Trail Blazers' fate hung on extra-long bathroom break

In the past few decades, professional soccer has made great strides in the U.S., and hockey has always had an enthusiastic cult following. But the Big Three are still the same as they were in 1970: Baseball, football, and basketball.

Before 1970, Oregon was home to exactly zero major-league teams from any of these sports. But after 1970, it was home to one: The Portland Trail Blazers, a basketball team that took just over five years to build a team that would win the NBA World Championship and become an absolute legend.

Both of those things — the team’s inception, and its rise to the top — had a lot to do with a gregarious Portland promoter and sports fan named Harry Glickman.

Harry Glickman was a native son of the Beaver State, born and raised in Portland. He was Jewish, and he had the unsettling experience many American Jews had of having their European relatives suddenly stop answering letters after about 1941. Later he would learn they had all been kidnapped by Nazis and shipped to Treblinka to be killed.

Harry was a hardcore sports fan from early childhood, and as a high school student played basketball at Lincoln High

“I cannot remember a time when I was not absorbed with sports,” Harry wrote in his memoir many years later, “(but) there is nothing in my background to indicate that someday I would be involved as a means of earning a living.”

That changed in 1941 after he graduated from high school and entered the University of Oregon. He had planned to take a year off to work and hopefully earn enough money to pay his tuition and living costs; but his mother forced his hand by marrying a Seattle man (Harry’s parents divorced when he was 5) and moving to his home in the Evergreen State. Harry’s plans did not include Seattle or the University of Washington, so his plan to live at home and stack up cash for a year was thrown out the window. He’d have to find a job and work his way through college.

This “setback” turned out to be quite possibly the luckiest break of Harry’s life, before or since. Casting around for a job that fit his talents, he found one — and ended up working his way through college covering Duck sports for the Portland Morning Oregonian, Oregon Journal, and various news wire services

Glickman took time away from college to fight the Nazis from 1943 to 1946, so he didn’t graduate until 1948.

He had a job waiting for him after graduation, and he’d made all his plans around it. It was, he thought, his dream job: Staff sports reporter at the Portland Morning Oregonian.

But once again, fate intervened. An Oregonian staff reporter who had been drafted to fight the war came home, a little later than most GIs. While he was gone his job had been given to someone else; so by law the Oregonian had to either fire that person and rehire the veteran, or find another slot on the staff. Nobody wanted to fire anyone, and there was only one other slot open just then … so they placed him in the position they’d opened up for Glickman.

To help him out, though, Glickman’s would-be boss helped him get set up as a press agent for boxing matches and other sporting events, and referred his first three clients to him.

“Most good things have happened to me by accident,” Glickman wrote in his memoir, at the beginning of Chapter 2. And clearly, he wasn’t kidding! Of course, chance favors the prepared, and Glickman was always prepared.

Over the following two decades, Glickman and his company, Oregon Sports Attractions, got involved with some very high-profile promotions. In 1951 he met some VIPs from the National Football League (this was before 1955, when broadcast television made football America’s favorite national sport, but it was already very popular) and talked them into scheduling exhibition and pre-season games in Portland’s Multnomah Stadium.

These visitor-vs.-visitor football games would become a regular feature of the stadium’s schedule throughout the 1950s.

Another nationally famous organization started coming regularly to Portland courtesy of Glickman in the early 1950s as well: The Harlem Globetrotters, the world famous basketball exhibitionist team.

And in the late 1950s, Glickman started working on getting a Western Hockey League team in Portland. The WHL was a minor league, but it seemed like it was going places (although it wasn’t, as it turned out) so Glickman founded the Portland Buckaroos in 1960. The Buckaroos would be a big part of the Portland sports scene for the next 13 years, winning three WHL championships along the way.

But Glickman’s goal was always to get a big-league basketball club started in P-town. He started working on that in 1954 after Portland voters approved a bond measure to build Memorial Coliseum, working all the angles he could get a line on with NBA executives he knew and knew of, trying to convince them that Portland was ready for a team and would support it with a butt in every stadium seat every time the whistle blew.

He would doggedly chase that dream for the next 15 years, and it would finally bear fruit in 1970. It wouldn’t be easy, though!

Along the way, sometime in 1958, Glickman popped the question to his girlfriend, Joanne. He may or may not have been influenced to do this by a crusty old boxing promoter he was regularly working with, Jack Hurley, who was constantly needling him to “make an honest woman of her.”

“It’s time you signed the papers,” Hurley would growl. “It’s every man’s duty to take a gentle little creature and make her happy. Besides, you’ve been getting away with murder long enough.”

Who says there’s no romance in professional boxing?

The Portland Trail Blazers, in the summer of 1970, were nothing more than a gleam in the eye of the promoter who’d been banging the “NBA in Portland” drum for the previous 16 years.

And it probably would have stayed that way, too, if not for a really long bathroom break taken in Beverly Hills that year.

Here’s how that came about:

In 1967, Portland’s sibling-rival city, Seattle, nailed down an NBA franchise deal — the Seattle Supersonics. One imagines Glickman’s frustration at hearing the news of that, and it seems to have set him into a redoubled effort to get Portland a seat at the NBA table.

And in 1970 it looked like he had a chance. The NBA’s expansion committee was meeting at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills. Calling in all the markers and working all the angles, Glickman got them to add him to the agenda for a presentation urging them to let him add a Portland team.

The NBA’s expansion committee consisted of Abe Pollin of the Baltimore Bullets (later the Washington Wizards), Fred Zollner of the Detroit Pistons, Tommy Cousens of the Atlanta Hawks, and Carl Scheer, a representative of NBA Commissioner Walter Kennedy.

Glickman leaped into action, got on the phone, and called everyone he could think of who could arrange interim financing for the cash that would be needed to launch a team. After the team was launched, a public stock offering would cover the loan handily; but that would take much more time than Glickman had just now.

He had gone through his phone list and was waiting for callbacks when the time came to jump on a plane and go plead Portland’s case, so — hoping something would happen while he was in the air — he did so.

Nothing happened, though, and Glickman found himself the next day in the super-unenviable position of having to tell the committee the interim financing was still up in the air.

Committee members were visibly dismayed at this. By this time, they all knew Harry Glickman, if not personally then by reputation; and to know Glickman was to be his friend — he was that kind of personality. Nobody wanted to tell him no.

Plus, they were all impressed with the work he had done, and they believed him when he assured them that he would line up the financing in short order. His word was bankable, and they all knew that.

So one of the members — Tommy Cousens of the Atlanta Hawks, who Glickman had actually never met in person until now — promptly offered to pony up a quarter-million if Glickman could find funds to match it from his Portland people. That would get him over the hump and they could say yes to him. Could he do that?

This offer kept the deal alive for another 24 hours or so, which would turn out to be critically important. “It’s superfluous to add that I fell in love with Cousens in exactly five seconds,” Glickman wrote, in his 1978 memoir.

Glickman promised to give it his level best. Then, as quickly as courtesy allowed, he got himself back to his hotel room and got on the phone.

No dice. Nobody seemed to have the lettuce. So close, and yet ….

But just as Glickman was thinking Portland’s bid was as good as dead, plucked, and roasted fork-tender, the phone rang again. Suddenly everything was changed. The IPO was now a no-go — big fish with deep pockets had stepped up. New Jersey real estate developer Bob Schmertz had jumped aboard along with Seattle businessman Herman Sarkowsky, and they wanted to finance the franchise privately in partnership with Beverly Hills real estate developer Larry Weinberg. And they had $750,000 ready to go.

“I went back to the room and said, ‘Hey guys, time out, there’s a new deal,’” Glickman recalled later, in his memoir. “I explained that we were now going to have a privately financed company.”

The committee members were no doubt relieved to hear this. Pollin told Glickman to get a letter of credit ready and present the whole thing to a meeting of all the league’s owners, scheduled for noon the following day.

Glickman got on the phone to Sarkowsky, who told him he’d have his banker in Tacoma get in touch the next morning.

Glickman can’t have felt too comfortable with this — bankers didn’t start work until 10 a.m., which would give him very little time to get the documentation he needed and get back to the Bev for that noon deadline.

So the next morning, at 10 a.m. on the dot, he called the bank. He was referred to a banker named Hugh Darling at the bank’s sister institution in Los Angeles.

“I called Darling,” Glickman said. “He had never heard of me, Sarkowsky, the NBA or anything. He called Tacoma, called me back and said yes, he would handle my problem.”

So at a few minutes after 10 a.m., Glickman was on his way to downtown L.A. to pick up the letter.

He got lost on the way. By the time Glickman found his way to the bank branch, it was already 11:15 — and it was a half-hour drive back to the hotel, even if he didn’t get lost again. He raced into the bank and found Darling yelling into the telephone, having a heated discussion with someone.

“He waved me to a chair where I sat biting my nails for about 10 minutes,” Glickman recalled. “When he finished, he started asking me questions about Portland and the NBA.”

Without being too offensive, Glickman managed to redirect Darling’s attention back to the letter, which was just on the verge of being too late. Darling dictated the letter to his secretary, who brought it over for him to sign. Alas, there was a typo on it. He told her to take it away and retype it.

“I said, ‘Don’t bother with that, just initial it and give me the damn letter,’” Glickman said. “Which he did.”

Racing to the parking lot, Glickman leaped into his car and started running every red light and blowing through every stop sign between downtown L.A. and the Beverly Wilshire.

When he got there, it was 12:05 p.m. And when he burst into the room, he found that Pollin — the Baltimore Bullets owner — was in the bathroom.

Pollin “told me he had been worried about my lateness so had asked for a recess while he went to the john,” Glickman said. “He remained there until I arrived with my letter.”

The NBA representatives took the information and told Glickman to come back at 3 p.m. When he did, he was told that, congratulations — Portland was now officially an NBA city.

The rest of the story of the Portland Trail Blazers — including how they got their name, which is arguably the best team name in professional sports, and their progress from nothing to the NBA World Championship in 1977 — is a story for another day.

(Sources: Promoter Ain’t a Dirty Word, a book by Harry Glickman published in 1978 by Timber Press; “Give Me the Damn Letter,” an article published in Citadel of the Spirit, a sesquicentennial anthology (editor: Matt Love) published in 2009 by Nestucca Spit Press.)

Finn J.D. John teaches at Oregon State University and writes about odd tidbits of Oregon history. His most recent book, Bad Ideas and Horrible People of Old Oregon, published by Ouragan House early this year. To contact him or suggest a topic: [email protected] or 541-357-2222.