Marty Blake, director of scouting for the NBA, has been involved in basketball for most of his life. He
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| Marty Blake has worked in baseball, football and boxing, but most of his history is in hoops. |
helped found the Continental Basketball Association in 1946, when it was known as the Eastern League. He was general manager of the NBA’s Hawks franchise when it was located in Milwaukee and St. Louis, during which time the team won eight division titles (and the NBA championship in 1957-58). Since 1971, Marty Blake and Associates has been providing scouting and consulting services to clients around the globe.
Blake’s résumé is not exclusively basketball, nor scouting. His baseball and promotional experience includes service with the Cleveland Indians, Detroit Tigers and New York Giants. He worked for the Detroit Lions and the Wilkes-Barre (Pa.) Bullets of the American Football League. In addition, he handled PR duties for Sugar Ray Robinson, Joey Chitwood and the Harlem Globetrotters.
Blake spoke recently about his experiences with SportsBusiness Journal New York bureau chief Jerry Kavanagh.
Your sports background is not limited to basketball. You worked in baseball, football and boxing.
Blake: I did a lot of things in a lot of sports because I couldn’t play any of them.
You’ve been scouting basketball players for, what, 50 years?
Blake: A little more than that. I was working for Eddie White, who was the owner of a minor league basketball team called the Wilkes-Barre Barons. They were in the Eastern League, which later became the CBA. I used to go to the games and I kept score. Eddie, in the 1940s — when I was in high school — had a semipro team that would play all over Pennsylvania. He’d bring in some of the great touring teams, like the New York Renaissance and the House of David and teams like that. He paid a pretty good fee and he always had ballplayers who floated in and out from out of town. One night, the scorekeeper didn’t show up. So he knew me, and I was sitting up in the stands with my scorecard, and he said he could use a scorekeeper and paid $5 a game, and that’s how I got hooked into minor league basketball.
When did you move on to major league basketball?
Blake: I joined the NBA in 1954. I was going to be the public relations director for the Milwaukee Hawks. I had the experience working for Wilkes-Barre. I donated my services to the CBA for many years as the director of scouting. When I got to Milwaukee, I called Donald Davidson, who was the PR director for the Hawks, and asked him to leave me a ticket. Up in the press box, Red Holzman, who was coaching Milwaukee at the time, wandered in and said, “You’re not due for a couple of days.”
“Well,” I said, “I came to meet the staff.”
So he took me in the men’s room and told me to look in the mirror. “You are the staff,” he said. Red was the coach and I was the PR director and the business manager and everything else.
What was behind the move from Milwaukee to St. Louis?
Blake: The Hawks were virtually bankrupt. It’s interesting that after my first year in Milwaukee, I believe [the owner] would have sold the team for under $100,000. The best offer he had — and that was with players like Bob Pettit, Charlie Share, Bob Harrison, Alex Hannum and Lew Hitch — was from a group in Indianapolis for between $50,000 and $70,000.
The team moved to St. Louis because there was some interest there. We used to
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| Blake crossed paths with the Globetrotters earlier, and both are still going strong. |
take games on the road there. We played preliminary games for the Globetrotters. We played Boston in a regular-season game at the arena in St. Louis. I’d go in and promote the game in addition to all my other duties, and we drew about 7,000 or 8,000 people.
We had an opportunity to go into St. Louis. They formed a committee and offered us a thousand season tickets and a TV-radio deal. The team had been last in Milwaukee eight straight years. So we moved the team to St. Louis. By that time, I was trying to line up a bunch of contacts all over the U.S. and scouting. We made a deal to get Ed Macauley and Cliff Hagan from Boston in ’56. The next thing I know, we win five straight Western Division titles and beat Boston in ’58.
You mentioned handling promotions. Tell me about that.
Blake: I used to book exhibition games for a good many of the NBA teams. We played 20 exhibition games a year. And then I started to take a page when I was GM of the Hawks in St. Louis from Bill Veeck, who I had worked for, and we brought in name bands. We had every big jazz band, from Duke Ellington to Woody Herman to Stan Kenton and Count Basie, every year, and Louis Armstrong and Guy Lombardo and on and on. St. Louis became a happening, not only a basketball game. We brought in Emmett Kelly every Sunday for seven games. We brought in Paul Hahn, a great trick-shot artist, two or three times a year.
Fast forward to the present. The draft is a big day for NBA teams …
Blake: It’s carried in so many countries all over the world. What David Stern has done with international basketball has triggered a phenomenon — that’s the only way to describe it. Now the NBA has something called “Basketball Without Borders,” in which NBA people go into every country in the world and help young people.
How far has scouting come in the last 50 years?
Blake: Years ago, nobody scouted. We didn’t have the funds. My first trip scouting in 1954, I paid my own way by bus to Fort Leonard Wood in Missouri to see Al Bianchi, who later became an NBA player and general manager of the Knicks, and Sam Jones playing in an Army tournament. And I never got my $28 back.
All of the GMs doubled as scouts. And a lot of times when we would get together on the draft, especially if we went deep into the rounds, people would come up to me and ask for heights and weights on a particular player. And you’d try to help.
If we had a good year, my owner would let me film three or four games. Today, you have NBA teams that have literally a whole floor for computer technology with international film units, where you get films from all over the world. And everybody has scouts, and very, very good scouts in Europe.
What kind of service do you offer to the NBA teams?
Blake: Now at least the teams have big staffs. What we do is provide them with a lot of information. We tell them where to go, who to see, which players we feel have the opportunity to develop quicker. We put out a briefing book of 100 or so players. In the fall, we put out roster sheets of every Division I team, outlining who the top players that we feel they should see.
With all the players you have seen over the years, are there any whose development you have taken particular satisfaction in?
Blake: I’ll tell you a story. There was a player by the name of J.P. Lovelady, who played at Arkansas Tech. I wanted to bring him in. I always felt he would be a player in the mold of Jerry Sloan. But he was killed in an automobile accident. I happened to be in touch with one of their players, Arch Jones. He called me years later, mentioned how nice I was regarding Lovelady. (I had sent flowers and so forth, but I don’t want to get into that.)
So he said, “I’m the assistant coach now in Central Arkansas and we’ve got a guy here. He’s a little older, but I think he’s a great player.” Now, the one thing we do, we have to follow every lead. There was a game where Central Arkansas was playing against Southern Miss, and the player, Scottie Pippen, gets 37 points. So I brought him to Portsmouth [an invitational camp for top college seniors], and 10 minutes after he played at Portsmouth, everybody was coming to shake my hand. But you’ve got to understand that [the Chicago Bulls’] Jerry Krause made the deal for Pippen. He picked seventh. Portland was going to take Pippen sixth. And Seattle took Pippen fifth and traded him to Krause for Olden Polynice.
Among the players drafted this year, are there any we should keep an eye on? Not necessarily the big-name guys, but perhaps a lesser-known talent?
Blake: I think Luke Jackson of Oregon is terrific. He’s not an unknown player. And Beno Udrih, who was drafted 28th by San Antonio.
Look for more of this conversation in our sister publication, The Sports Business Daily, located at www.sportsbusinessdaily.com.
