NBA Hall of Fame trainwreck ... Peter Vecsey

Here's my Vecsey story...

I'm at a NBA playoff game about a decade ago. I had never met or spoken to Vecsey before.

He comes over to me in the press room shouting.

"Who the fuck do you think you are reporting something like that? It figures, you're just a kid. I should have known. How could you have written that bullshit. God damn, what a fucking moron."

He storms out of the press room.

I was at the game writing a sidebar and at that point had not ever written a NBA story. I was 23 years old and was a GA/Baseball writer.

Our columnist comes over.

"What'd you do?"
"Fuck if I know..."

"Have you ever met him before?"
"No."

Our columnist runs off after him to find out what is going on.

At this point, there is a long line of people I've never met coming up to me telling me stories about what an asshole this guy is, how nobody likes him and how I should have knocked him out.

Our columnist comes back.

"He thought you were someone else."
"Who did he think I was?
"He didn't say."

I figured I would get an apology, but didn't.

 

Doug Collins is turrble and hooorrible, depending on whether you want to reference Barkley or Walton. Just painful to listen to. He's one of those former athlete/coach broadcasters who obviously knows way more about the game than nearly all his viewers but has spent his whole TV career repeating the same 15 or 20 cliched observations.

 

Don't forget, Marv, the first three minutes of the second half are so important. And a team has to finish strong in the last two minutes.

He says those things every game. Every quarter. Sometimes even combines his favorites to, "Marv, when I coached Michael, he had that instinct to know to take over the last two minutes of a quarter so we'd finish strong."

 

My story from way back. Playing in summer hoops league that Vecsey played in. We are playing Vescey's team. Teammate of mind and one of Vecsey's teammates get in aggressive tussle over rebound. Ref blows whistle - Vecsey comes over and slugs our guy in the face. Teammates grab Vecsey and we grab our guy before bedlam ensued. Clearly he was a real hot head on the hoops court.

 

Boom,

Why didn't you punch Vecsey?

 

I think his writing on today's game has gotten a bit old and the bitterness can overwhelm it - although I'm still a sucker for the nicknames; I can't help it.

Where I do think he's still really good is that he often writes quite extensively about guys from the NBA's past. Whether it's a story on Roy Boe - the old ABA owner - a series of stories on Cotton Fitzsimmons when he was dying, or a story on the Lakers team whose plane crashed, he still does provide stories I don't see anywhere else.

 

Then there's the story -- I don't know if it's apocryphal or not -- about a pickup game in which Vecsey was on the same team as Albom. Mitch was apparently shooting almost every time down the court, and Vecsey told him that if he took one more jumper, he would bust him in the face. Mitch launched another one on the next possession, and sure enough, Vecsey slugged him. Like I said, I can't vouch for the truthfulness of the story, but it sure sounds in character for both guys.

 

I don't even care about his character, which sucks. All I know is that he wrote so much crap over the years that he gave a bad name to the really good journalists. This guy is no Hall of Famer.

 

Can't vouch for that one. Never saw Mitch speak to other reporters, let alone play ball. But I played in a media game during the Finals somewhere in the Bad Boys era in Detroit when Pete and Jere Longman, then of the Philadelphia Inquirer, got into a fist fight. Mike Abdenour, the trainer, came out and cleaned things up. "It's this damn court," he said. There were a lot of fights in Auburn Hills then. Like Pete as an NBA lifer. As a Hall of Famer, don't think so. In fact, it's a joke.

 

I don't know the guy, but it sounds very much like they let him in because they were afraid he'd beat them up.

 

Man, I forgot it was Reilly that broke the story and how he got lambasted by the so-called experts. That was back when Reilly was still the shit. He had a great few years on that back page.

As for Vecsey, as a casual NBA fan, I dig his stuff from time to time. It makes me laugh on occasion. I agree with whomever he said he's great on NBA history. Let's face it, those kind of reporters, the ones who actually knew players, execs, etc. on a personal, even level, are dying out, or are dead.

 

If the Vecsey punching Albom story is true, it's the only reason I have to like Vecsey.