Making Something from Nothing

By Brian McLane

As most know, I spent much of my life in politics.  It was, as I’ve said time and time again, a career I loved because it was so much like sports.  There were two teams and two sides, and almost every time you introduced a piece of legislation, one side won while the other lost.

That said, in politics, at the end of the day you didn’t always have something tangible to show for all your hard work; something you could touch and feel, and something that allowed you to say to that person deep inside you, "Look what I created."

That’s why I've always marveled at those who can come up with an idea and then, somehow, make it real. Sometimes that might result in a successful business or maybe a new building. Sometimes it could end up as a book, or a song, or even a painting.  And sometimes it might lead to something as simple and seemingly inconsequential as a tire swing, a birdhouse, or a child’s snow fort.

I admire, in other words, anyone who can make something where there'd once been nothing.

That’s why I still have such warm memories about an idea I once had so many years ago, an idea I was then able to turn into something tangible and something that, for a brief time anyway, actually mattered to people.

We were called the 7-Up Pros, a semi-pro team comprised of former college ballplayers – a handful of whom had had cups of coffee with various NBA and ABA teams.  I was the Pro’s coach, general manager and, I suppose, founding father.

I love basketball, you see. (And, yes, I’ve said that many times too.) I always have and I always will. But even though I was never able to play the game as a youngster, I always wanted to be around it, if not actually in it.  That’s why as an undergrad I worked for WAER, the S.U. student radio station.  That’s why I’d occasionally do color commentary during broadcasts of Orange home games.  And that’s why I worked briefly at local radio and TV station, WSYR, in their sports department.

Because I’d figured that if I couldn’t play the game, I could least announce it or report on it.

That’s also why I started the Pros. Because, as a twenty-something youngster who’d spent his life in a wheelchair, I’d studied basketball like few others I knew had. Whereas virtually all coaches come from the ranks of former players who were, themselves, coached, I’d never played even a single full-court game in my life.  I'd never been coached, in other words. I’d only watched.  And studied.  And learned.

Even now, I don’t so much cheer at basketball games as I sit there and watch, study and – yes – learn.

So, back in 1971, I started the Pros to compete in a series of local and regional semi-pro tournaments – and I did so as much to create a vehicle for me to coach as I did to give some players I knew around my age a chance to keep playing highly competitive basketball.  Let those guys do what they do best, I figured, and let me do what I sensed I could do better than just about anyone I knew – if, that is, I only had a chance.

And, make no mistake, we were good.  We won more than our share of tournaments and money.  We reflected well on our sponsor. And at one point one local Syracuse sportswriter even suggested the 7-Up Pros might have been the best basketball team in town, at least at that point.

Heck, we even beat the Canadian National Team once, a team coached by Jack Donohue, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s high school coach, and a team that finished just shy of qualifying for the 1972 Summer Olympics.

But all these years later, it’s not about any of those things.  It’s not about the wins and the losses, or the money or the acclaim. For me anyway, it’s about the memories.  It’s about the friends I made and the moments we shared.

It’s about laughing at the time my two guards, Greg “Kid” Kohls and Joe Reddick, in the context of the game and on successive trips down the floor, began competing with each other in an otherwise impromptu game of PIG – matching one another, shot-for-shot, even as they were leading us to victory against a particularly tough team in Toronto.

It’s about recalling the time we were getting our brains beaten out by our biggest rival, in part because one of their guards had gotten hot as hell and was eating us alive, and when Joe told me his friend, Howie Harlow, happened to be in town and was in the stands watching.  And it’s about remembering how I looked up at Howie, a defensive whiz in high school and college, and beckoned him to join us, and how he, in street clothes and borrowed sneakers, then pressed that same guard all over the court and shut him down completely.

It’s about making all those out-of-town trips and being treated after all those hard-fought tourney games with dinner and drinks by the hosting team – both clubs bonding like a bunch of rugby players in some local pub somewhere, telling jokes, swapping stories, and making half-baked promises to do it again someday.

It’s about, all these years later, reflecting on a time when some of the greatest players I ever knew – right in the heat of battle – would actually lean in during a time out to hear my thoughts on what we should do to try to beat the other team.

And it’s about the knowledge that I’d once been so close to the game I love that, for one shining moment, I was no longer the guy just watching from the safety of his seat the stands. I was in the arena and in the fight.  Because, believe me, my friends – and I know what I’m talking about here – all the luxury boxes, season tickets, and front seats in the world can’t hold a candle to being there; in the huddle and on the sidelines, making substitutions, changing defenses, barking at the refs, and fighting like hell for the very guys who were fighting so damn hard for me – for us.

Because, you see, in that one brief but oh-so glorious stretch of my younger days, I was no longer just rooting for a team.  I was – for the first time in my life – on one.  And we Pros were connected in ways that, even now, can make the emotions catch in my throat.

That’s why I love you, Joe Reddick, and Billy Case, and Ed Papworth.  And that’s why I love you and will always treasure our far-too-brief time together, Dave Taylor, Bobby Hughes, and Bill Suprunowicz – to name but a few.

Because every one of us 7-Up Pros back in the day – back when we were younger and freer and so much bolder – were more than just friends, and we did way more than just play hard, break bread, share laughs, and toast to whatever success may have stumbled our way.

We were once teammates. And as God as my witness, even now, you will never know how much that means to me.