Basketball Interests
Boone is a basketball fan and had ownership interests in two teams. He owned a team in the Hollywood Studio League called the "Cooga Moogas." The Cooga Moogas included Bill Cosby, Rafer Johnson, Gardner McKay, Don Murray, and Denny "Tarzan" Miller.
With the founding of the American Basketball Association, Boone became the majority owner of the league's team in Oakland, California on February 2, 1967. The team was first named the Oakland Americans but was later renamed as the Oakland Oaks, the name under which it played from 1967 to 1969. The Oaks won the 1969 ABA championship.
Despite the Oaks' success on the court, the team had severe financial problems. By August 1969 the Bank of America was threatening to foreclose on a $1.2 million loan to the Oaks, and the team was sold to a group of businessmen in Washington, DC, and became the Washington Caps.
In Terry Pluto's book about the ABA, Loose Balls, Boone recounted his days as an owner and claimed that he had had a chance to buy into the then-expansion Dallas Mavericks of the NBA in 1981, but declined.
Read more about this topic: Pat Boone
Famous quotes containing the words basketball and/or interests:
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)
“It is sometimes necessary to lie damnably in the interests of the nation.”
—Hilaire Belloc (1870–1953)