Excerpt: Building the Bucks of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Oscar Robertson

Building the Milwaukee Bucks: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Oscar Robertson and the Rapid Rise of an NBA Franchise, 1968-1975 was released on July 7, 2025, and can be purchased from Amazon and wherever books are sold.

Wednesday, March 19, 1969. The date is forever etched in history before and after the flip of a coin. The time was set for 11 a.m. Eastern time in the league’s office in New York. A three-way phone line between New York, Milwaukee, and Phoenix connected all parties, while Walter J. Kennedy would do the honors on live television. And here Milwaukee was, waiting for yet another miracle. The Bucks officially clinched last place in the East on March 17, 1969, after the Pistons beat the Suns that very night. Phoenix’s fate was sealed weeks before, as they were very clearly the worst team in the West and they had already gone so far as to run a poll in Phoenix-based newspapers over whether to call heads or tails for the eventual coin flip. Milwaukee may have come late to the party, but it was decided that Pavalon was entrusted to call heads or tails, should he have the chance.

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Kennedy outlined how the operation would go down. He’d draw between two cards that were placed on his desk to determine which team would choose heads or tails. When Kennedy drew the card, it came up Phoenix. Exactly how the Bucks had wanted it, according to Fishman. ‘Fine, I thought. Let Phoenix call,” he said. “The old gambler’s adage is to never choose on an even bet. The house never makes a choice. It is always safer to let the other guy choose against himself.” Still, all officials in the Bucks’ brass who were in attendance brought along some good luck charm that day. For Erickson – a Protestant – that meant bringing a kibbutz medal that his wife had gotten on a trip to Israel. Wesley Pavalon – who was Jewish — came into the office wearing a St. Christopher medal that one of his good friends had given him and he was ritualistically chain-smoking cigarettes. Fishman had put a Winston Churchill silver dollar in his left shoe. The three men appeared on a dais before the Milwaukee press corps, who were there to capture what was already the biggest moment in the franchise’s 14-month history. Kennedy spoke over the phone line. “The card says Phoenix. What is Phoenix’s pleasure?”

Soon after, Kennedy flipped a 1964 half-dollar piece that he had received from the late Robert F. Kennedy. Kennedy was holding it in his right hand. After flipping it in the air, the coin landed back in his right hand and he flipped it over to the back of his left hand.  “Heads,” Suns owner Richard Bloch had called into the speaker, honoring the wishes of Suns fans who voted in favor of heads by 51.2 percent in the polls they ran in the newspaper. Kennedy flipped over the coin and revealed it: “The coin flip has come up … tails." Bedlam had erupted in Milwaukee. Pavalon immediately whooped and leapt up from his seat to bear-hug Erickson. He didn’t even notice that he had burned Erickson’s ear with the cigarette that he had been smoking in the run-up to the flip. Nor did Erickson care. Not after the Bucks had gotten Lew Alcindor. Media members in attendance were openly celebrating that the next big ticket coming into the NBA may be coming to Milwaukee. “Any further questions from Milwaukee?” Kennedy then asked. Erickson responded that he would be in contact with the commissioner in short order. As the television cameras kept filming, Kennedy continued flipping the coin in the air and it kept coming up tails.

Pavalon was pressed on what he would have called going into the coin flip. He said that he would have called tails. But that day was not the biggest coin flip he had ever participated in, according to Pavalon. “Yes, I won a hot dog when I was on the streets of Chicago and that was important then. And a year ago, I bought a farm in northern Wisconsin. We were $25,000 apart on the price, so we flipped a coin – double or nothing, too.,” he beamed. The Bucks had won the flip. They were diplomatic, choosing not to talk about Alcindor that day. It was far easier to do that knowing that they had the first pick in the NBA Draft. Phoenix, meanwhile, was forlorn. The faces of general manager Jerry Colangelo and head coach Johnny “Red” Kerr said as much after Kennedy called tails. Suns players, such as Gail Goodrich, questioned the integrity of having a coin flip for the first pick altogether. “I think it’s an injustice that they had to flip a coin at all,” Goodrich said. “We obviously have the worst team in the league, so we should have the first choice. That’s the way it is in football and baseball, why not basketball?” To add insult to injury, that wasn’t the only victory the Bucks had earned over the Suns that day. Milwaukee earned their 25th victory of the season by beating the Suns, 117-110, in Phoenix.

This was everything the Bucks had been building toward. The one voice curiously absent from the proceedings was Alcindor himself. It made sense as he was leading the Bruins, who were in search of a third consecutive title and in another run to the NCAA championship. He was certain to be the first man to land a million-dollar contract before ever playing a professional game. Two leagues were fighting over his services and months had been building towards his decision, which was about to change the professional game forever. Terry Bledsoe of the Milwaukee Journal went down to Louisville, Kentucky in search of a story that was about to change Milwaukee forever and sought for comments from Alcindor himself. UCLA was camped out there for the Final Four of the 1969 NCAA Men’s Tournament and they notoriously had a policy against athletes talking to reporters and that was upheld by legendary coach John Wooden. Being two wins away from another NCAA title meant no distractions were going to be tolerated. Instead of talking to Alcindor directly, Bledsoe awkwardly asked a few questions to Wooden, who acted as an intermediary for Alcindor and relayed responses through the hotel telephone. Those questions and answers went as follows:

UCLA eked by Drake in an 85-82 victory and cut the nets down after a 92-72 victory over Purdue. Finishing with 37 points and 20 rebounds, Alcindor finished his time at UCLA with three titles, and an 88-2 record.

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The Bucks had conquered the Suns and now it was time for them to conquer the ABA. There were no more jabs to be thrown from either side. Much was at stake. It was put up or shut up time and it came down to the man whose very future would be decided one way or another. The mystique around Alcindor existed back when he was a teenager starring for Power Memorial Academy, an all-boys catholic high school in New York. So did the winning. He was originally the “Tower from Power” and appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show after being named an All-American as a high school sophomore. He was friends with Wilt Chamberlain whenever Chamberlain was in New York playing against the Knicks. As schools and universities recruited and sought Alcindor, the calls and inquiries were so incessant that his parents made sure their phone number was unlisted.

There was a distance between the public and Alcindor well before he stepped on UCLA’s campus. He commanded intense media attention and the shield that was in place between the media and Bruins players only heightened it. Once he was set to leave the UCLA campus, Alcindor could no longer hide himself away. He’d have to stand firm on the decisions that would define the rest of his life.

He’d first experienced that head-on when he boycotted the 1968 Olympic games. The public met Alcindor’s decision with hostility, seeing him as the next of the great Black athletes who disrespected the country by not choosing to represent it on an international stage. What they didn’t understand was that Alcindor elected not to suit up for the Olympic team because of everything he had experienced and observed throughout his life growing up in Harlem. “Nothing in my whole life caused as unpleasant a commotion as the storm I got into over the Olympic boycott,” he said. “My decision not to play was, in the end, one I made for myself; I felt I was right, I still feel I was right, and in the same circumstances I would do the same thing again.”

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Alcindor was shaped by racial incidents that he witnessed and experienced throughout his life. It was when he was sent to an all-black boarding school right outside of Philadelphia as a fourth grader that he first realized who he was, and the significance of his skin color. “I never felt like I was Black until I was made to,” he said. He later returned to New York for schooling, but his parents knew that something had changed in Alcindor. Innocence was lost and he drove inward to find himself, especially as he grew in the public eye. His coach at Power Memorial, Jack Donohue, was once something of a father figure to Alcindor. That image shattered when Donohue, dressing down his players during halftime in a rare game that Power was losing, turned to Alcindor and called him the N-word. Donohue sought to rile up his players, but he almost lost Alcindor, who wanted to leave the school immediately after telling his parents. He chose to stay, but he obviously would never look at Donohue the same way again.

Alcindor’s growing star and excellence on the high school court brought wins. Lots of them. He later recalled that after going undefeated in his sophomore year at Power and winning a state championship his feelings towards basketball were changing: “Losing was unthinkable, and the game stopped being fun.”

Alcindor was no ordinary teenager, that much was clear. He soon learned, if he hadn’t already, that everyone wanted a piece of him—whether it was an autograph, a college assistant coach looking to recruit him, or even two professional sports leagues pulling out all the stops to woo him. This is the world that Alcindor had chosen, the road he traveled down. Seeking inner peace, he set out on a spiritual journey that would influence his decision-making for the rest of his life. The decision to either play for the Bucks in the NBA or the Nets in the ABA was set with specific ground rules by Alcindor himself. He was not looking to draw out a long negotiation and wished for each side to submit one blind bid for his services. The Bucks were the first to meet with Alcindor at a hotel in midtown New York, with John Erickson, Ray Patterson and Pavalon taking the lead to meet with the prized big man. Lew was accompanied by his father and his two advisors – UCLA alumni Sam Gilbert and Ralph Shapiro – in a meeting that spanned four hours. It was over that four-hour meeting that Pavalon connected with Alcindor on a human level and ended up creating a lifelong bond. “You’re a human being with a birth certificate, and you can go anywhere you choose – anywhere that will make you happy,” Pavalon said at one point in the meeting. “And you should be happy. But give us a chance to make you happy in Milwaukee. I believe in someone’s happiness.”

The next day, as the Bucks made it official by announcing they’d be taking Alcindor with the first overall pick in the 1969 NBA Draft, Alcindor and his advisors met with George Mikan and Arthur Brown, the owner of the Nets. Mikan and Brown had offered up a five-year contract, but with a salary that was substantially lower than the Bucks and NBA offered. Alcindor and his advisors were surprised and they asked whether that was Brown and Mikan’s final offer. Mikan insisted on it and Alcindor promptly informed the Nets, the ABA and the NBA commissioner that he’d be playing in Milwaukee. “That morning, I had been wealthy and unconcerned, back in New York with the city spread before me and no budget or curfew to keep me off its streets,” he’d later write. “By afternoon, I had been uprooted. I loved New York, but I would have to pass up a great deal of money to live there. Basketball was a business, that fact brought home to me my first day on the job. My first professional compromise: I chose Milwaukee.” It didn’t take long for Alcindor’s decision to travel fast throughout the hotel. Other ABA owners had reached Shapiro and Gilbert, and upped the ante on the league’s offer to the big fella, despite Alcindor’s insistence that he receive a single bid from both parties. The Nets and the ABA threw in the kitchen sink. The offer included a five-year, $3.2 million contract that included annuity payments until Alcindor was 41 years old, 10 percent of the ABA’s proposed TV contract and a five percent ownership stake in the Nets.

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It wasn’t as if Alcindor hadn’t made it known that he’d rather have played closer to home. Ultimately, that didn’t matter to him as he later recalled. “I was all tied up with respect and conviction and fairness. My religion taught me to abhor hypocrisy and right off the bat, I was faced with the choice between being where I wanted through double-dealing on the one hand and beginning a career honorably two thousand miles from nowhere on the other. I was pissed off. The Nets had the inside track and had blown it. I signed with Milwaukee.” News of Alcindor’s decision to join the Bucks hit newsstands on March 29, 1969, which signified another win for the young franchise. The ABA didn’t stop their pursuit of Alcindor and they promptly filed an antitrust suit against the NBA, alleging that the NBA and its clubs had pooled money to ensure they’d land Alcindor. The very strategy the ABA had enacted in their efforts to land Alcindor. Upon receiving the UPI’s College Player of the Year award in Atlanta, Alcindor explained his decision to go to Milwaukee in front of the press. “I had to weigh two decisions, the ABA and the NBA and the NBA seemed most solid and sound…With all things being equal, it would have been easier playing in New York. It would have been different if the ABA had a better offer, but things not being the same, I went to the NBA…It was my decision and nobody else’s not to get into a bidding war because it degrades the people involved. It would have made me feel like a flesh peddler, and I’m not that.”

After all of the bluster, the ABA and Mikan had squandered their biggest opportunity to be equal to, if not greater than, the NBA. Alcindor had agreed to a five-year contract with the Bucks that was worth up to $1.4 million. Incentives included a signing bonus, annuities and more. Meanwhile, in a press conference that was thrown together quickly held at the ABA’s headquarters, Mikan was defiant and insisted that negotiations were open with Alcindor. At one point, the unshaven Mikan brandished a $1 million cashier’s check like he was the head of Publisher’s Clearing House. He continued to insist that the ABA wasn’t in a fair fight against the NBA and the Bucks. “Alcindor doesn’t want to play in Milwaukee. He wants to play in New York. I’m not a good loser and never was. I want to tell you this. We’re in business. We’re damned mad. All we want to do is talk to the talent.”

The Bucks headed West to grab Alcindor’s signature and make his historic deal final on Wednesday, April 2, 1969. Putting pen to paper during a press conference held at a Hilton hotel in Beverly Hills, Alcindor discussed how he had never been to Milwaukee before but was eager to win and knew that his new head coach, Larry Costello, wanted to win too. Bucks officials raved about Alcindor’s integrity and the discussions that brought him to Milwaukee. It was Pavalon who said best what this all might mean for the city moving forward. “It’s a dream come true – a beginning of a whole new era of Milwaukee sports. You know that coin flip with Phoenix for first choice was based strictly on luck. But it was poetic justice that we won, because we had a better record, better attendance and more fan support. We deserved it.”

It was a landmark moment for the Bucks, one that had been 15 months in the making. But for Alcindor, the inevitable had come to pass. He was set to make more money than he had ever made in his life. Pressure was growing on his broad shoulders. Life in a new city would come with new experiences and a whole new set of challenges. More than he could have imagined. The ABA, meanwhile, had declared an all-out war on the NBA. Mikan lost the complete confidence of his ABA owners, and “Mr. Basketball” would soon be out of a job.

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Building the Milwaukee Bucks: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Oscar Robertson and the Rapid Rise of an NBA Franchise, 1968-1975 was released on July 7, 2025, and can be purchased from Amazon and wherever books are sold.

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This article originally appeared on Hoops Hype: Excerpt: Building the Bucks of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Oscar Robertson