobody wants to run with them. This is the NBA, not high school ball. There might be two dribbles, three at most. A Blazer scores on a layup, probably uncontested. The whole fast break sequence takes all of five seconds.
Just five seconds. But for me, and many others, it was nothing evanescent. And that's why thirty years later, I conceived the book Red Hot and Rollin': A Retrospection on the Portland Trail Blazers' 1976-77 Championship Season. I simply felt compelled to return to this monumental cultural event and, with the help of some of Oregon's finest writers, try to ascertain what it all meant…means.
Sounds of a championship season.
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