Original article posted by Les Carpenter on Yahoo Sports
Karl Malone and Joe Dumars played together on an AAU super team before going on to dominate in the NBA

By: Les Carpenter (2017)

NEW ORLEANS -- Of all his earthly possessions lost to Katrina’s flood in 2005, the one Richard Coffey wishes he had right now is a program from a long-ago basketball tournament. For years he had kept the program as proof that once he was part of a magnificent teenage team – one so good that 37 years later he breathes his teammates’ names as if the whole thing had been a dream.
 

Karl Malone. Joe Dumars. Hot Rod Williams. Benny Anders.

“I don’t think anybody would believe I played with those guys,” he says.

Back in the summer of 1980 there was a Louisiana AAU team of 15- and 16-year-olds almost too amazing to be true. Among those on its roster were two future Hall of Famers (Dumars and Malone), a player who would become one of the NBA’s best shot-blockers (Williams) and another (Anders) who turned into the most dazzling player on a college basketball dunking sensation known as Phi Slama Jama. It was the kind of team that caused heads to turn and the rat-a-tat-tat of dribbling to stop the moment its players walked into a gym.

Even today, Guy McInnis, a guard on the team, chortles as he recalls the silence that greeted them.

“We weren’t even trying to be intimidating!” he says.

But how could they not terrify? Imagine the alarm that must have blared through a high school junior’s brain as he watched a young Malone, already 6-foot-8 and chiseled from years on the farm, dunking so hard that he shook the walls of tiny gyms? Who wouldn’t stare, slack-jawed, as Anders, just three inches shorter than Malone, dribbled behind his back, then took off from the foul line hurtling toward the rim?

The Louisiana team’s players were strong and fast and played ferocious defense. Their coach, an old-time grinder from the northwest part of the state, drove them to run, run, run. Sometimes, it seemed, they won simply by showing up. Though no official record of that summer exists, the players remember dominating nearly every game they played around Louisiana or in the two national tournaments they entered. Most of those victories were blowouts. Once they scored 224 points over two games – in the same day.

And yet this wasn’t some roll-out-the-ball-and-go-play kind of AAU team. Louisiana’s players worked hard, practicing twice a day in sweaty gyms, some of which had slippery vinyl floors. The best of them weren’t superstars dripping with entitlement but country kids barely known by college recruiters. Dumars, Malone and Anders came from small towns in the north. Williams grew up in a trailer just off the road from New Orleans to Baton Rouge. A few lived in rural Mississippi. Most of the rest were white teenagers from the New Orleans suburbs. Separating them were hundreds of miles of backwoods roads and a racial and social makeup like none on the other teams they played.

“Anything people think of when they think of an AAU team – this team was the opposite of that,” says Dumars.

Except for its extravagance. In many ways, the Louisiana team exceeded the opulence of even modern AAU clubs. That’s because it was the invention of a wealthy businessman, Robert Thompson, the president of First Progressive Bank near New Orleans, whose son, Bobby, was a promising player at a small high school in the city. Hoping to challenge Bobby, the elder Thompson put together a local AAU team during Bobby’s sophomore year in 1979, later merging it with another in Baton Rouge to form a statewide super club.

That’s when things really got crazy. What followed were three ridiculous years of the First Progressive basketball team with its own corporate jet, an impromptu romp through a Vegas casino and – for three months in the summer of 1980 – the greatest AAU basketball team you never heard of.

Time has dulled some memories. Piecing together the story of First Progressive’s 1980 summer team is not easy. Williams died in 2015. Anders has detached from old friends and wants to be left alone. Malone – through an intermediary – rejected several interview requests. Some players appear to have disappeared, not replying to last-known numbers or emails. Still, enough people from that team could be found who recall those three months and the thing that it gave them the most.

A chance.

“None of us knew what our futures were at that point,” Dumars says. “Just getting to travel around like that was a big deal. We were guys from Louisiana and this was an opportunity of a lifetime. We were just happy to play together.”

This is the story of their team in eight parts.

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