by Mirin Fader
Henning’s parents were season-ticket holders in the early 1970s, sitting in the second row behind the basket, back when the Bucks played at the MECCA. With superstars like Abdul-Jabbar and Oscar “Big O” Robertson, the Bucks were thrilling. Henning’s dad, Randall Henning, owned a Volkswagen shop, MoFoCo Enterprises, and he happened to work on custom seats for several of Abdul-Jabbar’s cars—a Rolls-Royce, Jaguar, and Mercedes-Benz, among others—cutting and welding seats far back to fit his seven-foot-two frame so his knees wouldn’t rest against the steering wheel.
Once, Abdul-Jabbar picked up McGlocklin in his Cadillac Fleetwood, “a car as long as a block,” McGlocklin recalls. When McGlocklin got into the car, he turned to talk to Abdul-Jabbar, but all he saw was his teammate’s legs. McGlocklin cranked his neck back, seeing that Abdul-Jabbar had taken the back seat out in order to move his seat all the way back.
Abdul-Jabbar never fit in: in hotels, he had to put a chair at the end of the bed to catch his feet. Showerheads seemed to hit him at his belly. But he was a generational player whose creativity, grace, dominance, and finesse transformed the game. His dunks, his unstoppable skyhook, were innovative. He handled the ball like a guard, and no one had seen anything like him before. “He is as close to a meld of Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell as you can be and remain human,” Sports Illustrated wrote in 1969.
That year, Abdul-Jabbar, then Lew Alcindor, was to be drafted out of UCLA, and the Bucks had a chance to land him in just its second year of operation since restarting its franchise after the Hawks had left fourteen years earlier.
It was an uphill battle to even bring basketball back to Milwaukee. Marvin Fishman, one of the team’s original owners, wasn’t even thinking about basketball at first. The Milwaukee native who made his money in real estate was originally trying to bring a professional football team to Milwaukee. But negotiations fizzled, since, as he later put it in his book, Bucking the Odds, “Milwaukee had spent a year sucking its thumb and holding on for dear life to the Packers.”
Knowing that Alcindor’s draft prospects loomed on the horizon, Fishman moved on to bringing hoops back to Milwaukee, steeling himself against a counterargument he often heard: “Milwaukee isn’t a big-time basketball city. If the Hawks couldn’t make it here, why should anyone think another pro basketball team could make it here?”
But he bought a four-dollar one-way Greyhound ticket to Chicago to try to convince J. Walter Kennedy, the NBA commissioner at the time, that the NBA needed a franchise in Milwaukee. And he succeeded. “I was delighted!” Fishman wrote. “What a coup this little Milwaukee group had pulled on the big time sports people!” Still, reporters asked him, “Do you really think you can cut it in pro basketball? You didn’t do much in baseball.” This was the chance Fishman had been waiting for to prove that Milwaukee was a basketball city.
Alcindor, however, made it known his preference was to play in a big market: New York or Los Angeles. Not a smaller city like Milwaukee. Kennedy flipped a coin—a 1964 Kennedy half-dollar—into the air to determine where Alcindor, the obvious number 1 pick in the 1969 draft, would go. The Suns and Bucks were vying because of their dreadful records the previous season. The winner would get Alcindor. Jerry Colangelo, Phoenix Suns GM, called it a “monumental, once-in-a-lifetime flip of a coin.”
John Erickson, Bucks general manager; Wes Pavalon, principal owner of the Bucks; and Fishman sat in the Bucks office on Seventh Street and Wisconsin Avenue on the morning of March 19, 1969, anxiously awaiting a phone call from Kennedy with the results of the flip. The three men brought good-luck charms: Erickson, who couldn’t sit still, wore a kibbutz medal his wife had brought from Israel; Pavalon, who was chain-smoking cigarettes, wore a Saint Christopher medal that he called his “Italian good luck piece”; and Fishman kept a Winston Churchill silver dollar tucked in his left shoe. They were all praying, audibly enough that Fishman was sure others could hear them.
The Suns went with “heads” based on a fan poll. The toss went tails. The Suns were demoralized, the Bucks elated. So elated that Pavalon jumped up and accidentally jammed his cigarette into Erickson’s right ear when he was about to hug him. It stung, but Erickson laughed it off: “I didn’t care, once we had Lew,” Erickson told Sports Illustrated in 1970.
Eddie Doucette, the Bucks’ iconic broadcaster, describes the feeling in that room as a sense of “euphoria.” “It was like somebody had turned the lights on. It was a magical moment,” Doucette says. “It lit the city up. Everybody was crazy: ‘We’re going to get Lew Alcindor, the greatest basketball player of our time, coming to Milwaukee!’
“It gave the city an identity,” Doucette says. “The Milwaukee Bucks hoisted the city on its shoulders when they drafted Lew.”
They also had coach Larry Costello, a basketball mastermind who always kept a yellow legal pad to jot down notes. “He was extremely old school,” says Mickey Davis, who played for the Bucks from 1972 to 1976. Costello would send players a five-page document of the drills they needed to practice to be in shape for training camp, like running a mile in five and a half minutes. And he’d include a test in every playbook; those who got the highest marks would play, he’d tell his players.
Alcindor ended up helping the Bucks win twenty-nine more games than they had the previous season, and ticket prices increased from five to seven dollars, but the Bucks fell to the Knicks in game 5 of the 1970 Eastern Division Finals. Alcindor left the floor in New York with fans taunting him, singing, “Goodbye, Lewie; goodbye, Lewie; goodbye, Lewie; we’re glad to see you go.” That was painful, given that Alcindor was born in Manhattan.
He was determined to come back to New York for revenge, as he told Erickson that night: “We’ll be back, Mr. Erickson.” The next day, the Bucks traded for Robertson, ten-time NBA All-Star, who brought his particular kind of leadership. Sometimes if a player wasn’t where he was supposed to be, Robertson would throw the ball where the player was supposed to be. It would roll out of bounds, and Robertson would just glare at the player.
The next season, with Robertson in place, plus sharpshooters McGlocklin and Bob Dandridge, the team felt confident. “We knew we were going to win it,” McGlocklin says. “Even though we knew the Knicks were still pretty good, we just knew it was our year.”
The Bucks finished the 1971 regular season 66–16, beating the San Francisco Warriors and Los Angeles Lakers and, finally, sweeping the Baltimore Bullets in four to win the championship. Milwaukee had proven to the skeptics that it belonged in the big leagues. That basketball could succeed in Milwaukee.
Alcindor, who legally changed his name to Abdul-Jabbar in fall 1971, after converting to Islam in 1968, was named league MVP and Finals MVP. “You know,” Robertson said, clutching a champagne bottle in the locker room afterward, “this is the first champagne I’ve ever had, and it tastes mighty sweet. We won the title in high school, but it was soft drinks then. This is the big leagues, man.”
Some of his teammates were less demonstrative. Abdul-Jabbar was drinking a Coke and chewing gum before finally having a small glass of champagne. The lack of exhilaration was probably due to the fact that, as guard Lucius Allen told Sports Illustrated at the time, “people expect us to win.”
When asked about building a Milwaukee dynasty, Abdul-Jabbar said, “I don’t know about dynasties, but right now we’re on top of the world.”
There were no parades then, but about ten thousand fans crowded the airport when the team returned from Baltimore, blocking the exiting players. It took four policemen to escort McGlocklin and his wife and son to their car. But once they were safely inside, fans mobbed the car, pressing their faces against the windows. McGlocklin was afraid to drive, for fear of running someone over. “It went from exhilarating to scary,” he says. “We were trapped.” Somehow he managed to drive over a curb and a lawn to escape.
Abdul-Jabbar solidified his reputation as the best player in the world, but he shied away from media. He was perceived as being standoffish, cold. His teammates
knew a different side: Abdul-Jabbar was quite funny, often playing pranks on people. “You had to be on the lookout for him,” says Terry Driscoll, who played for the Bucks from 1972 to 1974.
One afternoon, returning to what was then known as General Mitchell Field Airport after a road game, players met up with wives and children who came to pick them up. Unbeknownst to Pam McGlocklin, Jon’s wife, Abdul-Jabbar had put their toddler son on top of a tall locker that no one but Abdul-Jabbar could reach. Abdul-Jabbar just laughed and laughed before finally pulling the kid down.
“He did have that side to him, that side he didn’t want the world to see,” McGlocklin says. But he wasn’t happy in Milwaukee. On October 3, 1974, over a dinner of beef wellington, red wine, and assorted cheeses in a suite at the Sheraton Hotel in downtown Milwaukee, Abdul-Jabbar told executives he no longer wanted to play in Milwaukee.
He wanted to be in a larger city that was more in tune with him culturally, with Black culture, with Islam. With jazz. “I’m not criticizing the people here,” Abdul-Jabbar told the New York Times in 1975, “but Milwaukee is not what I’m all about. The things I relate to aren’t in Milwaukee.”
He never grew to like the cold. He had a window in his home that faced north, and he kept the curtains closed. But one day, he opened the window and was greeted by a solid sheet of ice.
He faced racism on a daily basis. Every day brought new microaggressions: people would stare and gawk at him, as if he were an exotic animal. “Live in Milwaukee? No, I guess you could say I exist in Milwaukee,” Abdul-Jabbar said earlier in his career. “I am a soldier hired for service, and I will perform that service well. Basketball has given me a good life, but this town has nothing to do with my roots.”
His tone grew harsher. The media felt he was distant, rude. He described the city as merely “where I work.” The reaction was swift: “Everybody in Milwaukee was mad as hell,” Chuck Johnson, former sports editor of the Milwaukee Journal, told the Los Angeles Times. “He had put down the city.”
When Abdul-Jabbar was traded to the Lakers in 1975, in one of the most monumental trades in NBA history, something fundamentally changed in Milwaukee. The trauma of losing not just the city’s star player but a generational player, after having achieved unimaginable success, was brutal. It hurt. Some felt insulted. Bitter. We’re not good enough for you? We’re too small for you?
He had been the city’s hope. And now he was gone. “Everybody was devastated,” Doucette says. “They thought, How are we going to make up for this? But people became understanding of the fact that life changes.” They tried to get excited about the fantastic players they were getting, like Junior Bridgeman and Dave Meyers.
The Bucks would still go on to win multiple Central Division titles, led by Moncrief’s stellar play, Paul Pressey’s poise, and Don Nelson’s never-back-down approach to coaching. Those Bucks teams were formidable. And fun: they played disco music in the locker room. Nelson sported his trademark fish ties.
The Bucks battled. Seemed like they were always on the cusp of greatness, especially in duels against the Celtics, though they oftentimes came up short. Those games were intense. In 1983, Celtics president and former coach Red Auerbach told reporters, “This is the first time I’ve ever lost a series that I won’t go to the winners’ dressing room. If it’s the last thing I do, I’ll get back at the Bucks.”
Every game felt like an event at the MECCA. Games often sold out. Pop artist Robert Indiana painted the court bright yellow in 1977. It was not exactly a popular move at the time, as it cost $27,500, a price that the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel said should result in “something akin to the ceiling in the Sistine Chapel.”
It was so bright that Nelson said at first he thought he had to wear sunglasses to see.
“It was so unique and peculiar,” says Andy Gorzalski, longtime Bucks fan and producer of MECCA, the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary about the building. He would later put down a whopping $20,000 on his credit card to protect the iconic court. “You would think hiring a pop artist to do the court would happen in New York or Los Angeles,” Gorzalski says, “but no, it happened in a Rust Belt place.”
No other NBA court was as cool, as flamboyant, the effect highlighted by the fact that it was dark inside the building and the ceiling was low. Fans sometimes left the MECCA with gum stuck to the bottoms of their shoes—but that court. Those colors! It was incomparable. And it made sense: the Bucks had to do something to stand out since they still had the smallest venue in the league.
Former Bucks swingman Marques Johnson remembered when the Lakers would travel to town, his buddies Norm Nixon and Jamaal Wilkes, the epitome of Hollywood, would stroll into freezing Milwaukee with fur coats, cowboy boots, and fancy caps. “We just knew that if we jumped on ’em early, and really put the pressure on ’em early,” Johnson told CBS Sports, “they’d be ready to get back to the warm weather in a hurry.”
Seats were so close you felt like you could touch players. “I always remember such a warmness when I was there,” Henning says. The Bucks had a section where fans could sit with favorite players and take pictures. “I still have my Polaroid,” says Sharonda Robinson, Milwaukee native. “Dave Meyers, Junior Bridgeman, Brian Winters. I loved, loved that team.”
The MECCA was formerly the Milwaukee Arena, a lackluster red brick venue thought to resemble an old train station. It accomodated just 11,052 fans, the smallest arena in the NBA, but “it was booming,” Doucette says. “It was the most electric place in the city at that time.” But because it was so small, Jim Fitzgerald, Bucks owner, put the team up for sale in 1985. “This team couldn’t be kept in town by any sane person unless there were more seats,” Fitzgerald told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that year. But Fitzgerald was adamant that someone from Milwaukee purchase the team and keep it in Milwaukee: “We feel this is where they belong.”
Milwaukee needed a new arena. Jobs in the city were dwindling, the economy in tatters. Wisconsinites worked hard, but opportunity always seemed just out of reach. An exciting new venue could help, but politics and bureaucracy often stood in the way. Milwaukee mayor Henry Maier seemed averse to helping fund an arena. He maintained that the city didn’t have any money to do so. Once pressed for action to save the Bucks, he quipped, “It’s not the end of the earth if they leave.”
Fans were losing hope. Again.
Meanwhile, Kohl eyed the franchise. The Milwaukee native, whose family owned a chain of department stores, Kohl’s, loved hoops. He was a regular at Marquette basketball games. He was one of the original ten investors in the Brewers too, as he is a childhood friend of Bud Selig.
When Kohl eventually bought the Bucks and maintained that he was committed to keeping the team in Milwaukee, reporters called it a “miracle,” an end to the “hysteria.”
Leaving, leaving, leaving.
Kohl understood that sentiment: “We couldn’t afford to lose them,” he said at his introductory press conference. “Psychologically and economically, it would have been a disaster.” How he’d get a new arena to replace the MECCA, though, was a mystery. But then a local couple, Jane Pettit and her husband, Lloyd Pettit, announced they’d donate $90 million toward the construction of a new arena, naming it the Bradley Center after Jane’s father, Harry L. Bradley. “It doesn’t cure the city’s financial problems,” Selig said at the time, “but it certainly gives it a boost sociologically and psychologically.”
But the arena, completed in 1988, couldn’t change the fact that the Bucks were… horrible. The 1990s were brutal. Attendance plummeted. “The Bucks were just giving tickets away,” says Andy Carpenter, longtime Bucks fan. “It really sucked how bad they were all the time. The pain was very deep. It almost seemed systemic.”
In the words of Vin Baker, Bucks all-star, after the team had lost twelve of the last fifteen games during 1997—a particularly awful season where the Bucks were on pace to miss the playoffs for the sixth straight season—“Lots of expectations and no results.”
But fan
s continued to love their team, always loving their team. “You had to really be a fan to watch; you had to really love basketball to support Milwaukee,” says one such fan, Matthew Smith.
Another fan, Jim Kogutkiewicz, learned how die-hard Bucks fandom was, growing up on the south side of Milwaukee watching games with his grandmother. When a Bucks player missed the free throw that could have won the game, his grandmother smacked her fist in her hand, shouting, “You gotta make your free throws!”
Once Kogutkiewicz got to high school, in the 1990s, during peak Bucks malaise, he wore an Air Jordan shirt to school, and his friend, a fellow Bucks fan, scolded him for selling out: “Real nice fuckin’ shirt.” The Bulls were beloved; the Bucks were mocked. “Other NBA cities think we should just be grateful that we let other stars come here and kick our team’s ass,” Kogutkiewicz says. “That we should just be thankful we have a team.”
That changed in 2001, as Ray Allen, Glenn Robinson, Sam Cassell, and coach George Karl turned the Bucks into a winning team again. Milwaukee played a high-octane offense that was exciting. Fun. Players were trigger-happy; anyone could get hot. “Light It Up,” the team’s rap anthem that year, would blast through the Bradley Center:
“Yeaaaaah, yeeeah, yeaaaah, yeaaaaaaah. Milwaukee! Milwaukee! Milwaukee! Milwaukee! The word around town is we’re lightin’ it up, so who’s gonna win it? The Bucks, the Bucks! Straight from the Central Division, the team that’s swishin, runnin,’ and dishin’, the Bucks on a mission!”