The Billion-Dollar ABA Deal

• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Textile Magnates of New Jersey
• Chapter 2 The Wild West of the Red, White, and Blue
• Chapter 3 Purchasing the Carolina Cougars
• Chapter 4 Relocation and the Birth of the Spirits of St. Louis
• Chapter 5 Stars, Characters, and Bob Costas on the Radio
• Chapter 6 An Unsustainable League
• Chapter 7 Secret Meetings and Secret Handshakes
• Chapter 8 The June 1976 Summit at the Dunfey
• Chapter 9 Four Teams In, Two Teams Out
• Chapter 10 The Ghost Franchise at the Negotiating Table
• Chapter 11 Donald Schupak's Legal Masterpiece
• Chapter 12 One-Seventh of Four: Drafting the Clause
• Chapter 13 The Words "In Perpetuity"
• Chapter 14 The Final Signature
• Chapter 15 A Quiet First Decade
• Chapter 16 The Magic, Larry, and Michael Boom
• Chapter 17 Cable Television and the New Media Frontier
• Chapter 18 Checks in the Mailbox
• Chapter 19 The NBA's Growing Regret
• Chapter 20 David Stern's Decades-Long Headache
• Chapter 21 The Legal Battles and Challenges
• Chapter 22 The Empire of Passive Income
• Chapter 23 The $500 Million Settlement
• Chapter 24 Legacy of the Greatest Sports Contract Ever Made
• Chapter 25 Ghosts of the ABA in the Modern NBA

In the midsummer heat of June 1976, behind the closed doors of the Dunfey Family’s Parker House hotel in Boston, professional basketball was fighting for its financial life. The American Basketball Association—a flamboyant, cash-strapped insurgent league defined by red-white-and-blue basketballs, three-point arcs, and breathtaking playground style—was collapsing under the weight of bounced payroll checks and empty arenas. Across the negotiating table sat the National Basketball Association, established, conservative, and eager to end an expensive bidding war for elite talent, yet wary of absorbing the financial wreckage of its rival. The terms were brutally simple: four ABA franchises would be welcomed into the NBA fraternity, while the remaining outposts would be bought out, disbanded, and wiped from the ledger of history.

Among the men facing extinction were Ozzie and Daniel Silna, two brothers from New Jersey who had made their fortune manufacturing double-knit polyester. Just two years earlier, fueled by a passion for the sport and the dream of owning a marquee franchise, the Silnas had purchased a struggling club, relocated it to the Midwest, and rebranded it as the Spirits of St. Louis. The team had been an electric, chaotic spectacle—boasting dazzling young stars, eccentric bench-warmers, and an ambitious twenty-two-year-old radio announcer named Bob Costas—but it had failed to secure a ticket into the promised land of the NBA. Conventional wisdom dictated that the Silnas, possessing virtually no leverage, would take a modest cash payout, lick their wounds, and walk away into obscurity, just like the other liquidated owners.

Instead, the Silnas and their brilliant young attorney, Donald Schupak, authored the most audacious masterstroke in the history of modern sports business. Sensing that the established league was desperately shortsighted, the St. Louis brass refused a standard lump-sum severance. In place of immediate millions, they proposed an obscure, alternative arrangement: they would dissolve their roster and surrender their arena, provided they received a small slice of future broadcast revenue generated by the four surviving ABA teams entering the NBA. To the cash-conscious NBA owners of 1976, television was merely an afterthought—a medium that broadcast championship games on late-night tape delay and barely covered production costs. Convinced they were trading away pennies from an imaginary future, the league agreed.

Crucially, the contract contained a phrase that would echo down the decades like a financial curse: the payments would continue for as long as the NBA existed. In perpetuity.

What the NBA treated as an inconsequential concession transformed into an engine of unimaginable wealth. As the league exploded in the 1980s and 1990s behind the global stardom of Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Michael Jordan, network rights fees skyrocketed from modest regional sums into billion-dollar international bonanzas. Cable television, satellite packages, and digital streaming revolutionized the media landscape, and with every signature penned by NBA executives, a guaranteed percentage quietly flowed directly into the mailboxes of the Silna brothers. For nearly four decades, without owning an arena, selling a single ticket, employing a player, or winning a game, the ghost franchise of the Spirits of St. Louis collected hundreds of millions of dollars from an industry that desperately wished they would disappear.

This book tells the definitive inside story of that legendary agreement—from its improbable origins on the smoke-filled fringes of the ABA to the high-stakes corporate legal battles in Manhattan skyscrapers that finally brought it to an end. It is an exploration of vision and folly, of legal craftsmanship pitted against institutional arrogance, and of a transforming American sports economy that outgrew everyone’s wildest imaginations. Most of all, it is the story of two outsiders who dared to think beyond the immediate horizon, wagering on the future of media itself to secure the greatest business deal American sports will ever see.

Before there were boardroom negotiations with league attorneys, before there was a professional basketball team flying commercial across the Midwest, there were bolts of synthetic yarn stacked floor to ceiling in warehouse bays along the industrial corridors of northern New Jersey.

Ozzie and Daniel Silna were sons of the garment trade. Their father, a Jewish immigrant who arrived in the United States carrying modest savings and a fierce work ethic, had planted the family flag squarely in the buzzing ecosystem of the New York metropolitan area's textile economy. In the middle decades of the twentieth century, that world was loud, demanding, and fiercely competitive. Fortunes were won and lost on the changing whims of department store buyers, the micro-movements of overseas wool markets, and the mechanical reliability of circular knitting looms. The margins could be thin as tissue, but for men who understood how to buy raw yarn low, stitch it into cloth efficiently, and sell it before taste shifted, the cash rewards were enormous.

The two brothers complemented each other in the way of siblings who spend their entire adult lives in business together. Ozzie, the older of the two, born in 1932, was the driver. He had an instinctive eye for operational mechanics, an aggressive appetite for taking market risk, and a personality that was blunt, pragmatic, and rarely bothered by conventional consensus. Daniel, born twelve years later in 1944, was quieter, more cerebral, and possessed a deliberate, analytical demeanor. Where Ozzie liked to charge into a room and push the edges of an opportunity, Dan tended to look at the angles, weighing probabilities and studying details that others glossed over. Both of them, however, shared an unshakable family loyalty and a sharp instinct for timing.

That timing could not have been better when, in the late 1960s, a chemical miracle swept through the American wardrobe.

For generations, the clothing business had been chained to natural fibers. Cotton shrank and wrinkled. Wool required delicate handling and was hot in summer. Linen crumpled the moment an office worker sat down in an armchair. Then came polyester, a synthetic polymer spun into durable filaments that defied ordinary wear. Even better, European textile engineers perfected a mechanical technique known as double-knitting. By utilizing two sets of needles working in tandem, double-knit machines produced a fabric with two interlocking layers. The resulting cloth had body, resisted tearing, retained vibrant dyes with extraordinary stubbornness, and, most miraculously of all, stretched with human movement before springing immediately back into shape without a single crease.

To high-fashion purists on Seventh Avenue, double-knit polyester was a synthetic abomination that looked plastic under bright lights and felt stiff against the skin. But Ozzie and Dan Silna were not designing haute couture for Parisian runways; they were manufacturing cloth for ordinary Americans. And ordinary Americans in 1969 could not get enough of it.

Men wanted leisure suits that could survive an eight-hour shift in an office and a subsequent backyard barbecue without requiring an iron. Women bought colorful pantsuits and flared slacks that could be tossed into an automatic washing machine, dried on medium heat, and hung back in a closet looking pristine. Suburban department stores like Sears, JCPenney, and Montgomery Ward pleaded with textile mills for inventory.

The brothers threw themselves into the craze with ferocious energy. Their business, based in North Bergen and operating under names that included Silna Textile Company, became a manufacturing juggernaut. Ozzie scoured the globe for state-of-the-art knitting machines, investing aggressively in automated hardware while competitors hesitated. In the industrial parks of New Jersey, the Silna machines ran around the clock, roaring with the rhythmic clatter of thousands of steel needles transforming petrochemical threads into millions of yards of polyester.

By the dawn of the 1970s, the brothers were rich. They were not merely comfortable; they had generated the kind of liquid, private wealth that allowed them to live with immense freedom. They had fine homes, country club privileges, and substantial investment portfolios. Yet, unlike many self-made industrial magnates who channeled their windfalls into traditional pursuits like thoroughbred racing, real estate developments, or blue-chip art collections, the Silnas were preoccupied by something that had captured their imaginations as boys growing up in the shadow of New York City.

They were hopelessly, passionately in love with the game of basketball.

In northern New Jersey during the postwar years, basketball was not an elite executive pastime. It was a street game, played on asphalt courts behind brick public schools, on chain-link blacktops where the backboards were made of rusted fan-shaped steel and the rims had long lost their nets. It was a game of sharp elbows, bounce passes threaded through crowded keyways, and endless debates carried out over corned beef sandwiches about the New York Knicks.

The Knicks of the early 1970s were the toast of New York culture. Coached by the stoic Red Holzman and led by Willis Reed, Walt Frazier, Bill Bradley, and Dave DeBusschere, the team played an exquisite, selfless brand of basketball that captured Madison Square Garden and the national sporting press. They won NBA championships in 1970 and 1973, bringing a cool, intellectual glamour to the sport. Celebrities sat courtside; corporate executives fought for season tickets.

Ozzie and Dan Silna were among those regulars in the stands, taking in the action with an obsession that went beyond casual fandom. They knew the stats, followed college recruiting, and admired the strategy. But as their bank accounts swelled from the profits of the double-knit boom, simple spectatorship began to feel insufficient. They did not just want to buy court-side seats; they wanted to build a roster. They wanted to sit in the draft room, argue over scouting reports, and watch men wearing jerseys bearing an emblem they owned compete for national championships.

There was only one problem: the National Basketball Association was essentially a closed guild.

By 1973, the NBA consisted of seventeen franchises, run mostly by conservative, entrenched sports figures, arena operators, and old-money syndicates. An expansion team was exorbitantly expensive—costing several million dollars just for the privilege of stocking a roster with other clubs' unwanted bench-warmers—and the league's governors were in no hurry to dilute their product further. Furthermore, buying an existing franchise required an open bidding war against seasoned sports tycoons. When the Silnas kicked the tires on potential NBA opportunities, they found a wall of indifference. The old boys' network of the established league did not readily roll out the red carpet for two young, brash textile manufacturers from North Bergen, no matter how many millions of yards of polyester they had sold.

The brothers, however, were not the type of men to accept a polite rejection and return quietly to inspecting knitting mills. If the established sporting aristocracy refused to give them an entrance through the front door, they would look for a side entrance. And in the chaotic, wide-open landscape of American professional sports in the early 1970s, there was an alternate world waiting just across the tracks: a wild, renegade operation called the American Basketball Association.