George W. Bush and George Steinbrenner owe Bob Short gratitude. Bush might not be president if Short wasn't such a failure as a sports owner, and Steinbrenner might not have gotten a taste of sports ownership as a young man without Short's ineptitude. 

The American Basketball League started as a protest of Short's move of the Minneapolis Lakers to Los Angeles in 1960. Harlem Globetrotters owner Abe Saperstein was under the impression that he had been promised the NBA franchise in Los Angeles. When Short moved his Lakers to LA Saperstein was left out in the cold, so he rounded up a number of owners and organized the ABL in March 1961; the league began play in October.

(Ironically, 11 years later Short moved baseball's Washington Senators to Arlington, Texas. The team was renamed the Texas Rangers and eventually sold to a group that included Bush, who with a two percent stake ended up as general managing partner. Bush used his Rangers ownership as a stepping-stone to politics.)

Saperstein owned the Chicago club. The other seven clubs were in Honolulu, Kansas City, LA, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Washington and Cleveland, where the ABL franchise was a former Amateur Athletic Union industrial league club called the Pipers. It was led by a group of investors headed by Steinbrenner.

During the first season, Washington moved to New York, and LA folded during the first half of the season because of financial problems.

"One of the reasons the league folded (was) because they added Hawaii," said John McLendon, Steinbrenner's first Pipers coach and the first black coach of a professional basketball team. "It cost too much, and even after they found out the terrific cost flying back and forth to Hawaii for the teams, then they made a rule that anytime you went to Hawaii you had to play a minimum of two but favorably three games.

"So everybody loved to play in Hawaii, and the Hawaiian teams liked it too. Those guys were used to Hawaii and they would beat up on the teams coming there. All the visitors wanted to be out on the beach drinking pineapple juice or whatever."

One of McLendon's players was Dick Barnett, who Steinbrenner signed to a big money deal after his NBA Syracuse Nationals contract ran out; another was Larry Siegfried, the only college player of note to sign with the league. They were Steinbrenner's players. Barnett did not come easily, as the NBA contested his signing with Cleveland, but the ABL prevailed.

McLendon left the team after winning the Eastern Division title in the first half of the 1961-62 season. The reason? Owner interference. Three decades after he quit the Pipers, McLendon had little to say about Steinbrenner, who replaced him with one time Boston Celtics great Bill Sharman, who led the Pipers that year to an ABL title.

The ABL split the season into halves had a championship round during the midway point in the season. Cleveland lost to Kansas City.

"We had a playoff between Eastern and Western and we lost the first half of the year championship. This was Saperstein's idea, because he said people lose interest if a team is running away with the league. So you go halfway during the season and start all over. So, I won the first half Eastern Division championship but lost in the playoff by a couple of points to Kansas City. The same two ended up in the second half.”

McLendon said Saperstein was doing too much and ultimately failed because of that.

"The schedule was too long and the travel was too great. That's what really killed them," said McLendon, who offered a solution to the problem. "I remember we flew from Westchester all the way to Hawaii and look how many teams we passed over and then came back here to play another game with all these teams in between.

"One time the guys said, ‘Coach, you have a lot of experience in scheduling and stuff—why don't you work out a schedule where we can get better distribution?’ I studied and studied for two or three weeks and took it to the meeting. They said, ‘It’s your turn, give it to the commissioner.’

"I had it big enough to put it on the board, so I unfolded it and everybody looked at it and everybody said, ‘Oh yeah, we could play so many games and not cross over everybody's territory.’ The commissioner looked up and said, ‘That's a great job coach, what's the next article of business?’"

McLendon knew the league was doomed at that meeting and shortly after he quit the Pipers after Steinbrenner tried to tell him how to run the team and ended up in Malaysia and Southeast Asia teaching basketball. McLendon got about as far away from George as he could.

With McLendon leaving, Steinbrenner was exhibiting the first glimpses of the sports life that he would eventually find in New York as Yankees owner by hiring a big name coach, Sharman, and by signing Ohio State All-American Jerry Lucas to a two-year, $50,000 contract which was an unheard sum of money for a player just out of college.

Steinbrenner might have been an NBA owner in the summer of 1962, as the struggling ABL and NBA held discussions about a merger, and in July the NBA announced that Cleveland was joining the league as an expansion franchise at a cost of $400,000. Saperstein filed a lawsuit blocking the Pipers from joining the established league.

Steinbrenner then dropped out of the league but paid Lucas who would start his NBA career with Cincinnati in 1963. 

On December 31, the ABL folded and claimed it lost $1 million in 1961-62 and $250,000 in 1962-63. But the ABL left a legacy that includes the three-point field goal and a widened free throw lane. Both rules would be adopted by the NBA and a 32-year-old owner who years later was turned down in his attempt to buy his hometown Cleveland Indians, would eventually change Major League Baseball's economic structure as the New York Yankees owner. His name is George M. Steinbrenner III.