**Original interview and story from December 2016**
In 1997, the Notorious B.I.G’s second and final studio album ‘Life After Death’ was released. The lyrics to the last song on that album are abrasive, and come with a backstory, hence its title ‘I Got A Story To Tell’. The four minutes and forty-nine seconds wrap up Biggie’ final lyrical masterpiece, twenty years later hip hop fans everywhere still bumping their speakers to any of his greatest hits, evoking his timeless hip hop greatness. And if Christopher Wallace were still alive today, he could perhaps tell another story to that same smooth, jazzy, melodic beat. This story belongs to a legend of another kind.
Before Adrian Wojnarowski and Shams Charania were competing to see who could press the send button fast enough and get the most likes, retweets, or comments. Before media and news became accessible with just the touch of a button. Back in a time when people cracked open a freshly delivered newspaper to go with their morning coffee, there was one standard setter in the sports writing world who made his living around a pen and pad, a round ball and ninety-four feet of hardwood. His first love was baseball, but he fell in love with basketball, a marriage that has stood the test of time.
Peter Vecsey is 73 now. He is over 40 years removed from a two-year stint in the Army Special Forces where he was a green beret, four decades from his days at Rucker playing and coaching the Westsiders to street championships, where he ran the break with a young Julius Erving. He traveled with numerous NBA teams in the 1970s and 1980s, becoming the leading basketball columnist on the globe – the first ever journalist to specialize in one sport. In the 1990s, his “Hoop Du Jour” column in the New York Post was a wonderful blend of insight and unbridled comedy, cracking jokes at NBA players far and wide. He broke news, did top notch interviews with the NBA’s best, and gave pinpoint analysis, blunt and honest takes about the NBA’s superstars.
The Basketball Hall of Famer, recipient of the 2009 Curt Gowdy award for journalism excellence, has achieved a basketball life that many would envy. He has seen the NBA from its infancy, mesmerized at the “saultry skills of Sweetwater Clifton, who in 1950 became the second African-American player to sign an NBA contract. He saw and covered the ABA - the NBA’s counterpart league in the ‘60s and ‘70s, built on showmanship and flash and entertainment - in its entirety. Along the way, he forged close relationships with guys like Wilt, Dr. J, and Tiny Archibald. He is perhaps the most well-known basketball writer of all time, while at the same time maybe its most polarizing.
Vecsey, born in Queens, N.Y., had little use for academics growing up, one of those guys who’d rather play ball than do his math homework or catch a ball game rather than study for a chemistry exam. “My grades weren’t the greatest”, he admits. “I never really cared for school.” Though it affected his athletic eligibility at Archbishop Molloy high school in Briarwood, he saw the roots of the New York City game through guys like Connie Hawkins, Roger Brown, and Larry Brown. “New York City ball was the best back then. No other city was close. There was no Chicago or LA. It was all New York. ”
Vecsey attended Hofstra University, on Long Island, but only for six months – he often jokes that he’s “110 credits shy of a degree” - before leaving to accept a full-time position at the New York Daily News, starting there in 1963, two years before he served in the Special Forces (which he did until 1967). He credits his style and writing development to trial and error, and guys he emulated, from sports writing pros to his wife. Two particular writers, he says, influenced him greatly. “David Wolf, who wrote ‘Foul’ (a biography of Connie Hawkins), I really emulated his style, his comedy.” He then mentions a Washington Bullets PR funny man for more influence. “The Bullets had this PR guy, Marc Splaver, who would say clever things like ‘Wes Unseld has to be the world’s best rebounder below the rim.’ I really incorporated that into my writing.” His first wife, he says, was also a strong helping hand. “(She) was really helpful. She would tweak my clichés ingeniously.”
Vecsey got his hoop fix at Harlem’s famed Rucker Park, recruiting a young kid with a fluffy afro and otherworldly leaping ability to join him and play for his “Westsiders” squad. Julius Erving, future NBA megastar, was Vecsey’s right hand man in those days on the playground, days the veteran writer recalls very fondly when they won two championships, beginning in 1971. “It was loaded back then when Julius played. Willis Reed was there for three years. Walt Frazier, Bill Bradley, Cazzie Russell, Dean Meminger. Basically every Knick except Dick Barnett.” Vecsey also recounts a particularly memorable encounter with one of the greatest streetball legends to ever grace a blacktop. “Julius and I’s team played against Earl Manigault (known as ‘The Goat’). I remember guarding Manigault and I said to him ‘just don’t dunk on me. You know, dunk on me forwards, not backwards (laughs)”. He’s quick though to recall his greatest memory from the years of winning championships on the famed court. “Running a break with Julius to my side. I looked off the defender and fed Julius and he did one of his crazy dunks that he would do back in the day, you know, send the crowd into a frenzy.”
He quickly became one of the best sports writers around, sinking his teeth into the ABA. “Those ABA guys could compete,” he says about the quality of talent. “Back in those days, they would play exhibition games against the NBA, and it was very close. With the consolidation (when the leagues merged in 1976), those ABA guys became stars in the NBA.” He traveled with the Philadelphia 76ers, New York Knicks, New Jersey Nets, Atlanta Hawks, Boston Celtics in the 1980s, and he’s not short on naming his lasting friends and most enjoyable guys to be around. Larry Bird, he says, was his favorite.
“Bird was the best guy to be around,” he says. “He held nothing in and answered every question.” He remembers a particularly funny interview with Bird after a particularly crushing defeat. “After they lost to LA in the Finals, I was giving him real s***.” I told him I’d get him a key to my YMCA (laughs).” Vecsey, also, is forever appreciative of the honesty that was so widespread back then among his interview topics.
“Everything was on the record back then," he says. “From the owners, to the ball boys. I’ve read a lot of stuff from when I was covering the Knicks and the Nets and they didn’t hold anything back back then.” He even worked out with the 1986 Celtics on occasion - a squad considered one of the best of all time - and reflects warmly on his time with legendary Celtics coach Red Auerbach. “One time I passed Red in the hall I said ‘hey Red how are you?’ and he’d go ‘(bleep) you Vecsey (laughs). He did it because I would give him s*** about re-signing Tiny (Archibald). But I appreciated Red. We ended up ok.”
One of Vecsey’s closest former player friends is Micheal Ray Richardson - the former New York Knick, Golden State Warrior, and New Jersey Net, a four-time All-Star in the early 1980s. He covered Richardson during his best times and also his most turbulent times dealing with substance abuse. On many occasions, he went to bat for Richardson, including in 2007 when Richardson, at the time coaching the Albany Patroons of the CBA, made comments that persuaded some people to label him anti-semetic.
"I love talking with him. What an incredible story he turned out to be,” says Vecsey. Richardson, in fact, was coaching professionally in Canada in 2013 when he invited Vecsey up to London, Ontario to see a game. Vecsey, regrettably, did not have an up to date passport at the time.
At NBC - where he worked throughout the NBA’s contract with the network after the league had switched coverage from CBS, Vecsey was the authority on trade news, free agency, an inside track on all happenings with the league. He was their chief interviewer on halftime and pregame shows, asking the tough questions that he was known for to stars like Penny Hardaway and a 20-year-old Kobe Bryant. He put the Latrell Sprewell-PJ Carlesimo story (Sprewell choked Carlesimo after a disagreement at practice) from 1997 together with unrivaled quickness – “within an hour” – a hallmark of his fast working days. He was a mainstay on the Prudential Halftime reports with Hannah Storm and Bill Walton, and later on when the sponsor became NetZero.
Vecsey moved to TNT in 1997, covering the draft, before becoming an analyst on ‘Inside the NBA’, a stint that revealed a somewhat contentious relationship with he and Charles Barkley, who started with the network at the dawn of the 2000-2001 season. People have made a lot of Vecsey and Barkley’s relationship over the years, some of which can be revealed from Barkley’s studio debut. it’s a subject though, that you get the sense he is tired of discussing.
“Barkley, people ask me about that”, he says, delving into the dishonest Barkley. “There was a time in Houston (when Barkley played for the Rockets) we were talking about something, just the two of us, and then he gets asked something and gives them (the interviewers) what I said to him.” It is a relationship that Vecsey says he hasn’t been able to mend. “Karl Malone, I saw him at the All-Star game in New Orleans (2014), and we’re cool now. I told him we would be great doing a show together,” he says with a laugh. “But Barkley, we haven’t been able to do that (make amends).”
Vecsey represents part of the older generation of basketball media that the core of today's coverage is built on. Vecsey, along with the likes of Bob Ryan, has a knowledge of the history of basketball that is tough to match.
Whether it’s a discussion on all timers, or the current game, he knows his stuff. The days of him being the NBA’s king of story breaking and its number one source for news are over, having retired from the New York Post in 2012. He now lives on Long Island with his wife, where they house many rescue animals, a nothing short of admirable undertaking that he is quick to dispel as just a hobby. “I wouldn’t remotely call it that. It’s a full-time commitment, emotionally, physically, financially. We’re down to six dogs, two of which are dying, eight cats, and three horses. At one time we had as many as 11, 19, and 5.” Vecsey is a father of three, one of whom, Joseph, is a comic who can be seen performing often at Long Island and New York City shows.
In a career filled with bucket list type experiences - covering the Bird-Magic rivalry, analyzing MJ’s Bulls alongside good buddy Dr. J, scrimmaging with Bird, McHale, DJ, and Parish, all while rubbing elbows with basketball royalty, he says he only has one regret.
“I wish I could’ve analyzed more," he says. Vecsey was a mainstay on NBA TV in the 2000s with former Laker Gail Goodrich, but, when the station moved its production to Atlanta in 2007, Vecsey was not retained.
You talk with him, and you learn that he is a basketball encyclopedia – so much history of the game, so many interesting facts emanating from his mind. In his basketball life, he has done it all.
The media landscape around the NBA and its coverage is now more opinionated than ever before. For that, there is one to thank. One who has a rich story, steeped in basketball history.
If only Biggie were still around to tell it.
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