Hunter didn’t back down, responded with another well-placed shot at Hagan and Hagan quickly pummeled him with three punches.
“It was bam, bam, bam,” Stembridge said. “He really staggered him.”
One of Hunter’s teammates came off the bench to intervene and scraped Hagan across the face with his fingernails. That drew blood and a Dallas newspaper photographer was there to capture the scene.
“The next day in the Dallas paper, there’s a picture of Hagan with blood all over him,” Stembridge said. “It really upset the Dallas owners that on ‘Kids Day,’ their coach got in the biggest fight they’d ever seen. Cliff could have cared less. It was nothing to him.” . . .
When the Chaparrals finally departed Dallas, they did it as ignominiously as they entered. In their first college draft in 1967, the lead researcher for the draft had compiled a list he planned to use when the draft was held. Unknown to him, the general manager, whose specialty was business and not basketball, took the list to New York without telling anyone and used it for the draft even though he knew nothing about any of the players.
“The problem was that the list he used was in alphabetical order,” Stembridge said. “The guy had no idea. If you look back at our first draft, you can see it.”
Here is the list of the 1967 draft from the Association for Professional Basketball Research:
Dallas Chaparrals – Matt Aitch (1), Michigan State; Jim Burns (2), Northwestern; Gary Gray (3), Oklahoma City; Pat Riley (4), Kentucky; Jamie Thompson (5), Wichita State.
While the level of incompetence of the first draft day would be hard to match, the Chaparrals managed to get a sendoff from the fans that spoke volumes of exactly why they were moving.
On March 26, 1973, in the last home game in Dallas Chaparral history, attendance was announced at 134.
© Whitman Pubilshing, LLC
PREVIOUSLY: As Popovich nears 900 victories, a look at the early days
CHECK OUT JAN HUBBARD’S ARCHIVE FROM SHERIDAN HOOPS.COM. GREAT STUFF ON THE NBA THEN AND NOW.
Jan Hubbard has written about basketball since 1976 and worked in the NBA league office for eight years between media stints. Follow him on Twitter at @whyhub.