On its 45th anniversary, Dan Issel relives ‘the highlight of my basketball career’
Dan Issel scored more points (2,138) and snared more rebounds (1,078) than anyone ever to play men’s college basketball for the Kentucky Wildcats.
As a pro, he played in seven All-Star Games.
In 1993, Issel was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
Yet none of those achievements are what Issel sites as “obviously the highlight of my basketball career.”
To find that, you have to travel back to Louisville’s Freedom Hall on May 22, 1975.
That night, the Kentucky Colonels defeated the hated Indiana Pacers 110-105 in Game 5 of the American Basketball Association Championship Series to claim a 4-1 win that made Kentucky the 1975 ABA champions.
It was the only championship ever won by any of the Colonels’ three stars, 7-foot-2 Artis Gilmore and ex-UK icons Louie Dampier and Issel.
“That night, it was like the weight of the world was taken off of our shoulders,” Issel said Wednesday via the phone. “We finally were ABA champions.”
From the time the Colonels signed Issel (1970) and Gilmore (1971), Kentucky boasted one of the most talented teams in professional basketball — NBA included.
However, the Colonels had a vexing difficulty “getting over the hump” to win a championship.
In Issel’s rookie season (1970-71), Kentucky fell to the Utah Stars in Game 7 of the ABA Finals.
The following year, Gilmore’s initial campaign, the Colonels went a remarkable 68-16 in the regular season (the ABA played 84-game seasons) but were upset by Rick Barry and the New York Nets in the playoffs.
Perhaps most painful was 1973, when Kentucky lost in Game 7 of the ABA Championship Series to the Pacers in Freedom Hall.
“We should have won one or two championships before (1975),” Issel says. “It seemed like we kind of underachieved. We’d have great regular-season records and didn’t get it done in the championships.”
Before the 1974-75 season, the Colonels front office — led by team owners John Y. Brown Jr. and his then-wife, Ellie, and general manager David Vance — hired an up-and-coming NBA assistant, Hubie Brown, off the staff of the Milwaukee Bucks to coach Kentucky.
To basketball fans today, Hubie Brown is best known as an ESPN color analyst on NBA telecasts. Back then, he was a rising coaching star.
In Louisville, Hubie Brown shook things up. Prior to his arrival, the Colonels had used the 6-9 Issel and Gilmore in a double-post alignment. Brown thought Gilmore needed to be the focal point of the team’s offense, so he shifted Issel out on the floor.
As a result, Issel took 423 fewer shots in 1974-75 than in the prior regular season. His scoring average fell from 25.5 to 17.7.
“At that point in my career, I had scored quite a few points as a Colonel — and didn’t have a championship,” Issel says. “If Hubie thought that playing a more straightforward brand of ball would get us there, it was fine with me.”
In the ABA Championship Series against Indiana, the pivotal moment came in Game 3 in Indianapolis. The Colonels had held serve at home to take a 2-0 lead in the series, but they were down eight points entering the fourth quarter of Game 3.
Kentucky then buried the Pacers with a 36-20 fourth quarter. The resulting 109-101 Colonels victory — led by double-doubles from Gilmore (41 points, 28 rebounds) and Issel (26 and 12) — made the long-elusive championship inevitable.
Late in Game 3, Issel recalls standing along the foul line next to Pacers star George McGinnis.
“George looked over at me and said, ‘Well, it looks like you are finally going to get one,’” Issel recalls, laughing. “I’ll never forget that.”
After dropping Game 4 in Indy, the Colonels closed out the Pacers back in Freedom Hall. Gilmore went for 28 points and 31 rebounds; Issel had 16 and 12 and Dampier 12 points and 12 assists.
At last free of the “can’t win the big one” albatross, Issel says the Colonels cut loose at a team postgame party. The celebration went so long, Issel says, that when he, his wife Cheri and Dampier were driving home “the sun was coming up.”
From that championship high, it was amazing how quickly pro basketball in Kentucky disintegrated.
Even though his team had won the 1975 ABA championship, Colonels owner John Y. Brown said he had lost hundreds of thousands of dollars that season. To recoup some of his losses, Brown sold Issel’s contract for $700,000 to the Baltimore Claws.
Outraged Colonels fans lit up the team switchboard canceling season tickets.
After a lackluster 1975-76 season, John Y. and Ellie Brown announced that the Colonels were for sale.
Amid the uncertainty, Hubie Brown bolted to become coach of the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks.
So when the NBA/ABA merger came in 1976, the Colonels franchise — long one of the ABA’s most stable — was in disarray.
Excluded from the merger, the Colonels were no more only one year after being champions.
Now 71, Issel is the public face of the effort to convince the NBA to bring a professional basketball team back to Louisville.
He is also the most visible link to the only time a team from the commonwealth ever won a “major-league” professional sports championship.
“That was just a great time,” Dan Issel says of the Kentucky Colonels’ 1975 ABA championship, “obviously the highlight of my basketball career.”
