funwhileitlasted.net/2013/03/03/1983-1986-bay-state-bombardiers/WORCESTER — The Bay State Bombardiers left Worcester 30 years ago, but John Ligums is reminded of his time as the team’s owner whenever he arrives at his home in Houston.
Inside his garage, hangs a large Bay State Bombardiers sign.
“It was a fun time,” he said. “I have some very fond memories.”
Ligums, 65, is a graying grandfather of five who long ago shaved his black mustache, and he’s lost 117 pounds over the past two years to drop to a weight, 190 pounds, he hasn’t seen since he was 14.
But to Bombardiers fans, however many remain, he’ll always be known as the owner who gave them two fun-filled seasons in the Continental Basketball Association.
Ligums was a successful stockbroker from Milton.
“I made people small fortunes as long as they started with large ones,” Ligums joked.
He moved the Bombardiers from Brockton to Worcester, and they played the 1984-85 and 1985-86 seasons at the Worcester Auditorium. Ligums hired Celtics great Dave Cowens to coach the team the first season, and Mauro Panaggio coached the second year.
Ligums was a hands-on owner. He even came up with the name for the team’s cheerleaders the Bombar-Dears.
“I’m a light switch,” he said. “I’m not a dimmer switch. Either it’s on or it’s off. Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess.”
But he also tried to keep a sense of humor.
“If you work hard and you’re successful at business and you have play money,” he said, “you buy toys. The Bombardiers were a toy, a fun toy.”
After victories, Ligums handed out $20 cash bonuses to the players in the locker room.
“They loved it,” he said.
“That probably wasn’t legal,” Cowens said, “but who cares?”
The extra money came in handy, considering the salary cap for each CBA team back then was $54,000 in 1984-85 and $67,000 in 1985-86.
Ligums also worked out a deal with Panaggio to pay the coach an extra $500 a game, but only after victories.
The Bombardiers finished 20-26 under Cowens and 30-18 under Panaggio before losing in the CBA semifinals to eventual champion Tampa Bay, but the most lasting memories didn’t involve wins and losses.
Cowens is more remembered for lifting the much shorter Tampa Bay coach Bill Musselman by the throat during an altercation between the two teams at the Auditorium.
“I don’t think that’s what happened,” Cowens said with a laugh during a telephone interview from his winter home in Florida. “I know that one of the players on his team was about to sucker-punch me from behind and one of my guys went out and got him first. That’s all I know.”
But witnesses insist that Cowens did lift Musselman by the throat.
“Of course, I saw him do it,” said Bob Fouracre, who broadcast the game on WORC radio. “By the throat. He was like a rag dog. His arms and legs were going limp before he dropped him. If you pick up a guy by the throat, I don’t care if it’s five years ago or 55, you don’t forget that one.”
“That was only my favorite moment of the year,” said Steve Warshaw, the team’s business manager during its first year in Worcester and general manger the second year.
Charter TV-3 didn’t exist back then, so Warshaw tried to convince WBZ-TV Channel 4 Boston sports anchor Bob Lobel to film a segment on the team, and he finally showed up that night. Warshaw was disappointed when he saw Lobel’s report.
“No one talked about the CBA,” Warshaw said, “no one talked about the Bombardiers, no one mentioned there was a team in Worcester. It was just Dave Cowens beating the (stuff) out of Bill Musselman and holding him up by the throat. We finally got on Boston television, but there was nothing about our team or league or anything.”
Whatever Cowens did to Musselman, Cowens felt he deserved it.
“You know him,” Cowens said. “He was egging people on. I was trying to get them to settle down, and he was egging people on. I was like, ‘What the heck is this guy doing?’ Maybe he needs to get involved in it then if he wants everybody else to fight. He was nuts, he was crazy.”
So Musselman fit right in with the CBA — the Crazy Basketball Association.
“The Bay State Bombardiers and the collection of players,” Fouracre said, “it was something out of ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.’ The whole thing, they were all crazy.”
The craziness began for the Bombardiers even before the season did, when William “Captain P.J.” LeBlanc battled Jim “Ratman” Hanlon in a mascot tryout at the Quality Inn.
P.J. remembers kicking a hole in a wall of the newly refurbished banquet room during his tryout, but Fouracre, one of the judges, insists P.J. ran into the wall headfirst. Either way, P.J. made an impression on the judges, as well as the wall.
“I had to go crazy,” P.J. said, “to outdo Ratman. Ratman kicked the top of the wall. So I ended up going through it.”
“I had to pay for that wall, but it was worth it,” Ligums said.
The team decided to hire both the equally off-the-wall P.J. and Ratman because as Ligums said at the time, “in case one them gets well.”
Ratman lasted only a game or two, but P.J. entertained fans throughout the team’s two years in Worcester. Wearing an aviator cap with ear flaps, googles, a Snoopy scarf and leather jacket, he ran around with his arms spread out during timeouts before performing what he called his “Yogi Berra face-first slide” toward the foul line or center court.
“I had a lot of fun in those days,” P.J. said. “To me, it was the coolest time in my life.”
“He was out of his mind,” Cowens recalled.
One night, P.J. slid into referee Bob Delaney.
“It was an accident,” P.J. recalled. “He fell on top of me.”
The league suspended P.J. for a game, but he didn’t mind because of the exposure he got.
“I made national television,” he said.
Cowens got a kick out of P.J.’s antics, and he even allowed him to give the team pep talks in the locker room before games.
“I’d get them going,” P.J. said with a cackle. “Let’s go, Bombardiers. Let’s do it.”
The Bombardiers also held a tryout for local players.
“It was a big mistake,” Cowens said. “I don’t think we picked up anybody from that. That was sort of waste of time, but a few people got pretty upset because they thought should have made it.”
The Bombardiers had some great players, including Joe “Awesome” Dawson, Kevin Williams and Michael Adams.
The 6-foot-5 Dawson was a CBA star who wasn’t quite tall or quick enough to make it in the NBA, but he played in Europe and Israel for 20 years after he left Worcester.
“He was one of the few non-crazies on the team,” Fouracre said.
Williams played in the NBA before and after he was in Worcester. Michael Adams, the former Boston College star, went on to play 11 NBA seasons and sank a 3-pointer in 79 consecutive games to set an NBA record that was broken by Kyle Korver.
Little did Bombardiers fans know back then that the coach of the Albany Patroons would go on to win 11 NBA championships coaching the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers. Yes, Phil Jackson coached against the Bombardiers at the Auditorium.
Cowens is a legend who helped the Celtics win NBA championships in 1974 and 1976, and was NBA MVP in 1973. But with the Bombardiers, nothing was beneath him.
The Bombardiers had no trainer, so the players taped their own ankles, or Cowens and his assistant coach Dave Guidugli did. The coaches also had to take part in scrimmages or grab someone from the YMCA because the Bombardiers had only nine players.
Cowens even drove the Bombardiers’ 15-person van.
“Guys would listen to their music,” Cowens said, “and I told them if they didn’t behave, I’d play country music the whole way.”
The CBA awarded a point for winning each quarter and three for winning the game, and no one fouled out.
“Every quarter was important,” Cowens said, “so you’re drawing up all kinds of plays at the ends of quarters. I think those two rules could make the NBA game a little bit more interesting.”
The Bombardiers were just as memorable for their crazy promotions.
“You can never get away with these stupid promotions in the big leagues,” Warshaw said.
Shortly before the Patriots played William “The Refrigerator” Perry and the Chicago Bears in the 1986 Super Bowl, the Bombardiers allowed fans to line up to take a sledge hammer to a refrigerator at center court with Perry’s No. 72 painted on it.
P.J. was the last one to take a turn.
“I cross-body blocked the thing,” P.J. recalled, “and sent it for a ride back and then destroyed it with a sledge hammer. I knocked both doors off it.”
In honor of Cowens’ nickname of “Big Red,” the Bombardiers held a few Big Red Nights and all redheads got in free. One night, fans received six packs of Wrigley’s Big Red chewing gum and another they received 10 percent off tickets to Continental Trailways Go Big Red buses for each traveling call.
Another night, the team held a hot dog eating contest.
“It was won by a 65-year-old guy without teeth,” Warshaw recalled. “One kid threw up right on center court. I remember how we introduced each person, we made up their bios. ‘This guy’s hobbies include smelling other people’s breath and eating roadkill.’ We just made stuff up. It was the best time.”
During a toughest man promotion, a contestant dropped the weights on the court and destroyed a floor board.
“So for the rest of the season,” Warshaw said, “there was a dead spot and we knew where the dead spot was. At least once a game the other team would wipe out over there and we’d get a turnover.”
“Warshaw did a great job,” Ligums said. “He was the hardest working man in show business. He and I would sit around and think about promotions. He’s a very creative kid.”
One night Celtics legend Larry Bird showed up on his own to support his friend Cowens. Warshaw took a photo of Bird sitting in the stands and ran it on the cover of the following year’s program.
“With no permission,” Warshaw recalled.
The Bombardiers gave out all sorts of Spalding and Converse equipment and clothing, trips and Celtics tickets, but even though season tickets were only $125 and game tickets cost just $6 each, the 3,500-seat Auditorium was usually just a third full.
The building was more than 50 years old and hadn’t regularly housed basketball games since Holy Cross opened the Hart Center in 1975. Warshaw thought of the ancient auditorium as a “mausoleum.”
“It was cold,” he said, “it was dark, but we did as well as we could. We put a lot of charm into it and made it look good. We served as much beer as we could.”
That comment reminded Warshaw of another story. Something was wrong with the beer sales. The money collected wasn’t enough to account for the amount of beer his staff had supposedly sold.
“So I hid in the bathroom during the game,” he said, “and these guys were coming in and washing the cups out and then reusing them. So on the inventory they would only have 100 cups (sold), but they actually filled 200 because they’d go in and clean them. It’s a good thing no one got some sort of E. coli.”
So Warshaw fired those staffers who had been pocketing half the beer money.
The Bombardiers faced stiff competition from the Celtics, who won their third NBA championship in six years in 1986 and went 40-1 at home. So 1986 season was the Bombardiers’ last in Worcester.
Warshaw remembers telling CBA commissioner Jim Drucker: “We squeezed the last drop of blood out of this stone. There’s nothing left here.”
Ligums sold the team to a group in Pensacola, Florida, to spend more time with his family.
When Ligums’ son Benjamin was 6 months old, he was diagnosed with Cavanan disease, a progressive, fatal neurological disorder that begins in infancy. Doctors told the family he’d live only to 12 to 18 months old. Death usually occurs by age 4.
Benjamin can’t speak or move his arms or legs, but he’s 33 years old now and lives with Ligums and his wife, Ann.
“The reason he’s alive is because of my wife,” Ligums said. “She won’t let him die.”
Ligums bought the Maine Lumberjacks for $50,000 out of bankruptcy a week before the 1982-83 CBA season. A year later, he moved the team to Brockton and renamed it the Bay State Bombardiers. A year after that, he moved the team to Worcester.
In his four years as team owner, Ligums figures he lost $250,000 before he sold the team for $200,000. A day after selling the Bombardiers, he purchased the inactive Montana Golden Nuggets from the CBA for $78,500, and he sold them a few months later to a group in Davenport, Iowa, for $450,000.
“It was the greater fool theory,” Ligums said.
These days, Ligums helps his son Jeb coach middle school wrestling and baseball teams in Houston.
P.J., 58, lives in Hudson and is recovering from a stroke, but hopes at some point to return to community radio station WCUW-FM (91.3) where he’s hosted a show called “Rockin’ Revolution” since 1984.
Cowens, 67, is retired after serving as coach of the Charlotte Hornets and Golden State Warriors and as an assistant with San Antonio and Detroit. He lives on Sebago Lake in Raymond, Maine, for much of the year and runs a basketball camp with the Celtics at their practice facility in Waltham in the summer.
Fouracre, 78, of Shrewsbury broadcasts HC women’s basketball games on Emmanuel Radio (1230 AM and 970 AM).
Warshaw, 56, runs his own sports branding, marketing and public relations consultant business in Northern Westchester, New York.
“Bottom line,” Warshaw said of the Bombardiers’ two-year run in Worcester, “it was a great experience, and what I really loved about Worcester is there are so many people who loved that team and we all came together and had this great bond. There were hundreds of us who were really addicted to the team. The demographics just couldn’t make it work, and with the media blackout (no local TV), it was a tough go, and the venue was tough. It was fun while it lasted.”