Blizzard Knowledge
By Tim Wendel
Sometimes simply being from Buffalo reminds you about the important things in life.
Even though I’ve lived in the Washington, D.C., area for 20 years now, I will always consider myself a Buffalonian. Of 
course, we’re getting nailed by a nasty stretch of weather as I write this. (Silently praying that the power doesn’t go out). At the moment, we’re at two-plus feet and counting.
So, I’ve been trying to impress upon my 17-year-old son the importance of getting out there and doing the shoveling. How the white stuff isn’t going to disappear any time soon. Not this much snow. And how it’s important to help your elderly neighbors clear their driveway, too. Even when their snow blower breaks down.
Tomorrow is the Super Bowl. We were supposed to host old friends from Buffalo, who have resettled in this area. That won’t happen now with the weather. But during the Colts-Saints showdown, I’ll tell my son about the great teams from Buffalo. How Kelly & Co. made the Super Bowl four consecutive seasons, only to come up short. How that remains something to be proud. How that’s an accomplishment to be honored and remembered.
Bills’ franchise doldrums places extra pressure on Gailey
My initial reaction to the Buffalo Bills’ naming Chan Gailey as their new head coach? I flash-backed to Lowell “Cotton” Fitzsimmons.
At first blush the two appear to have little in common. Gailey has an 18-14 record in the NFL, while Fitzsimmons went 832-775 in the NBA.
But as I watch the dysfunctional Bills unravel, I’m reminded of the final season of the Braves in Buffalo, when Fitzsimmons was coach. The team went 3-10 in December, 3-9 in January and 3-10 in February in 1977-1978, en route to a dismal 27-55 record. By that point, season ticket sales, including partial plans, had fallen to 2,400. Soon after the year ended, with a 131-114 defeat to Boston, the Braves left Western New York. With John Y. Brown wheeling and dealing, the franchise was swapped with the Boston Celtics and sent west to become the Los Angeles Clippers.
“I think Buffalo got a raw deal as far as the NBA,” Fitzsimmons told my friend Pete Weber years later. “I enjoyed 
everything Buffalo. What I feel bad about is the franchise … I guess I’ve got to take credit for folding the franchise.”
That brings me back to Chan Gailey. Will he singing the same tune when the Bills leave town? Everyone knows the Bills are in big trouble, seemingly destined to end up in Los Angeles or Toronto or another larger market.
Ironically, if you compare the Braves’ coaches and the Bills’ coaches, the spiral downward is remarkably similar. Both had Hall of Fame coaches, followed by pretenders when the teams desperately needed to win. The Braves’ high-water mark coincided with Jack Ramsay. He was followed by Tates Locke, Bob MacKinnon, Joe Mullaney and Fitzsimmons.
The Bills haven’t been the same since Hall of Famer Marv Levy left after the 1997 season. Those who tried to fill his shoes include Wade Phillips, Gregg Williams, Mike Mularkey, Dick Jauron and now Gailey.
Buffalo fans better pray the Bills’ new guy can make the team competitive. If not, we could be looking at the Braves’ scenario all over again, with Gailey telling us years later how the Niagara Frontier deserved better.
Buffalo State to honor Randy Smith
Before joining the Buffalo Braves as a 7th round courtesy draft pick in 1971, Randy Smith honed his basketball skills at Buffalo State College. Smith also excelled in track and soccer during his tenure with the Bengals and is known as the greatest athlete in the school’s history.
Although details are sketchy, Smith will be honored on February 19th at a ceremony during Buffalo State’s game against Cortland state.
Kiffin’s and Beilein’s career paths provide new meaning to coaching loyalty
by Chris Wendel
Many of us watched is disbelief this week at the surreal scene in Knoxville with Lane Kiffin making the quick exit to LA to replace Pete Carroll at USC. Kiffin’s career path has a Forrest Gump bent to it, parlaying a dismal stay with the Oakland Raiders and a mediocre one season record of 7-6 into a the head coaching spot with USC.
Hidden in the hijinx that ensued with Kiffin this week was the University of Michigan’s announcement that John Beilein signed a long-term contract as the school’s basketball coach. While Kiffin’s departure from Tennessee was ridiculed, some might say that it is no different from Beilein’s job changing pattern.
I bring up Beilein because of his Buffalo area roots. Born and raised in Niagara County’s orchard country (Burt to be exact), Beilein has the distinction of progressing from high school coach to head coach in the Big Ten Conference without ever being an assistant coach.
There is a marked difference between Beilein and Kiffin, however. Since Beilein began coaching in 1976 at Newfane
(N.Y.) H.S.), his average stay at one position is about five years, and it would be fair to say that every school he left had a basketball program that was in better shape then when he arrived.
Kiffin’s one-and-done season at Tennessee could be justified by his narrow window of opportunity to accept his “dream job” at USC, but he has to realize how making that choice radically changes how the press and public view his coaching loyalty. The disarray left in Knoxville and the Vol’s inability to secure Kiffin’s replacement is rivaled only by the Buffalo Bills’ ongoing coaching search.
Somehow I felt that Beilein’s acceptance of a new contract means that he’s in Ann Arbor for the long-term. Time will tell if Michigan made the right choice with Beilein, my hunch is that they did.
Arenas has nothing on Buffalo’s “Bad News” Barnes
By Tim Wendel
Gilbert Arenas bringing at least three guns into the Washington Wizards’ locker room has made headlines nationwide.
That the All-Star guard tried to pass off the incident as a practical joke is quite a reach. Still, any Braves fan knows that Agent Zero has a long way to go before surpassing the antics of one Marvin “Bad News” Barnes.
Old Marvin not only stowed guns in his locker, but he snorted cocaine during games and traveled with hookers on the team plane. He was better suited to be a member of Led Zeppelin or Rick James’ backup band than a professional athlete.
After starring at Providence, where he once sank a record 10 for 10 from the field in the NCAA playoffs, Barnes won rookie of the year honors in the American Basketball Association with the Spirits of St. Louis. Even though his wild lifestyle made him a shadow of his former self, Braves owner John Y. Brown brought him over from the Detroit Pistons (in exchange for John Shumate, Gus Gerard and a high draft pick) for the 1977-1978 season. Of course, this would prove to be the Braves’ last time around the block in Buffalo, and Barnes did his part to push the team over the edge.
More than 15,000 packed Memorial Auditorium for Barnes’ debut with the Braves. Posters of Bad News with the caption, “Buffalo is Marvin’s Gardens” were handed out.
Despite such a promising start, Barnes soon wore out his welcome in Western New York, too. But that didn’t mean there weren’t some tales to tell along the way. One of my favorites comes from Van Miller, the Braves’ play-by-play announcer.
“Marvin Barnes was past his prime by the time he got to the Braves,” Miller once told me. “But that didn’t stop him from still going around in style. Marvin was late pretty much for everything, so one day the team is practicing at a high school in Buffalo and Marvin comes in a half-hour late. But that doesn’t bother him one iota. He walked into that practice with a beautiful woman on each arm. He sat them in the bleachers at this school gym and they waited patiently until practice was over. Afterward Marvin cleaned himself up and then walked out of the joint with one on each arm.”
Last March, Providence College retired Barnes’ jersey, along with the numbers of Jimmy Walker and Ernie DiGregorio, another ex-Brave.
At the ceremony, Barnes joked that while it may take a village to raise a child, in his case it had taken “a whole state, State police, DEA, everyone.”
A Banner Request for the New Year
by Tim Wendel
It was downright heartening to see the Sabres come back against Pittsburgh the other night. Not only did they take down “Sid the Kid” and those annoying Penguins, but they rolled back the clock, so to speak. The victory reminded me of an era when Buffalo teams were offensive juggernauts.
When the Braves were a contender in the mid-1979s, the rap against them was their often-lackluster defense. In fact,
that’s the major lesson coach Jack Ramsay took away from his stint in Western New York.
“Sometimes you have to be able to stop the other team,” he told me decades later when I was putting together Buffalo, Home of the Braves.
To that end, Doctor Jack went looking for a new team with tall timber underneath and he found it in Portland, where he and Bill Walton won a title together.
That’s all well and good, but there’s also something to be said for being able to score. In watching the Bill stumble to the end of another dismal season I grew nostalgic for the old days when they could put up points almost as quickly as the old Braves. One could argue that the Bills of the 1970’s played defense about as well as the Braves did, too. Still, they had playmakers on offense and continued to rack up points pretty much until this current crop came along, which barely put up three points against Atlanta.
When I think about the Braves in their heyday, it’s difficult to differentiate them from the Bills and the Sabres because every team in town could score, seeming at will. You could see Bob McAdoo & Co. put up a bushel load one night and come back to witness the French Connection & Co. do pretty much the same thing the next at that grand old barn of a building called the Aud. OK, the Braves, Bill and Sabres didn’t bring home any titles during those epic runs. But, all in all, it sure was a lot more fun to watch.
Happy New Year, everyone. Thanks for helping make Buffalo, Home of the Braves a reality. Now let’s get a banner to that team raised at HSBC.
30 years later franchsise swap begs for answers
By Tim Wendel
NBA Commissioner David Stern knows how quickly a sport can die, how its very integrity can be called into question. One of his first jobs in 1966, as outside counsel for the NBA, was the Connie Hawkins case. A star of the Brooklyn playgrounds, Hawkins associated with a known gambler, and that was enough to have him blacklisted from the league.
At the time, basketball was still recovering from point-shaving scandals that rocked the game in the 1950s. Top players, such as Kentucky All-Americans Ralph Beard and Alex Groza, were bribed by gamblers to make sure their teams didn’t cover the point spread. The City College of New York — the only team to win the NIT and NCAA titles in the same season – was involved and never returned to prominence.
Today, with former referee Tim Donaghy still making waves for fixing NBA games, commissioner Stern likely cannot help but flash-back to those dark days in the 1950s. Stern realizes as well as anybody how fast a sport can fade away.
Thirty years ago, boxing was on top of the world. Joe Frazier, George Foreman and Muhammad Ali were household names — national heroes. A Saturday night bout was almost certainly water-cooler talk on Monday morning. Now the sport in which they were once kings has become a shell of its former self.
During that sport’s fall from grace, the public often wondered if the fix was in. Too many times what happened in the ring was manipulated — boxers lost fights on purpose; promoters, judges and referees rigged things to favor one party over another.
The recent news of Donaghy reminds me of another time when I wondered if the fix was really in. If there was much more than met the public eye?
In Buffalo, Home of the Braves, we detail how John Y. Brown swapped the entire franchise with Irving Levin, the owner of the Boston Celtics. One of the architects of that stunning team swap, perhaps the ultimate trade of all time, was David Stern.
Levin headed west with his team, becoming the Lost Angeles Clippers. Brown’s new Celtics, dare we say the old Braves, somehow held the draft right to collegian Larry Bird when the dust settled. Thanks to such an influx of talent, they returned to championship form.
“I was home in Buffalo. Somebody called me from the Braves’ office to tell me the news…,” Randy Smith told me years later. “I was stunned. I couldn’t believe it.”
With that, basketball’s glory days in Buffalo ended.
The trouble with Homestead
Some of you have come to this site by way of the web site www.sunbearpress.com for ordering the book “Buffalo, Home of the Braves”. You’ve likely noticed how out of kilter the site presently appears, and I’d like to explain.
The site www.sunbearpress.com is hosted and its template supported by technology from Homestead.com. Homestead offers small businesses the ability to: “Build a website in minutes with our award-winning website hosting solution and website design software”.
To be fair, I have been a Homestead customer going on three years and have until recently felt positive about their ability to give a novice like me the opportunity create a business web site and have the ability to change content at the drop of a hat. Overall, their customer service was available and quite knowledgeable.
Awhile back I had minor problems integrating a merchant service account into the existing Sun Bear site so I could accept credit cards. I felt comfort in finding someone stateside (live not an online instant message chat) that could lead me to a solution.
With this as background I felt confident last fall paying Homestead a decent amount of money for a redesign of the site. That’s when things started to go sideways.
After Homestead recreated the theme and style of the template, I was no longer able to make simple changes that I had made prior to the redesign. The Sun Bear site serves as a portal to offer a variety of ways to make books available to inquiring customers. Purchases can in theory be made online, by phone, through seven different independent Buffalo bookstores, Amazon, and eBay.
For eBay, the link to the eBay listing needs to be updated periodically as the auction for an item expires. It was explained to me several weeks ago by a Homestead rep that guided me through the process, that even with the new design and limitations the hyperlink could be changed.
Last week we had to relist the book on eBay after earlier copies sold out. I took the previous advice and made the recommended change, which included a backup procedure. The change disrupted some code that resulted in the train wreck of a web site, that is far from appealing. I’ve had to now wait through the weekend, during the peak of holiday sales until Monday when a Homestead web designer can put things back to where they were. I’m afraid to calculate the number of lost sales and am quite peeved at Homestead for two reasons.
1. The customer service reps from Homestead have been stellar, but the managers I spoke with (or didn’t speak with because they didn’t call back) were complacent and downright apathetic.
2. It’s frustrating to spend $599 for a redesign of a site that I cannot place a simple hyperlink into. If I had known of the editing limitations of the redesigned site I would have saved my money and stuck with a plainer looking (but editable) site.
I’ll follow up with an update tomorrow (Monday), but for now I’m no longer recommending Homestead.com to anyone. In the meantime please realize that aesthetics aside, one can with some patience navigate the site and place an order. Oh and here’s that hyperlink to the eBay listing. Thank you Word Press for making that part easy.
Bills’ dysfunction mimics Braves’ demise
Bills' owner Ralph Wilson
A team a few bricks shy of a load. Small in stature at positions where that matters most. Week after week unable to finish close games.
That sounds an awful lot like the current Buffalo Bills football squad. But not so long ago that scouting report also summed up the Buffalo Braves basketball team. And, unfortunately, such organizational faults helped speed the team’s departure from Western New York.
In following the Bills’ ineptitude in recent seasons, I’m reminded of conversations I had with Bob McAdoo while writing Buffalo, Home of the Braves. The Hall of Famer, now in his 15th year as an assistant with the Miami Heat, talked at length about being patient. Having a plan and believing in it.
“Several times the pieces we had the pieces in our hands for a championship team,” McAdoo says, “and we let them go.”
Of course, one of the pieces that the Braves gave away was McAdoo himself – peddled to the New York Knicks in a Judas deal for John Gianelli and $3 million.
But there are plenty of other examples:
- Trading away a young Moses Malone.
- Firing Hall of Fame coach Jack Ramsay
- Drafting Tom McMillen when Ricky Sobers, Lloyd Free, Gus Williams and Kevin Grevey were available.
- Showing Jim McMillian, Gar Heard and Jack Marin the door.
- Allowing John Y. Brown to turn the franchise into “ABA North.”
“Good teams know when to stand pat,” McAdoo told me. “With bad ones, things get too fast, too crazy. Before you know it, you look up and see you’ve lost what’s really important.”
With the Bills going through such uncertain times, here’s hoping they’ve learned a lesson from the old Braves. The fans in Buffalo are among the most knowledgeable I’ve ever come across. They know when team ownership has a real plan and when it is just another shell game.
Questioning loyalty to Bills leads nowhere
After yet another disappointing loss, the dismal performance of the Buffalo Bills persuaded me to question with friends how far loyalty goes with one’s hometown team. After Buffalo dropped to 3-6 with a 41-17 drubbing at the hands of Tennessee Titans, I threw out the idea of changing my allegiance (at least for the rest of this season).
After eliminating the teams that I’ve grown to despise (Jets, Patriots, Dolphins) the teams left to consider included the Bengals, Chargers, and Broncos.
Living now in Michigan after growing up in Western New York, there’s never been a reason to root for the Lions (with the exception of Barry Sanders). Spending ten years of my life in Colorado and as much fun as it was going to Denver Bronco games in the old Mile High Stadium, my heart still belongs with the Bills.
As I write this New England is beating up on Indianapolis, the same New England team the Bills seemed to have handled in the first game of the season, before giving away the game in the final minutes. That seems so long ago now, but that game has me wondering if the Bills season could have played out differently.
To temper my delusion, I’ll soon escape to the Buffalo and Western New York Historical Society to view the exhibit featuring 50 Years of Bills History. It will allow me to look back at happier days or suffer several decades of futility all in one afternoon.
P.S. The Patriots blew their lead and eventually lost to Indianapolis. It should be noted that there is a certain amount of satisfaction in seeing New England also squander a game that it had seemingly won.
