Alexander Wolff took a fall,
He stepped off the cliff of ABA basketball,
Now he'll need some giant sieves,
To find a handful of Vermont Frost Heaves.

Sitting on the sidelines, reporting the goings-on of professional sports, you think to yourself: 'Hey, I could run a team better than [Insert Billionaire Moron Owner or Corporate Entity Here].'  Usually the cure for this is either heavy drinking to obliterate the notion, or perhaps running down to the plant where they brew up the battery acid for those Sears DIE HARDs and threatening to throw yourself in.

Alexander Wolff, much accomplished Sports Illustrated (SI) writer, has taken a different turn.  He's propping up crazy Joe Newman's viral American Basketball Association (ABA), the "I Have A Dream" league.  With  a little help from his bosses at SI, Alex has entered the Wonderland that is the ABA.

For those of you unfamiliar with the modern ABA, it is a league that sprouts franchises like Iowa grows corn.  If there is a nook or cranny where professional basketball could be played, the ABA is there.  Teams open and close with such frequency that their league directory looks more like the player roster from a club: 

Transactions for Tuesday, July 4, 2006: Add Memphis, Nashville, and Bossier City;  Drop Gainesville, Altoona, and Florida; Sheboygan, Wisconsin placed in IR;  Paramus, New Jersey side-lined by Reality Check (RC). 

One of those crannies is South Burlington, Vermont, home of the ABA Vermont Frost Heaves, the club which Wolff, and wife Vanessa, are trying to get on its feet for the ABA 2006-2007 season.

 Wolff is a great writer.  He releases stories on his adventures down the ABA rabbit hole to both to us in the minor league media, and to SI for its publishing purposes.  He is also very passionate about his town, his state, and the notion of developing great regional basketball. Unlike many of the owners in the Munchausen-manic ABA, he's pretty practical about what can be accomplished with this style of basketball.

When we spoke at this year's ABA All-Star shindig at the Bank Atlantic Center in Sunrise, Florida, just outside Ft. Lauderdale, he was envisioning a system of small regional leagues under the ABA umbrella doing home grown basketball with a very local flavor.  A league that lets little towns capture a piece of the pro sports magic.

Okay, so he also talks about green initiatives in sports.  You have to give it to him: He's a Vermonter, the only place where Kermit could find it easy being green.

Like his counterpart in the Lewis Carroll story, Wolff is chasing after a big white rabbit by the name of Newman who is part of a very up-ended world of basketball. Joltin' Joe announces the return to markets so dead for the ABA that even George Clooney, back in his miracle ER days, could not revive them.  He's putting teams into markets head-to-head where the NBA's rapidly expanding D-League is playing.

Newman can shout "Off with their Heads" about the D-League from his throne in Indianapolis, but it will be guys in the trenches like Wolff who will pay the price if the league tries to be too many things to too many people.

That's the macro level. Right now, Wolff, Michael Healy, his director of operations, and  Will Voigt, his head coach, are immersed in the micro level of putting together a competitive team in the Filene's world of bargain basement basketball.

In his current diary installment that was released to  the media recently (See: Diary of an ABA Open Tryout: Vermont Frost Heaves Take 40 Gallons of Saps to Find Pro Camp Invitees, MLN - The Raw Feed, July 5, 2006), Wolff may be the first owner in professional sports history to keep a franchise fresh just by writing about his experiences as an owner with a lot of passion and a dash of ironic humor.

In the piece, he chronicles the trials of basketball trials, from the unhappy camper who couldn't showcase his lethal jumper from the corner because of the gym's side baskets, to Taylor Coppenrath, who would make an amazing Frost Heave if only he didn't have this burning desire to be in Orlando to make the Indiana Pacers summer camp.  The piece does come up with a lot of the issues that low class A league sports face.  It does not, however, give face to the much more serious world of developmental sports that the NBA D-League, the USBL, and hopefully, what's left of the CBA, practice.  

Last year a lot of young men were given more opportunity to play in the NBA and keep their skills up in the NBA's D-League.  This year the D-League will ramp up with more teams in better markets, and have even more relevance to the sport because it's developing real draft picks for the first time in basketball history.

Wolff will produce one of the better clubs in the ABA.  In today's volatile world of basketball leagues, they could as easily be in the USBL or the CBA under the appropriate circumstances.   He has sensible people who come down from a reasonable basketball world around him.  He should be fine.

Alex's Adventures in Wonderland though, reverberate out through his great copy into the world of Sports Illustrated.  Is his narration of the goings on in the ABA to people who don't know much about minor league sports a fair portrayal of what our sports world is all about?

The ABA is, to the image of minor league sports, what Dennis Rodman  is to the image of professional basketball players.

Sports Illustrated is not a minor league friendly publication.  Their focus is perpetuating the big myth machines of the majors.  They'd like the world to think of regional professional basketball as some sort of subterranean sub-standard section of sports.   The minor leagues are a joke. A hoot. Something to get a grin out of before returning to the world of "real sports."

Like the freak show that is Dennis Rodman, the ABA is the exception, not the rule, in minor league sports.  There are too many credible leagues, including minor league baseball, and  the rising D-League in basketball, that deserve a lot more street cred and respect than they get.  

This, after all, is where sports is still played with drive and fire every day. Sports that doesn't turn it on in the latter part of the season when it's time to perform for the cameras in NBA playoff runs.  The minors and better indies remind us that the power of sports is not in the ink drying on fat contracts, but in the drive and passion that can infect fields, courts and rinks from Vermont to Arizona.

Wolff wants a good team, and to keep his bosses at SI happy.  Both are noble goals.  If he can get fans at the major league level to see the cool side of minor league and independent sports, the side that now more than 93 million fans know locally and regionally, then he's done the sport and the business of sports this level a favor. 

Without the bigger picture though, he's opening the door for the usual major league mockery of minor sports that does a disservice to the  business people and players in towns great and small who put out a major product in their minor towns.

The SI project on the minors is a unique spotlight, sadly aimed at a crooked fifth corner of a five sided room.  Wolff is gifted and sensitive to these angles. Hopefully SI will run the full breadth of the story, and not red line it down to the side show moments that Wolff will chronicle.

- Brian Ross