The Pros

Midway in the first period of the East-West professional All-Star basketball game, Boston's Bill Sharman cut loose with a long pass to his teammate Bob Cousy. Cousy never got his hands on the ball. It sailed over his head and dropped cleanly through the net for a 70-ft, basket, probably the longest unintentional field goal on record.

Sharman's spectacular accident would have been a standout in any game. In last week's encounter in the Boston Garden, won by the East 109-97, it was a surprise fillip to fine performances by the greatest basketball players in the world. Only a few years ago, pro basketball was a hobo sport that smelled of low-grade locker rooms and considered itself lucky if it weaned fans away from pinball and professional wrestling. Last week's game was lively--and sellout--proof of pro basketball's coming of age.

Peripatetic Peddlers. The pros peddle their skill with the peripatetic energy of oldtime vaudevillians. The National Basketball Association's eight teams keep on the hop from November through March, play one-night stands from Fort Wayne to Syracuse, from New York to Minneapolis. They even find time and resources to please crowds in nonleague cities as far off as Miami.

The homebred American game of basketball, in fact, owes most of is present gym-packing, crowd-drawing prominence to the popularity of its hot-handed pros. In turn, the pros acknowledge their debt to a roly-poly Russian immigrant named Maurice Podoloff, 66, who barely knew the difference between a pick-off play and a picket fence when he became president of the N.B.A. In ten years Podoloff has led the league out of virtual pauperhood into the promised land of big crowds and bigger bank accounts. He hits the road as often as any of the players.

Owl-Eyed Boss. As a kid on the streets of New Haven, Conn., where his father sold coal, oil and wood from a horse-drawn wagon, Podoloff seldom found time for fun and games. He worked his way through Yale (the 1913 class of Averell Harriman and Cole Porter) by selling tickets for an excursion steamer and playing clarinet in a band, went on to a law degree, and then drifted into real estate. One day he found himself owner of both the New Haven Arena and the ice-hockey team that played there. Soon, with other arena owners, he was looking around for a sport to fill the house when his hockey team was on the road. The choice was basketball, a poor risk at the time, and Podoloff was elected president of the Basketball Association of America. The association, coughed along, and in 1949 became the N.B.A. The crowds had been staying away in busloads, and teams were losing as much as $100,000 a season; there was no time to waste. To liven the game, Podoloff fostered a new rule requiring a team to shoot 24 seconds after it gets its hands on the ball. He cajoled the N.B.A. teams into abandoning the stolid, slow-moving zone defense, and persuaded TV officials to carry games on the air. The combination of change and promotion caught on.

Today, thanks largely to Maurice Podoloff, every team in the N.B.A. is making money; for five months of work, players draw salaries that range from a rookie's $4,500 to Bob Cousy's better than $20,000. From California to the East Coast, new towns are eager for franchises. Perhaps the surest proof of the N.B.A.'s success and the caliber of its players is that club owners want to expand their league but cannot find on college courts enough good players to match their pros.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.