George Mikan - Post-playing Career

Post-playing Career

In 1956 Mikan was the Republican candidate for the United States Congress in Minnesota's 3rd congressional district. He challenged incumbent Representative Roy Wier in a closely fought race that featured a high voter turnout. Despite the reelection of incumbent Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, the inexperienced Mikan lost by a close margin of 52% to 48%. Wier received 127,356 votes to Mikan's 117,716. Returning to the legal profession, Mikan was frustrated, after hoping for an influx of work. For six months, Mikan did not get any assignments at all, leaving him in financial difficulties that forced him to cash in on his life insurance.

Problems also arose in Mikan's professional sports career. In the 1957-58 NBA season, Lakers coach John Kundla became general manager and persuaded Mikan to become coach of the Lakers. However, this was a failure, the Lakers enduring 9–30 record until Mikan stepped down and returned coaching duties to Kundla. The Lakers ended with a 19–53 record, to record one of the worst seasons in their history. After this failure, Mikan then concentrated on his law career, raising his large family of six children, successfully specializing in corporate and real estate law, and buying and renovating buildings in Minneapolis.

In 1967, Mikan returned to professional basketball, becoming the first commissioner of the American Basketball Association, a rival league to the NBA. In order to lure basketball fans to his league, Mikan invented the league's characteristic red-white-and-blue ABA ball, which he thought more patriotic, better suited for TV, and more crowd-pleasing than the brown NBA ball, and instituted the three-point line. Mikan resigned from the ABA in 1969.

In the mid-1980s, Mikan headed a task force with the goal to return professional basketball to Minneapolis, decades after the Lakers had moved to Los Angeles to become the Los Angeles Lakers and after the ABA's Minnesota Muskies and Minnesota Pipers had departed. This bid was successful, leading to the inception of a new franchise in the 1989-90 NBA season, the Minnesota Timberwolves.

In 1994, Mikan became the part-owner and chairman of the board of Chicago Cheetahs, a professional roller hockey team based in Chicago, Illinois that played in Roller Hockey International. The franchise folded after their second season.

In his later years, Mikan suffered from diabetes and failing kidneys, and eventually, his illness caused his right leg to be amputated below the knee. When his medical insurance was cut off, Mikan soon found himself in severe financial difficulties. He fought a long and protracted legal battle against the NBA and the NBA Players' Union, protesting the $1,700/month pensions for players who had retired before 1965, the start of the so-called "big money era". According to Mel Davis of the National Basketball Retired Players Union, this battle kept him going, because Mikan hoped to be alive when a new collective bargaining agreement would finally vindicate his generation. In 2005, however, his condition declined.