Game 35: Sam Nassi - Anka's Coffee Cake
Sam Nassi was a Brooklyn-born businessman who turned a single discount store into a lucrative national retail chain. Then at 50, he went broke. But at his lowest point, he learned a valuable lesson from his stores closing down. What he found out was that the real money was in liquidation. By 1979, the “corporate mortician” was making millions as his Sam Nassi Company led 80% of the country’s retail liquidations. It even made him enough money to buy a financially-futile NBA team, the Indiana Pacers, after seeing the success of his friend Jerry Buss, whom he lent money to buy the Lakers several years earlier. While Nassi eventually sold the team in 1983 after years of financial losses, the former Pacers owner played an unexpected and important role in the history of women’s basketball. But did the source of his historic overture to the country’s best female player come from a well of equality or gimmickry?
Nassi with the Reagans
On March 26, 1955, Ann Meyers was born in San Diego into an enormous basketball obsessed family led by parents Patricia and Bob Meyers. Ann’s father was a standout player at Marquette who briefly played as a semi-pro and her brother Dave, one of her 10 siblings, was an All-American at UCLA who was drafted #2 overall by the Milwaukee Bucks. Growing up in a household seemingly designed to turn little girls into tomboys, Meyers developed into one of the top women's basketball players in the country. "I had always played with the guys,” she wrote in her autobiography You Let Some GIRL Beat You? “And [I] learned how to arch the ball over my brothers, who were a foot taller." Meyers won an Olympic silver medal as part of the 1976 women’s national team, the first high schooler to ever do so, and then became the first woman to receive a 4-year athletic scholarship when she followed her brother to UCLA. She graduated in 1975, holding several school records for steals, points, and blocks, some of which she still holds to this day.
A year after being drafted by the New Jersey Gems of the Women’s Professional Basketball League (WBL), Meyers received a phone call from Pacers owner Sam Nassi. The longtime L.A. resident had followed her career since college and wanted to offer her a historic opportunity: A real tryout at the rookie and free agent camp prior to the start of the 1979 season’s training camp. Meyers was worried that this was a Bill Veeck-style promotional gimmick, but she eventually felt what she described as Nassi’s sincerity. Writing that she wanted to “find new frontiers to conquer,” Meyers showed up to the camp alongside a gaggle of national news reporters. The Detroit Free Press called her the “butt of a cruel joke” but Meyers said that Nassi was her “biggest supporter.” He proved it with a three-year contract, negotiated by one of Meyer’s lawyer brothers, that stipulated she would be employed with the Pacers in some capacity even if she didn’t make the team.
The 5’9” 134 pound Meyers flew to Butler University for her three-day tryout, cognizant of both the media circus and the other players, some who viewed her as a curiosity, some who saw her as a joke, and others who weren’t going to lose their jobs by going soft on her. "If I was going after his job, then he was going after me whether I was a girl or not, and he hoped I didn't get hurt” was the way she recalled Mike Bantom of the Pacers describing how he was going to play against Meyers. Still, some of her opponents for the open roster spots seemed overly self-conscious about the media filming them going up against a woman. In this clip, Meyers tumbles to the ground while trying to defend an attacking player, who immediately goes up to help her and gently pats her on the head.
After her three day tryout, Meyers was informed by head coach Bob “Slick” Leonard that she wasn’t going to make the cut. Meyers was devastated, especially since trying out meant she forfeited her spot on the 1980 Olympic team (Jimmy Carter’s boycott of the whole thing would render her disappointment null). But now she and Nassi had to figure out what to do with her and her three year contract. They settled on adding her to the TV broadcast as a color commentator, the first woman to do so in the NBA. And while she enjoyed calling games, the call of being on the court was much greater. Especially now that the WBL, which insulted her in the press for eschewing the league for her failed tryout, was practically begging the now-nationally famous baller to join the New Jersey Gems. So she did, winning the league’s MVP award before it folded in 1981. Years of operating in the red had piled up for the struggling league, getting so bad that the Chicago Hustle walked off the court during the starting lineup introductions in protest of the checks they never received.
Meyers never played professionally again, but she remained heavily involved in sports. In 1986, she married legendary Dodgers pitcher Don Drysdale, who at that point was 16 years into his own broadcasting career, three years longer than his Hall of Fame MLB career. Now known professionally as Ann Meyers Drysdale, she worked as a broadcaster for practically every sport, including the Olympics, that aired on ESPN, NBC, ABC, FOX Sports, and CBS. In 2006, she began the third act of her life when she was named general manager of the WNBA’s Phoenix Mercury, building two title-winning teams in 2007 and 2009. She stepped down in 2012 to join the Phoenix Suns as a TV commentator, a position she still holds alongside the title of Vice President of both franchises.
After researching Meyer’s incredible life, the one question I had remaining was the same one I had when I first discovered her life story: Was Sam Nassi a huckster? Meyers believed him to be genuine, that his invitation to her was not a publicity stunt, but an honest invitation to one of the country’s best unsigned players, regardless of gender. But shadiness was seemingly second nature to Nassi. The way that he made his fortune, allowing badly run businesses to fire workers and escape bankruptcy by liquidating their stock at a profit, was a predecessor to today’s private equity dominated landscape, where business from Toys R’ Us to Sports Illustrated are bought, stripped for parts, loaded with debt, and then finally sold when all that remains are bones picked clean by the vultures at Bain Capital and Authentic Brands Group.
Or are the two things not mutually exclusive? Could Nassi have been an authentic supporter of women’s rights and an ecstatic fan of Meyers while also looking at her tryout as a lucrative money-making publicity scheme for his struggling team? Sure. Nassi wasn’t just the king of liquidation, he was also good at openly two-timing. Besides the financial struggles, Nassi finally sold the Pacers because the NBA blocked his attempt to make minority owner Frank Mariani the team president. That same Mariani owned Mariani-Buss Associates, the real estate company that was the source of Jerry Buss’ pre-Lakers fortune. I can’t say for certain that Nassi was angling to give Buss control of multiple NBA teams, but I do know two things about the man who described himself as a “Laker Super Fan” in the World Champion Los Angeles Lakers Are Cookin’ Family Cookbook published just two years after he relinquished control of the Pacers: He loved money and he loved the Lakers.
-------------------
Anka’s Coffee Cake
Cake Batter:
¼ pound butter
3 eggs
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 small carton of sour cream
1 cup sugar
1 ½ cups flour
1 teaspoon vanilla
Topping:
⅓ cup brown sugar
2 teaspoons cinnamon
½ package of semi-sweet chocolate chips
¼ cup sugar
½ cup chopped walnuts
Cream together butter and sugar; add eggs mixing slightly. Add dry ingredients and sour cream and mix. Mix in vanilla. In a 2 quart, buttered baking dish, add half of this mixture.
In a separate bowl, mix together topping ingredients. Sprinkle half of topping mixture over batter in pan and pat down slightly with back of spoon.
Pour rest of batter and top with topping mixture; pat down. Bake in a 350 degree oven for 35 to 40 minutes.
A month ago, I made a sour cream chocolate chip cake by Sports Illustrated NBA photo researcher Eileen Miller. This coffee cake by Sam Nassi’s wife Anka is essentially the same thing.
Except that it tasted way better. Eileen, get your fucking cake out of here.
Maybe it was the recipe; most prominently, it called for walnuts and one extra egg. Maybe it was the tools; I used my sister’s old electric hand mixer for Eileen’s and a brand new hand mixer for Anka’s. Or maybe it was just an extra month’s worth of cooking and baking experience. But Anka’s coffee cake was devoured by the guests at our white elephant party. I managed to grab the last piece before the night was over. Even 12 hours after I had baked it, the cake somehow remained soft and the chocolate chips gooey. Maybe it’s what happens when you cram 15 people into a tiny apartment. It turns the whole space into a convection oven.
