Aba

Happy Anniversary, ABA. Twenty-three years ago today, the NBA accepted the San Antonio Spurs, the New York Nets, the Indiana Pacers and the Denver Nuggets into the league from the American Basketball Association. Last night, the Spurs became the first team from the league with the red-white-and-blue ball to represent the established league in the Finals. For much of this week, the veteran Spurs - David Robinson, Avery Johnson and Mario Elie among them - talked about the idea of winning a championship for those who came before.

The Association of Soviet Lawyers (ASL) is a Soviet propaganda agency posing as a bar association. In this guise, it has authored some of the most virulent anti-Semitic and anti-human rights propaganda of modern times. It has said, for example, that Soviet Jews who emigrate to Israel are "blacklisted" as "racial halfbreeds," and their children are doomed to lives of racial discrimination, and that only a handful of refuseniks are trying to leave the Soviet Union, while 200,000 Soviet Jews have applied to re-enter.

Jerome J. Shestack, a Center City trial lawyer, Thomas Jefferson devotee, and socialite, has a shot at becoming president of the American Bar Association. The election will take place over the weekend in Baltimore, at the ABA's midyear meeting. Shestack, 70, would be the seventh Philadelphia lawyer to serve as president in the 118-year history of the ABA. He would speak for the nation's lawyers and guide the association as it takes positions on national issues. Shestack ran for the post two years ago, but said he dropped out of the race.

Irony department: On the day Julius Erving agreed to become a vice president of the NBA's Orlando Magic, he was on a conference call promoting HBO's entertaining look at the American Basketball Association (Monday, 10 p.m.). Erving's pro basketball roots are in the ABA. Before he joined the Sixers and helped them win the 1983 NBA title, Doctor J soared through the air as an ABA star. Erving is still upset the NBA won't recognize statistics accumulated in the ABA. "The ABA years are a valuable part of basketball history," Erving said.

To literal-minded book folk, ABA means the American Booksellers Association convention, the annual four-day ground war between publishers and bookstore owners that ended yesterday at the Jacob Javits Center on Manhattan's West Side. To veterans, however, it really means "Anyone Buttonholes Anyone" - CEOs chatter with unemployed authors wearing sandwich boards, world-famous authors compete for hors d'oeuvres with mousy marketing assistants, almost every American culture line imaginable gets crossed and a more literate country supposedly emerges half a week later.

Jerome J. Shestack wants to be president of the American Bar Association. Shestack, who racked up 30 years as a litigator with Schnader, Harrison, Segal & Lewis before skipping to Wolf, Block, Schorr & Solis-Cohen last summer, said last week that he was adding his name to the list of those campaigning to become the ABA's president beginning in 1994. Candidates for the job put their names in the hat now in order to have the chance to be nominated for an election in February 1994.

Jim Harrick is back in coaching more than a year after being forced to resign at Georgia amid accusations of improper payments to players and academic fraud. He was hired yesterday as head coach of the Vancouver expansion team in the American Basketball Association. "This is a great opportunity for me. The Vancouver team is a first-class organization, the quality of play in the ABA is outstanding as is the coaching," Harrick said in a statement. At Georgia, Harrick's son was accused of paying some bills for a player and teaching a bogus class on coaching.

Below is an excerpt from a statement released Monday by Martha W. Barnett, president of the American Bar Association, regarding reports that the Bush administration is considering ending the practice of notifying the ABA of nominations for federal judgeships in advance of public notice. While the administration indicated that it would continue to use the ABA, a decision has not been made on whether it will continue to give the ABA the names of candidates before they are made public.

Hours before their official induction last night into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, the new arrivals, Temple coach John Chaney, Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski and former 76ers great Moses Malone, had their Hall of Fame jackets slipped on. Asked to say a few words, Malone got the biggest laugh. Turning toward Krzyzewski and Chaney, he said: "If I would have played for you all, you would have been here six years ago. " Each new Hall of Famer has an already-enshrined member introduce him. So there was Julius Erving to do the honors for his teammate on the Sixers' 1983 title team.

Leaders of the United States' organized lawyers, silently seething for months under Vice President Quayle's blistering attacks on the legal profession, struck back this weekend in what promises to be a mounting feud. Quayle's continuing assaults on lawyers rely on "discredited data and the conclusions of voodoo statisticians," said Talbot "Sandy" D'Alemberte, president of the American Bar Association. The vice president's comments leave the impression of being made by "a person who is not capable of careful thought and analysis," D'Alemberte added, to the applause of leaders of local and state bar associations attending the ABA's midwinter meeting.

California-based SCP Auctions has listed 100 items of Julius Erving's personal collection for sale, including his 1983 76ers world championship ring. Other items on the auction block include his ABA championship rings from 1974 and 1976 with the New York Nets, MVP trophies from both the NBA and the ABA, and jerseys. Bidding on scpauctions.com begins Friday. Coincidentally, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Tuesday that a Georgia bank is suing the former Sixers great and his corporation, the Erving Group Inc. of Atlanta, over a $200,000 line of credit.

Calling Villanova University Law School's grade-inflation scandal reprehensible and damaging, the American Bar Association on Tuesday censured the school for releasing fraudulent admissions data but also lauded it for acting quickly to disclose the problem. The bar association said that the law school would retain its accreditation. The ABA section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar said that the infractions were serious enough to warrant removing the school's accreditation but that Villanova's quick action to correct the problem made that step unnecessary.

By Kamala Nair Grand Central Publishing. 305 pp. $24.99 Reviewed by Karen E. Quiñones Miller For those who have wondered how old is too old to be fascinated by fairy tales, Kamala Nair has answered the question in her debut novel, The Girl in the Garden . The answer? There is no such thing as too old. This beautifully written story is filled with intriguing characters, hints of mystery, and sprinklings of magic that will touch any reader's heart as a young girl - struggling to save her parents' shaky marriage - sets out to unlock the family secret that she senses hangs over everyone's head and affects all of their lives.

Scottie Reynolds made history Thursday night, though not for the reason the former Villanova star guard would have preferred. Reynolds, a 6-foot-2 senior who was the school's second all-time leading scorer with 2,222 points, became the first Associated Press all-American not selected in the NBA draft since the league merged with the ABA in 1976. Reynolds was not among the four all-Americans who were drafted, all of whom were chosen in the top five. Reynolds led Villanova to a top 10 ranking his senior season which ended in disappointment with a second-round loss to St. Mary's.

THE YEARS fall away easily for Hubie White when he talks about Villanova basketball. Before long, the ageless 69-year-old morphs into the senior captain of the 'Nova team that came within one game of the NCAA Tournament's Final Four in 1962. That was 23 years before Villanova shocked the nation with a national-championship victory over Georgetown. It was 47 years before the current team began its own NCAA journey, which continues with tomorrow night's Final Four game against North Carolina.

Americans' uneasy majority support for the barbaric death penalty falters - as well it should - when they learn that dozens of innocent people have been sent to death rows across the country. For those citizens, their approval of capital punishment relies upon an assurance that the death penalty is applied fairly and, most of all, without running the horrific risk that the wrong person could be executed. Well, no such assurances can be made with any confidence, as demonstrated by study after learned study.

The New Jersey Nets signed a deal with guard Vince Carter yesterday that will keep the eight-time all-star in New Jersey at least through the 2010-11 season. Carter will receive $66 million guaranteed - which includes four years plus a partial guarantee for a fifth year - and could make as much as $80 million, according to the Associated Press. The Memphis Grizzlies signed forward-center Darko Milicic, the No. 2 overall pick in the 2003 draft, who is joining his third team.

His special genius was fashioned out of scavenged junk: The backboard was a cracked plank of plywood, the basket was a rusted bicycle tire rim, and the ball, thrown out with someone else's garbage, had been dribbled until the seams were worn smooth. And by the light of the Florida sun and of the silvery moon, night and day, day and night, the sweat running off him in little rivers, he honed his jump shot to silky perfection. He would grow to 6 feet 8, with cannonball shoulders, and he moved with a feline grace, cheetah-sleek.

THE MEMORIES are of cold nights and weak lights that were the curse of every news photographer in town. Matthew Brady couldn't have gotten a good shot of anybody in that old barn, but these guys somehow did. Whatever illumination there was shone only on the court itself. The seats, all hard benches, lay in darkness. A bad back was your destiny after too many nights on those benches. But it was exquisite agony. They were the greatest nights, all sweat and sound and Big Al up in his TV perch, and the newspaper guys typing like madmen behind the visiting bench as deadlines slipped away, and these epic, bruising, bewitching doubleheaders that ended with the big, heavy doors throwing open and 9,208 spent fighters being flung out into the frosty night.

IN OCTOBER, the Census Bureau officially logged in our 300-millionth citizen (or would-be citizen). Nobody knows who that little baby was, but odds are that by 2032 he or she will be a lawyer. The official lawyer count is hovering around a million. For the math-challenged, that's one "mouthpiece," as Scarface Al Capone called his, for every 300 of us . . . whether we like it or not. Some folks seem to like it a lot. Drexel just opened a law school. Was Greater Philly not fully served by the five law schools (Rutgers-Camden, Temple, Villanova, Penn and Widener)