Sports Poets Society

by  NATHAN BIERMA  on  DECEMBER 22, 2017 The 1988-89 Pistons won their first NBA championship while playing at The Palace of Auburn Hills. John Ciszewski had done his job too well. The Pistons’ vice president of corporate sales was in charge of selling the pricey season tickets for courtside seats at The Palace of Auburn Hills when it opened in 1988. Ciszewski sold all the seats. The only problem was who was sitting in them . On Opening Night, Ciszewski’s customers were eerily quiet, observing passively except to offer polite applause. “Ciszewski had sold most of the tickets to corporations—what regular fan could shell out $10,000 to $40,000 for one season ticket?” writes Cameron Stauth in The Franchise, his absorbing chronicle of the Pistons’ first season at The Palace. “Whoever they were, they were awfully quiet.” It was Leon “The Barber” Bradley who pointed out the problem, Stauth says. Bradley was a Pistons superfan who specialized in hurling vile invective at oppon...

https://from-way-downtown.com/2021/07/31/detroits-leon-the-barber-1976/ Posted by  bobkuska  -  July 31, 2021 [When the Fort Wayne Pistons in the 1950s relocated to Detroit, pro basketball arrived with a thud. “The citizens of Detroit could have cared less if we were in town,” recalled coach Charley Eckman . In a city that loved its Lions and Tigers and Red Hawks, oh my, were the Pistons bad . Fred Zollner, the franchise’s aging, long-time owner, wintered in Miami . He followed his Pistons mostly in the newspaper and called in firings like ordering a peperoni pizza . After the team’s first eight seasons in Detroit, Zollner had hired-and-fired a grand total of five coaches and four general managers. By the early 1970s, Zollner’s new-and-improved Pistons, featuring the All-NBA talents Bob Lanier and Dave Bing, finally caught on with wealthy suburbanites from Bloomfield Hills, Birmingham, and Grosse Pointe , Management soon catered to their more-sophisticated palettes by ope...