At the conclusion of last week, the National Basketball Association (NBA) Family said goodbye to the first general manager in the history of Charlotte Hornets and the inventor of an annual event that has taken place at NBA All-Star Weekend that began in the American Basketball Association (ABA) in 1976 and then in the NBA in 1984.
Carl Scheer, the first general manager of the Charlotte Hornets and the inventor of the slam-dunk contest, an annual event on Saturday night during All-Star Weekend for over three decades passed on Friday, one day short of his 83rd birthday from complications related to his dementia. He was 82 years old. He is survived by his wife of six decades Marsha, and their children, son Bob, his longtime business partner, and their daughter Lauren.
“The Hornets organization mourns the loss of Carl Scheer,” the team said in a statement on Friday. “As our first president and general manager, he built the franchise from the ground up and laid the foundation for our city’s love affair with the Hornets. Carl was a true pioneer whose innovative ideas such as the slam dunk contest changed the NBA. His contributions to professional basketball in the state of North Carolina are unmatched, having led not only the Hornets but also the ABA’s Carolina Cougars, and his knowledge and love of the game will be missed.”
“Our thoughts and our prayers are with his wife Marsha, son Bob, daughter Lauren and his entire family.”
Mr. Scheer’s family said that as his dementia caused him to become more forgetful and harder to get around, the Hornets continued to keep him employed for more months in early part of this decade until he was unable to work at all.
“I was his son, and then I became his business partner, and then his caregiver,” Bob, whose Vice President of Development at the McColl Center in uptown Charlotte said of his father. “So, it was sort of a full-circle thing.”
As his dementia took an even crueler tool on what was considered one of the sharpest minds on the business side of pro sports, Scheer sometimes believed he still ran the Hornets.
At the Sardis Oaks nursing facility in Charlotte, NC, where Scheer lived out the final years of his life, he convened fellow patients around a table to discuss potential trades.
Due to his dad’s long, slow decline the past few years from the dementia, Scheer’s son Bob had plenty of time to work on what he will say at his father’s memorial service at Temple Beth El in Charlotte, NC on Wednesday at 3 p.m. at 5101 Providence Road.
Mr. Scheer and his son even had discussions on the first joke that would be told at the service-it is “Carl-approved,” Bob said.
Mr. Scheer, who was known for changing the attendance figures for home games of the teams he directed (outside of the Hornets, who always sold out). Scheer liked to see the official attendance number first on a piece of paper. He would then cross that number out and write down a higher number before it was made public.
“So, at his funeral, I’m going to say, “I heard there was going to be a couple of hundred people here. That’s awesome,” Bob said. “My Dad would like to announce an attendance of 17,443.”
Along with being one of the main authors of the Hornets inaugural season in 1988-89, which many longtime fans still get nostalgic about, Mr. Scheer in his over five decades in pro sports served as director of two minor-league hockey teams in the Carolinas—the Charlotte Checkers and the Greenville (South Carolina) Growl, while also being the GM of the aforementioned ABA’s Carolina Cougars, while also shepherding the construction of a 14,000-seat multi-purpose arena in downtown Greenville, SC.
Scheer though will forever be remembered one of the primary authors that brought pro basketball to the “Queen City.”
In the expansion draft of 1988, Scheer chose unknown shooting guard Dell Curry, who would go on to become the team’s all-time leading scorer in franchise history, and that decision meant that two-time Kia MVP of the three-time NBA champion Golden State Warriors would spend his formative years in Charlotte, along with his siblings in current Dallas Mavericks’ guard Seth Curry and his sister Sydell Curry-Lee.
There were a few occasions that the elder Curry was involved in trade rumors but it was Scheer that made it clear that Curry was untouchable, which the current television color analyst for the Hornets for FOX Sports Southeast is grateful for to this day.
“Carl’s the reason I’m doing this interview. He brought me to Charlotte. And I was involved in so many trade scenarios. He’s the guy that kept me in Charlotte. So, I owe Carl a lot, and I always kept in touch with him when I left,” Curry said recently to The Charlotte Observer.
“Sorry to see his health deteriorate like it is but will always be a friend. I will always be indebted to Carl because obviously it changed my life coming here to Charlotte. If I hadn’t gone to Charlotte, who knows what would have happened? Where I would’ve been?”
“Obviously, my kids might have been raised somewhere else but what better place than to do it here in Charlotte. It was close to my family. Close to my wife’s (Sona) family. So, I will forever be indebted to Carl for bringing me here and absolutely changing my life.”
Curry was one of many lives Mr. Scheer, who was an attorney by trade changed for the better. He was a man that was known for being a gentleman that loved Hershey’s chocolate bars and other sweets and his ability to listen to others.
Scheer ran the basketball and business operations for each team he directed as GM, something that is impossible for just one in today’s era of professional sports to do.
“My greatest fear is that somehow or another we’ll not be able to sustain great enthusiasm for the NBA in Charlotte.”
During home games, which he watched from the players’ tunnel because he was way too antsy to sit down because he was in constant motion. Sometimes Mr. Scheer wound himself so tightly in the curtain that separated the tunnel from the court that he would need extrication assistance.
According to Bob, he would see his dad so involved in the game from screaming at the referees to marching out with Marilynn Bowler, one of Scheer’s most trusted lieutenants with the Hornets to the visiting team’s sideline during halftime and watch the halftime show. Mr. Scheer was so obsessed with the halftime show because it was part of the evening’s festivities and the entire entertainment experience.
“Carl made us all realize that nobody owed us anything,” said Bowler. “Instead we owed all those people sitting in those seats. And he used to say all the time: ‘Win or lose, when people walk out, what I want them to say that they had the greatest time and that they will be back.”
As much as he wanted to see those in attendance to attend home games of the team’s he was in charge of be entertained he wanted his team to win just as much.
When his team’s lost, his wife and their children would go to bed and leave a carton of Rocky Road ice cream to thaw on the kitchen table, with a spoon right alongside it. Mr. Scheer would come home and console himself with the ice cream, where he would at times eat an entire half-gallon of it.
He would then go on a seven-mile jog the next day to burn off the calories from that half-gallon of ice cream.
“Anyone talking to Carl thought they were the most important person in the world,” Hornets public relations director in the early stages Harold Kaufman said. “He made you feel good about yourself. He motivated through positive reinforcement. You just didn’t want to let him down.”
After the Hornets inaugural season though, selling out almost every game in a 24,000-seat arena Scheer and the Hornets’ original owner George Shinn had a financial falling out, where he did not get a multi-year guaranteed deal as Shinn had a rule then he only guaranteed contracts to his players, even though he broke that rule several times later on his career.
Scheer ultimately left the Hornets in 1990 to become the general manager of the Denver Nuggets for the second time, being offered a five-year guaranteed contract.
Scheer and Shinn eventually did make up and Shinn ultimately hired Scheer to do consulting work in New Orleans, LA.
The one thing both men take great pride in is the Hornets’ streak of 364 consecutive sellouts at the no-longer 23,698-seat Charlotte Coliseum, a streak that started in the team’s first season 32 years ago.
“A lot of the things that were done right, I got credit for them,” Shinn said back then. “But I’ll admit most of them weren’t my idea…Once I got the team, it was all Carl.”
During his time as the GM of the Nuggets during their time in the ABA, Scheer signed Hall of Famer David Thompson, who starred for the North Carolina State Wolfpack to a five-year contract, outbidding the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks for his services. He also signed Monte Towe, Thompson’s friend, and point guard at N.C. State.
Thompson and fellow Hall of Famers in Julius “Dr. J.” Erving of the New York Nets; Artis Gilmore of the Kentucky Colonels; and George Gervin, and his teammate Larry Kenon of the San Antonio Spurs participated in the first-ever Slam Dunk Contest, that was held at halftime of the 1976 ABA All-Star Game on Jan. 27, 1976 at the now demolished McNichols Sports Arena in Denver, CO. Erving won that contest.
The original contest, which was conceived by Scheer with help from a few other staffers, where Erving, Gilmore, Gervin, Thompson, and Kenon competed for $1,200.
Thompson guarded Erving for much of the first half of the All-Star exhibition and then had to go against him in the finals of the dunk contest. Thompson completed a 360-degree dunk that was so unknown at that time, the public address announcer called it a, “twist-around slam dunk” twice.
Erving won the contest when he took off from the foul line on his final attempt-a move that the great Michael Jordan copied in the 1988 Contest in Chicago, IL after the NBA adopted the popular ABA attraction in 1984 and has grown in popularity ever since.
“Carl was a marketing genius,” Thompson said, “and he was great at making everyone feel special.”
“When I went out to Denver for the first time, he wined and dined me-gave me a real red-carpet treatment. When I went to see the Hawks, it wasn’t like that. I met them at a McDonald’s. The money was about the same in both places, but Carl had a way of making you feel wanted.”
Jordan, the Hornets owner today and Fred Whitefield, the Hornets’ current president brought Mr. Scheer back for a second stint with the Hornets to help them reach out to the community after the organization’s tumultuous years under former owner Bob Johnson.
Whitfield said that Scheer helped to lead an initiative by the Hornets that donated $250,000 to Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools nine years ago to keep middle school sports than have the district go to “pay-to-play” participation fees.
“He had sat in my seat before,” Whitfield said in reference to Scheer’s years in management of the Hornets, “and he became a great friend and supporter for me. Almost like a father figure. He was such a cheerleader for our organization.”
Curry concurred those same feeling saying, “I thought it was great he came back to the organization what he did.”
On Friday, the Charlotte Hornets lost a very important figure in their history. A man who cared about everyone that worked in the organization from people he worked alongside in the front office to the players and coaches of the team to the fans. To Carl Scheer being part of a sporting was something special and that it was something that those in attendance should enjoy to the point that you wanted and looked forward to attending again.
He for sure did that with helping to create a contest that has become a major part of All-Star Saturday night at NBA All-Star Weekend for over three-and-a-half decades with the Slam-Dunk contest. He also played a major role in bringing the All-Star Game twice to Charlotte, NC in 1991 and in 2019.
Along the way, he brought a positive vibe that made everyone he came into contact with feel better and be better.
“Charlotte owes Carl Scheer a debt of gratitude,” former NBA Commissioner Emeritus (1984-2014) David Stern, Scheer’s friend for more than four decades to The Charlotte Observer Feb. 2019. “The All-Star Weekend coming up there is very exciting. Carl Scheer provided a lot of reasons why a weekend like this can be in Charlotte at all.”
Information and quotations are courtesy of 12/14/19 NBATV news crawl; 02/18/19 www.charlotteobserver.com story, “Dementia Is Stealing Carl Scheer’s Memories, But not His All-Star Basketball Legacy” and 12/14/19 www.charlotteobserver.com story, “Carl Scheer, First GM of Charlotte Hornets and Slam -Dunk Contest Inventor, Dies at 82,” by Scott Fowler; 12/15/19 www.nba.com story, “Carl Scheer, First GM of Charlotte Hornets, Dies at 82;” https:en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slam_Dunk_Contest.
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