The first time basketball stopped
A look back at the 1998-99 lockout that brought NBA basketball to a halt—and preceded San Antonio's first title run.
Time presses on, my newborn reminds me. Even confined to our home, with days of the week bleeding together, nights mostly absent of sleep, sports at a halt, the news a loop of horrors and administrative malfeasance, and South Texas entering another endless summer, there’s still a sense of the passing of time in seeing our 5-week-old’s hair come in and his arms, legs and neck fill out with the weight he desperately needed at birth. Some playoff basketball would still help, though.
This year’s pandemic-induced suspension of the NBA and life as we know it marks the third time the league’s been forced to cancel part of a season. The other two were both lockouts, in 2011 and from 1998 to 1999, in which impasses between players and owners carried over into scheduled games.
The 1998-99 lockout immediately followed the events of ESPN’s The Last Dance, with owners and players failing to come to terms on a new collective bargaining agreement. League operations shuttered on July 1, just weeks after the Bulls completed another three-peat, beginning a long, indefinite wait for everyone. It was officially the league’s third work stoppage, but the first one to actually cost games.
The lockout divided players and grated on fans, who skewed more anti-labor than they might today. Many saw the nine-figure contracts recently signed by guys like Shawn Kemp and viewed a refusal to play as a sign of the times in an increasingly money-driven league. Bar and restaurant owners who depended on gameday revenue suffered, while it was equally bad business for the players themselves, who missed out on salaries and other business opportunities during the lockout. The Spurs, despite a title run once play resumed, still reportedly absorbed a loss of $12 million that season.
The Ringer’s oral history of the standoff includes accounts from a contentious players’ union meeting on October 22. In it, three members of the Utah Jazz had just attempted to sway a group of some 240 into accepting a low-ball offer that was on the table—an effort that then-NBPA head Billy Hunter believed to have been on behalf of the owners. Below is how David Robinson responded, as recounted by Hunter:
“David Robinson then got up and gave a blistering speech about having gone with his mother to the (National) Civil Rights Museum in Memphis and how she explained to him things he never knew. He said that what he saw there was overpowering, how he saw what they had to overcome and where we were at a time when we should be taking a stand. … That was like a Mack truck ran over John and Hornacek and Adam Keefe.”
Beyond Robinson’s moment, Spurs players appeared to lay low during the stoppage (more on that in our next email), although Tim Duncan, fresh off a Rookie of the Year season, did take time to play a non-speaking role in a clever, lockout-themed Sprite commercial alongside Grant Hill.
(NB: if you dial that number today, you get a service line for televangelist grifter Reverend Peter Popoff and his miracle spring water, whose supernatural properties can net you a check in the mail for the amount you wish for)
The lockout’s notoriety may have peaked in December with “The Game on Showtime,” an event in Atlantic City put on by the Showtime network and superagents David Falk and Arn Tellem. Sponsored by Just for Feet and Athletic Attic, the All-Star Game-like scrimmage pitted Patrick Ewing’s Team Athletic versus Mourning’s Team Feet.
Still a month away from announcing his retirement, Jordan’s absence spoke volumes and was addressed by his representation at the time, Falk’s group:
"Michael has said he won't make a decision about returning to professional basketball or retiring until the lockout is over… We did talk to Michael about the game, obviously, and Michael feels he needs to stand by his earlier statement that he'll wait for a resolution of the lockout before he makes that decision. He wouldn't want to send the fans a sort of mixed message by his participation in this game."
Even without Jordan, the event saw participation from many of the era’s stars, including Karl Malone, Anfernee Hardaway, Chris Webber, Reggie Miller and Shawn Kemp. Game MVP Tim Hardaway scored 33 points for Team Athletic in a come-from-behind victory.
The night was a fitting, unofficial segue into the post-Jordan NBA. Attendance fell well short of the 12,500 tickets that Falk and Co. hoped to sell—media in attendance believed the actual turnout was much lower than the announced crowd of 9,500 was actually lower, despite 500 receiving free tickets—and there were criticism of the predictably low level of intensity and competition. Meanwhile in the weeks leading up to the game there was backlash about the use of the proceeds, initially meant to support non-star players who had gone months without a paycheck, forcing organizers to give it all to charity.
It’s not just the adversarial climate of the 98-99 stoppage that makes parallels between then and now difficult.
“You almost can’t compare the two,” said Antonio Daniels, then a second-year pro who had just been traded to San Antonio. “During the lockout you could still play. You may not have been able to simulate actual NBA games but you could play NBA pickup ball. And if you couldn’t play NBA pickup ball then you could play with college kids. You could go to gyms, you could get guys together and work out back in the day. You could still gather and simulate—get as close as you possibly can to that level of competition—by playing with NBA guys. Now you can’t do none of that. I honestly felt like during the lockout, regardless of if we were playing or not you had no excuse for returning to camp out of shape.”
In contrast, today’s players at least have regular contact with their respective teams. The Spurs have said they are coordinating teamwide video workouts, while players who were injured at the time of suspension, like Jakob Poeltl, benefit from the continuity of care from San Antonio staff. Yet with limited access to equipment and, for most, no access to a hoop or court, there’s only so much a player can do.
As the days removed from the NBA grind pile on, so too does the rust. Even during the quarantine-free lockout, there was only so much that players could do to prepare themselves for the pace, competition, and stakes of an actual game, much less the toll from extensive travel. Today’s players will feel all of this, and then some, whenever the league turns the lights on again. Said Mourning in 1998: ''We miss each other… Our body clocks are going off. At this time of year, you need to play basketball again.'' Most of us will never relate to competing at that high a level, but the feeling Mourning describes of physically sensing a void amid a new normal? That may resonate with today’s players and fans alike as we all push forward in These Uncertain Times.
In the next Remember the Alamodome, we’ll pick things up with the quintessentially Spursy way that San Antonio handled the lockout, including at least one dynamic that helped the locked-out Spurs forge their championship mettle.