Indiana Pacers: 5 of the weirdest stories from franchise history

The Pacers held a telethon to save the franchise

If you needed to sell a ton of season tickets to generate enough cash flow to keep the Pacers in town, how might you go about it?

Maybe you’d sit outside a grocery store and pass out fliers. Maybe you’d try to secure some digital advertising on social media.

In the late 70s, you held a telethon.

Normally a format used to generate revenue for philanthropic or non-profit reasons, the Pacers turned to the telethon format with the goal of selling 8,000 season tickets, the amount the team needed to be somewhat stable financially, to keep the team in Indiana.

After joining the NBA in the ABA/NBA merger, the Pacers had to pay a large sum of dues to the NBA. They and the other ABA teams joining the league also weren’t permitted to share league-wide revenue for the first few seasons of their existence.

Already short on cash prior to the merger, this was a major hit for the team. They had been selling off star players and depleting their talent to remain afloat from a business standpoint, leading to a lower quality of basketball and less interest from fans. The negative cyclical nature of the team’s first decade in the NBA was hard to watch.

Still, Slick Leonard and his wife, also employed by the team, didn’t want to see what they had helped to build in the ABA go to waste. The team leaving Indiana would have been devastating for the community and for the Leonards.

And so Leonard’s wife, Nancy, suggested a telethon.

Slick hosted, the community rallied, and the team sold the tickets they needed to sell with not much time to spare. The Pacers would stay, at least until the next threat of relocation.