Common card was treasured find

A stack of cards greeted me at my desk earlier this month, and I was immediately intrigued.

From what I gathered, our publisher had received a stack of random collectible sports cards. The basketball cards went to me, and the baseball and hockey cards went elsewhere among the staff.

I pored through the basketball cards, noticing they were a bunch of what collectors call “commons.” To best explain it, let me tell you as a child I bought an entire box of NBA Hoops cards and unpacked seven Detlef Schrempf cards before my first Michael Jordan.

Many of the cards were commons lying about being valuables. Scottie Pippen rookie card? No, it’s a Scottie Pippen Rookie Debut card. It’s a card that tells you about when he was a rookie, issued somewhere around his 10th season.

But then, Wendell Ladner’s face stared back at me.

“Tams,” the card said. Oh, this is an ABA card, I said to myself.

I didn’t know much about the American Basketball Association as a youngster, and there wasn’t much reason I should. It disbanded two years before I was born, with the NBA accepting four teams and buying out the two others. One of those buyouts cost the NBA roughly $800 million. That’s a great story, but it’s one for another day.

I didn’t know any of this information until one summer at my grandmother’s house. I went there during summers to work, and during a free afternoon caught the HBO documentary “Loose Balls,” based on Terry Pluto’s book of the same name about the ABA. I was hooked, and have spent the rest of my life gobbling up any history I could find on the league.

The ABA added the 3-point shot, the dunk contest, and the red, white and blue ball now known as the “money ball” during the All-Star weekend’s annual 3-point contest.

It also gave us Ladner. He was detailed in Pluto’s book, but I Googled myself a few reminders. Ladner, part of the Memphis Tams on the card I had. He also played for the Memphis Pros, Carolina Cougars, Kentucky Colonels and finally the New York Nets.

Former teammate Julius “Dr. J” Erving said Ladner was his strangest teammate — a huge statement in the ABA — and that he wanted to be Burt Reynolds with a basketball.

I didn’t realize until my research that the Will Ferrell movie “Semi-Pro” was somewhat spoofing the character of Ladner, or that he never got a chance to join his Nets teammates in the NBA. He was aboard Eastern Air Lines Flight 66 on a June 24, 1975, flight, and was among the passengers who perished in the crash. Medical examiners identified him quickly from the 1974 ABA championship ring he wore with the Colonels.

The Nets never retired Ladner’s No. 4 jersey, but nobody wore it for 17 years after his death because trainer Fritz Massmann never issued it.

Your average basketball fan won’t remember Ladner, and he had a small impact on the game of basketball. But I like to think he’s somewhere with the basketball gods, surprised his card still gets passed around more than 40 years later.

This wasn’t a rare card, by any means, but it was a treasured find in my book.

Kevin Wilson is editor of The Eastern New Mexico News. Contact him at:

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