Rick Barry recalls playing days at Coliseum
October 23, 2009 by MARK HERRMANN / mark.herrmann@newsday.com
Take it from one of the greatest basketball players who ever lived. Rick Barry remembers when poor, dear, old Nassau Coliseum was its own beacon. Long, long before the Lighthouse Project, the Coliseum was filled with hope, if not every imaginable amenity.
And while it never was a palace, it had potential. It sure was a massive upgrade.
“It definitely was better than the Island Garden,” Barry said the other day, thinking back to the time when he was the first great attraction at what was seen as a bold new venue.
Barry played for the Nets and stirred big dreams on opening night, Feb. 11, 1972, when he scored 45 points in a 129-121 American Basketball Association victory over the Pittsburgh Condors before 7,892—capacity at the time because about half the seats weren’t in yet.
The irony now is that Barry, 63, is in better shape than the Coliseum. He still is an intense and successful competitor. This weekend, he will be in Mesquite, Nevada, pounding out massive tee shots with his Krank Golf driver in the 2009 RE/MAX World Long Drive Championships.
“I’m anxious to go out and compete. This has really been great for me to experience that again,” he said from Denver, where he lives and works in TV and several other business ventures. “The thing I missed most in retirement was that I didn’t get those butterflies in my stomach. I like the feeling of really putting myself in front of people with the possibility of failure and embarrassment. It really gets the juices flowing.”
Barry, a Basketball Hall of Famer who played every game as if it were the only one he ever was going to play, doesn’t just compete for the sake of the juices. He plays to win. And he has won. He won the Grand Champion Division of the national long drive contest last year with shots that measured 373, 369, 361, 360. But that division isn’t in the competition this year, so Barry will have to step up to the Super Senior Division, against golfers who are 10 years younger.
It’s just another challenge, not unlike the one he had on his hands in the early 1970s, when he put the ABA Nets on the map and made the fledgling Coliseum a place to be. The Nets caught fire that first season in the new place, three miles east on Hempstead Turnpike from the ramshackle Island Garden. As more and more seats were added, the Nets grew better and better. They were within reach of the title, except they blew a lead late in Game 5 of the finals in Indiana and lost Game 6 in Uniondale.
In the process, the Nets caught people’s fancy in a way that they have rarely—if ever—done since. The Coliseum was the place to be, and it looked like it would stay that way for a long time, what with a hockey team coming in that fall.
Those are classic memories for those of us who witnessed those games and they are Long Island folklore for those who didn’t. It turned out that Barry, having signed a future contract with the National Basketball Association’s Warriors before he was traded to the Nets, reluctantly left New York and the Coliseum never did become a palace.
But it sure would be sad to lose it. No matter where you stand on the Lighthouse, a scaled-down Lighthouse, Charles Wang and Kate Murray, you have to admit that Long Island wouldn’t be the same without it. Heck, a rebuilt Coliseum finally could be the wonderful place that we all envisioned 37 years ago (although let’s hope no one says, as officials did in the Feb. 11, 1972 edition of the New York Times, that it has potential to be “the indoor equivalent of Shea Stadium”).
When he was prodded about that season, Barry remembered “We gave the game away” in Indianapolis and that at the end of warm-ups before Game 6, he “pulled something” and barely could move. “I had to get shot up, just to play,” he said.
Mostly, though, he isn’t sentimental. “I don’t look back. I focus on what I’m doing now,” he said.
That includes pursuing his new love for fishing and hosting fishing programs and other shows for the Outdoor Channel. He organizes fishing trips. His overall golf game isn’t so great—he’s up to a 10 handicap after having been a 1—because he is busy. But he still can hit it long. He is on the staff of Krank Golf, which specializes in drivers for average players.
When he was asked what makes the Krank driver so distinct, he said he really doesn’t want to know. “It’s like driving a car: I just want to get it in and have it go,” he said.
Barry always has been one of the most intriguing characters in American sports. Long Island was lucky to have him, at least for a while. The Coliseum stands as a reminder to that, a reminder that ought to be preserved and refurbished.
There are even some of us who will hold out hope that, until that new arena in Brooklyn actually takes shape, the Nets will someday come back to Long Island and finish what Barry started.
*This article was placed in Newsday by Russ Christ PR.
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