The National Basketball Association is seeing record high contracts for its players, teams are selling for record numbers and TV deals haven’t been more lucrative. None of this would be possible without the American Basketball Association (ABA).
Slam dunks, the 3-point shot, the creativity and flare of the modern NBA product wouldn’t have been possible without the trailblazers of the ABA and its beautiful white, blue and red ball.
Filmmaker Michael Husain directed/produced “The Waiting Game,” which explores how the ABA helped build the billion-dollar business the NBA is and how many ABA players were left out of the rewards of what the NBA has become.
The film started it’s one-week run at the Gaslight Twin Cinema in Durango on Friday.
“It's going really well,” Husain said. “The audiences have responded incredibly well to the film. It's a film that kind of hits on a few different layers. It is a sports film. When we were making the film, we knew there's going to be an age break at some point where people don't even know the ABA ever existed … the ABA was just incredibly influential in what has become modern pro basketball. It was fun … they had a flare and so that was a really fun part of the story. But then it is also a business and legal ethics tale, because once the two leagues combined … the ABA players really got left out in the cold.”
The film features legendary sports commentator Bob Costas, NBA Hall of Famer and ABA legend Julius Erving, ABA stars Spencer Haywood and James Jones and more.
Husain has a long career of working on sports films such as the “ESPN SportsCentury” series in the early 2000s and the 30 for 30 Short film “Slick, Nancy and the Telethon” in 2016.
Growing up in Indiana, Husain always knew about the ABA because the Indiana Pacers were one of the four ABA teams that joined the NBA when the ABA-NBA merger happened in 1976.
Husain’s first ABA-related film was when he produced, “Slick, Nancy and the Telethon,” in 2016 which was the story of how the Pacers avoided financial ruin in 1977 after joining the NBA from the ABA.
In December 2021, Husain met Scott Tarter, one of the co-founders of the Dropping Dimes Foundation, an Indianapolis nonprofit with “the focus and concern is for the well-being and betterment of former players of the American Basketball Association and their families, who are experiencing financial or medical difficulties and have encountered significant financial hardship or sickness,” according to the Dropping Dimes Foundation’s website.
Tarter told Husain about the foundation’s goals and Husain was stunned to hear about the cases of hardship some of the former ABA stars were facing. Former ABA players were expecting pensions like the NBA players got and there wasn’t anything for them. Tarter told him that the foundation had been working with the NBA for over a year and were about six weeks away from getting something done for the former ABA players.
Husain thought it would be a great idea to follow Tarter and the foundation for those six weeks to capture the moment when the ABA players would finally be compensated for a 10-minute film.
Then nothing happened. The six weeks went by and months went by without resolution. As the former players started to get sick and the foundation waited, Husain realized this was going to be a larger story and film. He started going back, found the backstory of the ABA and started interviewing former players.
The title “The Waiting Game” came from former ABA players getting sick and some dying. They were playing a waiting game to see if their pension would come.
Husain said the film is still a long ways away from finding a streaming platform as it is a grassroots independent film. It does have a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
It was important for Husain to show the film in places that had ABA franchises, hence showing the film in Colorado, home of former ABA franchise the Denver Nuggets.
bkelly@durangoherald.com
