Where Are They Now? Pogo Joe Caldwell

[lethalweapon3]

(WARNING: It’s a long one, so TL;DR version – Joe Caldwell is Alive and Well and Living in Arizona. After a short-circuited career loaded with turmoil, he’s kicking back and enjoying the exploits of his grandson.)

^This is Marvin Bagley III, up-and-coming basketball star in Arizona. He’s also a talented instrumental musician. The young man who aspired to be perhaps the next Kevin Eubanks may now be on pace to become the next Kevin Durant. A mere 5-foot-9 just a couple years ago, a recent growth spurt now has this stringbean gracing the court at a high-flying yet wiry 6-foot-8 and 185 pounds.

Ball handling, range, hops, Marvin’s got a full package. He’s already brought down the hydraulics on a basketball stanchion after an in-game dunk. His on-court highlights are featured on numerous YouTube mixtape-style videos. A guard transitioning to forward, Bagley has starred for the AAU team of former Arizona legend and Hawks star Mike Bibby. He has as many as five college scholarship offers. Coaches declare he is “advanced beyond his years.”

Eventually, Bagley will choose between Arizona State, San Francisco, Creighton, North Carolina A&T, Northern Arizona, or any latecomer schools tantalized by his burgeoning talents on the hardwood. If he plays his cards right, he’ll be on the fast track to the bright lights and big cities of the NBA.

Within a decade from now, he’ll likely work with agents to negotiate annual guaranteed salaries and help him determine the best pro basketball venue to chase a championship. Another decade or so later, and it’s likely he’ll be able to consider retiring and sustaining his family, at least in part, off of a modest pension.

But first, before any of that comes to pass, the 6-foot-8-high-and-rising Bagley has to enter high school. He turns 15 next month.

Bagley has been coached and promoted fervently by his father, Marvin Jr., a former NCA&T hoopster and Arena Football League two-way player. Often watching from the sidelines and stands of the AAU games for the top-ranked Class of 2018 phenom is Bagley’s maternal grandfather.

Granddad is aware the road ahead for Bagley will have its share of potholes and roadblocks, speed bumps, winding turns, and uphill climbs, assuming the kid continues his pursuit of professional basketball glory. But Granddad, now age 72, also knows some of those tribulations and impediments no longer exist. He knows this first-hand, because his personal story played a key role in influencing a more level playing field for today’s NBA athlete. He dubs himself, "The 'Curt Flood' of professional basketball."

The last time your Atlanta Hawks reached the final round before the NBA Finals, Joe Caldwell led the team in postseason scoring, the 6-foot-5 guard pouring in 25 points per game. His 29 points per game helped his Hawks dispatch Clem Haskins, Jerry Sloan, Bob Weiss and the Chicago Bulls in four out of five Western Division Semifinal games in 1970.

By that time, the Texas City native had already starred at Arizona State, a third-team All-American in 1963. He earned a spot on the 1964 U.S. Olympic Men’s Basketball Team, winning a gold medal in Tokyo alongside Larry Brown and future Hawk teammate Walt Hazzard. Taken second overall in that year’s draft, he became the highest-drafted Sun Devil ever (sorry, James Harden) and played his 1^st Team All-Rookie season for the Detroit Pistons before getting traded to the St. Louis Hawks in late 1965.

In the eras before “Iso-Joe”, there was “Pogo Joe.” Also called “Jumpin’ Joe”, Caldwell was admired universally for his vertical leap, one writer declaring he could “rebound a ball in the rafters and slam dunk the Empire State Building.”

And by the time the Hawks made their franchise trek to Atlanta, Caldwell was also coming into his own as a gritty defensive player, making 2^nd-team All-Defensive in 1970. He earned both All-Star nods of his six-season NBA tenure as a member of the Atlanta Hawks, leading the West’s All-Star reserves with 13 points and 7 rebounds in the 1970 game.

Caldwell entered the league just months after the infamous 1964 All-Star Game, a near-walkout of the live, prime-time event that forced the NBA owners’ hand in recognizing the players’ union and their many demands, including the request for player pensions. Still, professional agents were not allowed, and individual player-bargaining for contracts (often, without the services of experienced professional negotiators) continued to rule the day.

In St. Louis, Caldwell never received all the compensation he agreed to with Hawks owner Ben Kerner. Caldwell believes he was benched during most of the 1968 playoff series, on orders from Kerner, so his salary demands would not peak before the owner could sell off the Western Division regular-season champs, eventually to Atlanta’s Tom Cousins. He got a real-estate professional to help negotiate a doubling of his salary, to $60,000, before his second NBA All-Star season in Atlanta.

He and player-coach Richie Guerin experienced evidence of conspiratorial actions against the Hawks once again, this time in Atlanta. And it involved an issue that persists in this town to this day: attendance. From Joe Caldwell’s bio on his website (joecaldwell.us):

Quote

Guerin and Caldwell both overheard two men taking in the breezeway of the Georgia Tech Coliseum. One of the men was Walter Kennedy, the N.B.A. commissioner, and the other was Mendy Rudolph, one of the league's top officials.

"Just look at this, only 7,200 people in the place," snapped Kennedy. "We have to have more than this for the playoffs."

Guerin was infuriated by what he heard. He realized they were conspiring to try to knock the Hawks out of the playoffs again. This was the most frustrating situation because he was powerless. There was nothing he could do to stop the conspiracy. In the first playoff game against the Los Angeles Lakers, 34 fouls were called against the Hawks. The pattern was set. Guerin was furious.

"A lot of blood will be spilled on the floor if the officials continue to call little, bitty fouls," fumed Guerin to the media. Kennedy got tired of his comments and fined him $1,000 for "comments that were detrimental to basketball."

The Lakers swept the Hawks to a four to zero (4-0) victory. During the final game in Los Angeles, Jerry West went to the free throw line 21 times. In four games, he went a total of 57 times! It was completely unbelievable.

By then a two-time All-Star and fan-favorite, in 1970 Caldwell and his representative thought they had leverage to secure a multi-year deal similar to incoming sensation Pistol Pete Maravich. Caldwell claimed that Cousins reneged on a handshake deal similar to Pistol’s, and grew so upset by the process that he decided to quit basketball. The All-Star sought out a superior salary working for a regional carpet manufacturer.

Caldwell’s rise as a top-flight basketball star also coincided with the sudden emergence of the American Basketball Association, who was picking the NBA clean of free agent players like the Hawks’ Zelmo Beaty and Billy Cunningham, who would eventually leave the Philadelphia 76ers for the ABA’s Carolina Cougars.

The upstart league was also outbidding the NBA for college stars like Julius Erving, a man who would eventually join other NBA greats in citing Caldwell among their toughest defensive opponents. The Cougars reached out to Caldwell, and his rep negotiated a deal, including a pension, that could not be legally modified or revoked.

The NBA had a card up its sleeve, though. The “reserve clause” obligated NBA players to sit out at least one year before playing basketball in another league. The Hawks tried to legally force Caldwell’s hand, but a Federal district court ruled in Caldwell’s favor, determining that the league violated the terms of their own “reserve clause” rules by officially offering Caldwell less than 75 percent of what he made in the prior season.

Pogo Joe bounced into the ABA, the first NBA player able to do so freely, without sitting out a year. This likely made Caldwell persona non grata to NBA owners, a situation that would come back to bite him later.

In his first season, Caldwell made it to the ABA All-Star Game, leading the Cougars with 23.3 points per game, but the Greensboro-based team was not good enough to make it to the playoffs. By his second ABA season, Caldwell was age 30 and still had not received the pension contract he agreed to years before with his owner, Georgia textile magnate Teddy Munchak. It turned out Munchak was weaving other designs for Caldwell. Per joecaldwell.us:

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During the break of the All-Star game, Munchak flew Caldwell to a meeting in his Atlanta mansion. When Caldwell arrived, he was surprised to be greeted by Lou Hudson, Walt Hazzard and Bill Bridges.

"Joe, we want you to come back to the Hawks," exclaimed Bridges. Caldwell was stunned. "Joe, we want you to jump back to the N.B.A.," revealed Munchak. Caldwell was beside himself.

"If you don't want me to play for you, trade me and I'll be alright with the trade," offered Caldwell. I just can't jump back to the N.B.A. after all I've been through. We have a deal."

"Joe, I can't trade you to the N.B.A.," disclosed Munchak. "They won't take your pension. Nobody will touch it."

The pension, which cost Munchak $600 per month for each year of service as basketball player, was the heart of the issue. Munchak believed that if he could get Caldwell to jump leagues, then he would be off the hook and wouldn't have to fund his pension any longer. Caldwell turned him down.

The rest of that season, Caldwell was constantly harassed both on and off the court.

In 1972, Caldwell hoped a professional ray of light had arrived in the form of the Cougars’ new head coach, former Olympic teammate Larry Brown. Alas, it was not to be, as Brown remained loyal to ownership. Still, one recipient of Caldwell’s work to fight the NBA’s reserve clause, Cunningham, joined the team. And with Brown at the helm, Caldwell and Cunningham, the new league MVP, guided Carolina to a 1973 regular-season division title and a seven-game series in the Division Finals, falling in Charlotte to Dan Issel, Artis Gilmore and the Kentucky Colonels.

Rumors began to surface that the league was angling for a merger with the NBA. The ABA Players Association at first supported these proposals to sustain the viability of ABA franchises. But Caldwell took over as the union’s president and led a reversal of the group’s position, much to the dismay of ABA team owners.

Carolina’s owner, Munchak realized his team had little chance of merging into the NBA without moving to a larger, single metropolitan market. After the Cougars lost in the playoffs to the Colonels again in 1974, Munchak sold his investment to attorney Donald Schupak and a pair of New York City bigwigs, the Silna brothers, who moved the team to the largest market without pro basketball to improve the likelihood of a merger.

Caldwell, the only holdover from the Cougars kept under contract, returned to St. Louis, only this time in an ABA uniform. The same year, Munchak would move into an even more adversarial role to union chief Caldwell when he became the league’s commissioner.

While Marvin Bagley III heeds Caldwell’s sage advice today, there was another Marvin whose tutelage may have spelled the end of Caldwell’s career. Before the Cougars moved to Missouri, they snagged another would-be NBA star from the senior league’s clutches, agreeing to a deal with Marvin Barnes.

The athletic Providence power forward was taken second in the 1974 NBA draft to UCLA’s Bill Walton, and was an ideal budding star to lift the spirits of St. Louis fans. But Barnes had a rap sheet, fighting a highly-publicized accusation that he assaulted a teammate with a tire iron after an aggressive practice elbow loosened Barnes’ teeth (he would plead guilty for assault, but was punished only for throwing a punch).

The Spirits’ management hoped a veteran presence like Caldwell would help Barnes adapt to the pressures of the pros. But almost a third of the way into the season, the star-crossed Barnes went missing.

Owners were quick to point the finger at Caldwell for encouraging Barnes to go AWOL. They cited evidence of the players with Caldwell’s representative in a car at the airport the night of Barnes’ disappearing act, accusing Pogo Joe of convincing Barnes to hold out for more than the youngster’s $2.1 million salary.

The mean-spirited Spirits suspended Caldwell indefinitely, never intending to lift the suspension for the 33-year old player, who was still averaging 14.6 points and 5.1 assists in what became his final season of pro hoops.

Caldwell could not appeal his suspension to the commissioner, Munchak, who he was still suing in Greensboro to recognize the pension benefits he was owed from his Carolina contract. And the ABA’s “reserve list,” it was believed at the time, hindered NBA teams from looking into his availability... even after the ABA folded in 1976 without reinstating him. Systematically, Caldwell was “Banned from Basketball,” the eventual title of the player’s autobiography. Pogo Joe had no doubts the ABA owners leveraged the Barnes situation to get out from under their obligations, current and future, to him.

Decades later, Schupak and the Spirit owners proudly tout what Sports Illustrated deemed, “the best sports deal of the century,” a windfall in the negotiated 1976 sale of the Spirits to the NBA that would have the senior league over a barrel for decades to come.

As Forbes reported, “the Silnas would be paid for any Spirits players drafted by NBA teams, an amount that came to roughly $2.2 million. On top of that, the Silnas would also get a 1/7th share of each of the four former ABA teams’ NBA “visual media” rights...”

Thanks to a contractual oversight, the media revenue, estimated today at a cumulative $300 million, was to be doled out in perpetuity. The Silnas made so much money off this deal that they actually lost millions to Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi schemes and still remain filthy rich. Only last month did the NBA finally get itself out from under this deal, settling with the Spirits’ owners for an additional $500 million.

Compare the Silnas’ path with Caldwell’s fate. Caldwell fought hard for, and was subsequently punished for, his “untouchable” pension deal. It turned out the sticking point for Munchak was an alleged typo. The clause in the deal the parties signed was to pay Caldwell $600 monthly for every year of his professional basketball service, but Munchak insisted the deal was only supposed to be $60 per month. Either way, once the ABA folded, it was not clear if Caldwell would ever get to see a dime of it.

As the Silnas enjoyed their manna from the heavens of the vastly-growing NBA, Pogo Joe Caldwell spent the next several decades awash in litigation, foreclosure, divorce, and bankruptcy. He won his lawsuit against Munchak for backpay from salary ($220,000) withheld in the 1974-75 season, plus interest, but that judgment wasn’t final until 1982. By the 1990s, Caldwell joined a law firm as a legal assistant as the firm helped him win a suit for his pension, money he would not receive until 1996, when he reached age 55.

He filed a Sherman Act antitrust suit against the ABA, but it was thrown out since the National Labor Relations Board held jurisdiction over Caldwell’s situation. Through the lawsuit, it was argued that the ABA’s “reserve list” would not have barred Jumpin’ Joe from hopping back to the NBA after all. Schupak and his attorneys insisted there was no such list in the first place, that it was a concoction of a “disturbed imagination” of a player who one accused owners of conspiratorially setting up a car accident.

Schupak insisted that Caldwell’s eroded skills were the real issue for the two leagues, an argument belied by his serviceable final-season stats. But the point was moot for Caldwell, by then in his fifties, and the animus built up by team owners around his controversies likely would have left him blackballed and on the outs anyway.

Now retired, Caldwell’s jersey hangs from the rafters of the Wells Fargo Arena in Tempe. A charter member of the Arizona State University’s Hall of Fame, his last major public appearance had him serving as the grand marshal of the school’s 2013 Homecoming. He’s infinitely more relaxed now, content with the knowledge that, with good fortune and persistence, his grandkid may soon be handsomely rewarded for hard work on the basketball court. Per USA Today:

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Caldwell's advice?

"I tell him to do the best you can, to stay focused, stay healthy and live a healthy life," he said.

Two decades prior, he was still fighting for every ounce of compensation he felt he deserved from the two decades before that. Interestingly, at that time he was still longing for his days thrilling Hawks fans at the Alexander Memorial Coliseum in Midtown Atlanta. He told the New York Times:

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"This thing is hollering at me from the middle of my mind," he said. "My mind says, 'He can play,' but my body is saying, 'No, he can't.' And I'm always playing for Atlanta, never the Cougars or the Spirits."

(ThunderBall Films LLC 2012 documentary "Pogo Joe: Fighting the Game", based on Caldwell's book)

http-~~-//www.youtube.com/watch?v=OuTNIisNNy0

~lw3

SOURCES:

(Whoops! They all got lost when my last post attempt didn't save. I'll re-type and post them after lunch.)

[Guest]

Sources? We don't need to stinking sources!

[lethalweapon3]

SOURCES:

Basketball-Reference.com, Joe Caldwell career NBA-ABA stats: http://www.basketball-reference.com/players/c/caldwjo01.html

Atlanta Hawks, "From the Vault... Teams from the '70s": http://www.nba.com/hawks/history/team_1970.html

"14-year-old phenom Marvin Bagley III loaded with scholarship offers," USA Today, July 3, 2013: http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/ncaab/recruiting/2013/07/03/14-year-old-phenom-marvin-bagley-iii-loaded-with-scholarship-offers/2478521/

Arizona State University, "Sun Devils offer 14-yer-old Marvin Bagley III," June 5, 2013: http://arizonastate.rivals.com/content.asp?CID=1512567

Arizona State University, "Joe Caldwell to serve as grand marshal at ASU Homecoming," September 18, 2013: https://asunews.asu.edu/20130918-Caldwell-Homecoming

Joe Caldwell website: http://joecaldwell.us/ (See "What's Up" section for basketball cards; "Joe's Story" for excerpts from his biography)

"The All-Star Game That Nearly Wasn't," by Steve Aschburner for nba.com, February 13, 2014: http://hangtime.blogs.nba.com/tag/1964-all-star-game/

"Spirits Suspend Caldwell," United Press International, December 4, 1974: http://newspaperarchive.com/new-castle-news/1974-12-04/page-48

"Caldwell Lives on Flipside of Paradise," by Jim Murray for The Los Angeles Times Syndicate, August 1, 1978 (linked newspaper interestingly placed article below, "Pete Rose in Prime of Baseball Life at 37"): http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1755&dat=19780801&id=Qk80AAAAIBAJ&sjid=gmcEAAAAIBAJ&pg=3958,205261

"PRO BASKETBALL; Recalling Joe Caldwell, Circa 1974," New York Times, February 23, 1993, http://www.nytimes.com/1993/02/23/sports/pro-basketball-recalling-joe-caldwell-circa-1974.html

"Banned from basketball," by David Friedman for hoopshype.com, August 15, 2007: http://hoopshype.com/articles/caldwell_friedman.htm

Caldwell v. Munchak, 548 F.Supp. 755 (1982): http://www.leagle.com/decision/19821303548FSupp755_11174

Caldwell v. ABA, 825 F.Supp. 558 (1993): http://www.leagle.com/decision/19931383825FSupp558_11289

"Lawsuit against ABA tossed out," Associated Press, July 2, 1996: http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1842&dat=19960702&id=R14eAAAAIBAJ&sjid=EskEAAAAIBAJ&pg=4389,178718

"Nothing but Profits," Sports Illustrated, June 16, 2003: http://www.cnnsi.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1028964/index.htm

"Revisiting the 'Greatest Sports Deal of All Time'," Forbes, May 12, 2011: http://www.forbes.com/sites/monteburke/2011/05/12/revisiting-the-greatest-sports-deal-of-all-time/

"The NBA Finally Puts an End to the Greatest Sports Deal of All Time," Forbes, January 7, 2014: http://www.forbes.com/sites/monteburke/2014/01/07/the-nba-finally-puts-an-end-to-the-greatest-sports-deal-of-all-time/

~lw3

[Jdawgflow]

This was a greats read! Lw3, what are your career goals? Because you sir are a fantastic writer.

[lethalweapon3]

This was a greats read! Lw3, what are your career goals? Because you sir are a fantastic writer.

Much appreciated! I get to write and read tons of far more boring stuff for a living, so stuff like this is always fun to do on the side.

~lw3

[Jdawgflow]

Your use of references and the flow of the article is a giveaway that you have either been to school with lots of paper writing or you are just very well self learned.

[lethalweapon3]

Speaking of Marvin Bagley III, here's an in-game dunk from Lil' Pogo. How can you 360 when you haven't even taken up geometry yet?

http://dimemag.com/2014/02/eighth-grader-marvin-bagley-360-degree-in-game-dunk/

~lw3

[lethalweapon3]

Four-plus years later, now that Marvy Bags is probably going to be Hawks Draft-eligible, I figured there was no time better than the present to share the above 2014 longform about his Grandfather ex-Hawk with the non-SeniorSquawkers.

2018 update: Pogo Joe is still doing fine out in Arizona.

http://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/22060911/duke-sensation-marvin-bagley-iii-ready-take-world

Quote

 

Marvin Jr. played football, at North Carolina A&T and in the AFL. Bagley's maternal grandfather, Joe Caldwell, was a legendary basketball player. In 1964, the Detroit Pistons selected him as the No. 2 overall pick in the NBA draft. Caldwell was such a tough defender that Hall of Famer Julius Erving once said that he guarded him better than anyone else in the American Basketball Association.

"I don't know if he got the grandpa's DNA or he got his dad's," Caldwell says, "but he got both of them so maybe that's the key. His daddy is probably -- had he been focused like he is with his son and [did] the right things, he could've been one heck of a football player."

Caldwell says the Bagleys lived with him for about the first 10 years of Marvin III's life, and at some point, he was so impressed with what the kid was doing in the backyard that he told then-Arizona State coach Herb Sendek that if he could hold out a few years, that help was on the way.

 

Sendek (now coaching at Santa Clara) couldn't quite hold out, but it didn't matter anyway as far as the Sun Devils were concerned.

~lw3

[NBASupes]

Draft his grandson! 

[AtlHomer]

Thanks for sharing as I learned a lot about Joe Caldwell that I was not aware of.

[lethalweapon3]

So, yeah! Back to Pogo Joe Caldwell.

~lw3

[lethalweapon3]

Here's an extra longform by Victory Journal from 2017, prior to Bagley's frosh season. Including an update from when Pogo Joe took on ESPN.

https://victoryjournal.com/stories/jumpin-joe/

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History has not been kind to Caldwell. The most well-known accounts of the ABA hew to the idea that Caldwell was the problem.

In Terry Pluto’s “Loose Balls," an oral history of the ABA, Caldwell is depicted as “troubled,” having “a chip on his shoulder,” and laboring under the delusion that “everyone is out to get him, that being black hurt him.” The overall portrait is of a “moody” malcontent who isolated himself from teammates and snapped back at assistant coaches even as the 1972-73 Cougars made it all the way to the ABA’s Eastern Division Finals.

That characterization, from ex-coaches and teammates alike, came as a great surprise to Caldwell. “I was so shocked,” he says, particularly by Gene Littles, who said that the rest of the Cougars had to redouble their efforts to cover for Caldwell’s antics. “I didn't know he felt that way about me.”

ESPN’s 30 for 30 documentary Free Spirits follows more or less the same script, calling Caldwell a “notorious clubhouse lawyer." Barnes, who was interviewed prior to his death in 2014, this time claims that Caldwell did convince him to ditch St. Louis. Caldwell himself was never approached by ESPN, and neither his suspension nor the subsequent lawsuits are mentioned.

When Caldwell saw the film, he was stunned, unable to comprehend why ESPN felt compelled to “dirty me up 40 years later.” He met with a lawyer to discuss taking ESPN to court. While no legal action was taken, in a settlement agreement, ESPN and the film’s director formally apologized and removed the inaccurate depiction of Caldwell from any future iterations of the documentary.

 

 

~lw3