Setting a Low Bar 🏀

That time a big-box retailer bankrolled a sports league for short basketball players without realizing it.

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Spoiler: The guy wearing the suit went to prison.

In the early 1990s, rich entrepreneurial guy Mickey Monus was on top of the world. He was one of the lead figures in a growing big-box retail business, and he was also a prominent investor in many major initiatives around his hometown of Youngstown, Ohio.

As I wrote in a 2021 piece on the retail chain Phar-Mor, Monus got in over his head in some serious fraud in his attempt to turn the massive pharmacy chain into the next Walmart, but the thing that took him down is pretty amusing in isolation: He was attempting to fund a basketball league in which everyone was short, at least by basketball standards.

The World Basketball League, as it was called, lasted just four seasons before going off the rails, but in the process of its decline, Monus had embezzled $10 million to keep the league going, a huge amount of money given the extremely niche nature of the sports league.

A 1989 Sports Illustrated article described how they determined whether a player could compete:

This particular summer league has some intriguing wrinkles, the most significant of which is that all players must be under 6’5“. To be exact, no one can stand taller than 6’4⅞”. Players near the cutoff height are measured lying down—on their backs, with their knees locked—to discourage slouchers. The height limit does not apply to the six foreign teams—from the Soviet Union, Italy, Greece, Holland, Finland and Norway—that were invited to play a handful of games as touring members of the league this summer. In the league standings, they are lumped together as the Internationals.

What the league lost in size, it made up for in speed—it was essentially a league of John Paxtons and Spud Webbs, at least based on how the commissioner, Steven Ehrhart, described it.

“The foreign teams have not been able to keep up with the speed of the North American teams,” Ehrhart told the magazine. “The speed eventually wears them down. The big guys can’t keep up.”

Speaking of things catching up to people, the fraud was eventually exposed after a $75,000 check for travel expenses landed in the hands of a Phar-Mor investor, and Monus received a 19½-year sentence, of which he served a decade. By the time he got out, Phar-Mor was gone, and so was the World Basketball League, but the Major League Baseball team he was involved in launching is still with us.

That’s right: Just before Phar-Mor blew up, Monus tried to lead the ownership group for the Colorado Rockies. No word on whether the Rockies have a height limit.

» Wanna learn more? Beyond the great Phar-Mor story I mentioned above, we also did a piece just recently on why obscure sports leagues often tend to fail. If only Mickey Monus knew that.