Simon is Naismith Hall of Famer
‘I’m thankful, I’m humbled, That’s it.’
GLENDALE, Ariz. — Indiana Pacers owner Herb Simon is sitting up there with the rest of the Naismith Hall of Fame Class of 2024, and this is not his thing. This has never been his thing. Being honored publicly? Talking about his path here from the Bronx in 1934, the youngest of three sons of a tailor, to City College of New York and then to the U.S. Army and then Indianapolis? To his first job in Indy, a real estate gig that paid $100 a week for six months until he was put on 100% commission and didn’t make his first sale for nearly 18 months?
How he survived those 18 months only because his older brother, Mel, paid the bills?
Herb isn’t here to talk about that, or about anything. He’s here to be introduced with the rest of the Class of 2024, alongside NBA legends like Vince Carter and Doug Collins and Michael Cooper, and that’s it.
“You can’t turn down this honor when it’s bestowed upon you,” Herb’s telling me off to the side, where he’s only slightly more comfortable speaking about himself.
Up there on the dais, when the emcee introduced him, Herb talked for 19 whole seconds, and here’s what he said in its entirety:
“I’m very proud to be included with these incredible people up here,” he said, “and representing the Indiana Pacers and the Fever and the state of Indiana, the place where basketball was perfected. Very proud of that too. Proud to be here. Thank you.”
If you expected more, forget it. Other inductees are talking about the recent phone call — sorry, The Phone Call — that informed them of their spot in the Hall. They’re talking about family and coaches and teammates. Some are crying as they tell their story.
Herb Simon doesn’t know it, would never even imagine it, but he has a story to match anyone’s on that dais. And his story is our story, the story of Indianapolis, because without the man sitting up there with Bo Ryan, Chauncey
Billups and others, we don’t have the most charming Downtown in the Midwest or the greatest big-event host city in the country. Without Herb Simon, we’d no longer have the Pacers and probably never would’ve had the Indianapolis Colts. We’d be a Triple A city in a majorleague world, and Herb won’t say any of that, either. Probably wouldn’t agree with it, but those are details for another day.
The details today are the story that put Herb Simon on that dais, into the Basketball Hall of Fame, and they involve a U.S. Army posting at Fort Ben and a Gulf gas station in Indianapolis and a pair of hard-luck California high-rollers looking to move the Pacers to Anaheim in 1983.
Another detail is what happened up there on that dais, when the emcee introduced Simon as part of the Class of 2024, and mentioned that he’d “purchased the team in 1984 with his late brother, Mel.” Until then, Herb had been sitting there, motionless and emotionless, but he hears his brother’s name and Herb cracks a sad smile and looks up, toward the heavens.
Herb Simon saves Pacers, barely
For more than 35 years Herb’s been sitting on a secret, and here in 2024, off to the side in a ballroom at the Renaissance Glendale Hotel & Spa, he’s finally going to tell it.
The story starts in 1983 with two California businessmen, Sam Nassi and Frank Mariani, running the Pacers into the ground. This was a franchise of champions, winning three ABA titles in the early 1970s and a spot in the 1976 merger with the NBA, but after Nassi and Mariani purchased the team in 1979, the Pacers were steadily going out of business. Average attendance dropped from more than 10,000 in 1979 to 4,800 in 1983, and on April 4 of that year the owners announced the franchise was for sale.
As the IndyStar reported the next day, Mariani and Nassi planned “to sell the team to an outside owner, or turn it back to the league.”
The Indianapolis citizenry wasn’t exactly moved to action. At a season ticket drive the next day 198 new season tickets were sold for the 1984 season, bringing the total to 408. Two ownership groups in California were lurking, one that included California Angels slugger Reggie Jackson, when Mayor Bill Hudnut and civic leaders including Jim Morris, Dave Frick and Ted Boehm set up a meeting with Herb Simon, age 48, and his older brother Mel, 55.
Herb picks it up from here, volunteering this tale because, ultimately, he gets to laugh at himself.
“The story,” is how he starts, “is that the mayor and a bunch of the city fathers came to see Mel and I and said: ‘Look, the team is going to be sold out of town. Would you guys help us buy the team?’ And we looked at each other and we're both really proud – young guys like us, just starting a business, and the city fathers would come to us with that opportunity? So we said OK.”
He pauses.
“About four or five years later,” he says, “I found out that five other local groups turned them down before they came to us. I thought they came to us first!”
Now Herb’s laughing, and I’m interrupting to ask how close the Pacers were to leaving Indianapolis in 1983. He turns serious.
“It was really close,” he says quietly. “It was almost gone. We said yes, not knowing what the hell we were doing. But we said yes.”
'He didn’t want a big crowd'
Back up there on the dais, Herb Simon keeps looking off to his right, blowing a kiss at one point, and gesturing for someone to move closer to the middle of the room. When the news conference is over – as the inductees move into quieter parts of the ballroom for one-on-one interviews – Herb approaches a young man and gives him a hug. Sean’s his name, Sean Simon, and he’s one of Herb’s five children with his wife Bui. Herb’s wife isn’t here. Neither are the other four kids.
Typical Herb.
“He didn’t want a big crowd – he didn’t really want any of us to come,” says Sean, 20. “But I didn’t want him traveling alone.”
While Herb’s giving interviews with local TV crews – Dave Calabro, Chris Widlic and Andrew Chernoff are here – Sean’s telling me about his dad, how quiet he is even at home.
“I know how much he works and what he’s done for the sport and the city, and I’ve never, ever heard him once talk about anything he’s contributed to,” Sean says, referring to the “Contributors” category that will be home to Herb’s Hall of Fame bust in Springfield, Mass. “Even I have to pry a little bit to find out what the actual difference contributors make. That’s who he is. He doesn’t do it for the credit. He has a love for the game, and the city.”
Some will wonder what Herb Simon has done to earn a spot in basketball immortality, and it’s a legit question with a legit answer. He’s the longest-tenured owner in the NBA – not just currently, but ever – and has been on the forefront of the game’s growth as a former chairman of the NBA Board of Governors, co-founder of the WNBA and one of the first owners with an NBA 2K franchise.
Most importantly – to Indianapolis, and to the NBA – Herb has kept this franchise right where it is. An NBA without a franchise in Indiana, arguably the basketball-craziest state in America, would be absurd, and Herb has had multiple chances to sell the team at an enormous profit. The franchise was a financial black hole when he and Mel bought it in 1983, before television money and Michael Jordan and the heyday of the Magic Johnson-Larry Bird rivalry lifted the league.
And before he was an NBA owner, Herb Simon was a businessman. The sales price of the Pacers in 1983 was said to be about $11 million. Today the Pacers are worth an estimated $2.9 billion, and with the mall industry in financial freefall – Herb and Mel’s “Simon Property Group” was once the country’s largest shopping mall company – the temptation to sell had to have been real.
But this is where Indianapolis got lucky, and it starts way before 1983, when Mayor Hudnut approached the Simon brothers for a favor.
Fort Ben, gas station give birth to Downtown
It’s 1953, and a young U.S. Army soldier from the Bronx has received his posting to the Fort Harrison Finance Center at Fort Benjamin Harrison. Mel Simon supplemented his income on the Indianapolis eastside by going door-todoor to sell encyclopedias. He met a woman, fell in love, decided to stay. Mel found a job with Eastgate Shopping Center developer Albert Frankel.
Seven years later, fresh off his own stint in the Army – at a base in El Paso, Texas – Herb joined his older brother in Indianapolis in 1960.
“Mel saw the opportunities here,” Herb says. “I was a kid in New York and he kept calling me and saying, ‘You gotta come out, you gotta come out.’
“I said: ‘New York’” – picture Herb spreading his arms and making a youmust-be-joking face – “but then I got married and realized I better get a job. So I went to Indianapolis and got a job with the same developer for $100 a week. (Frankel) says: ‘Six months. After six months, no more $100. You’re on your own.’”
Another pause.
“Mel had to pick it up after that,” he says. “The first deal took me a year-anda-half. We made some money, but it took 18 months for me to talk Gulf Oil into buying a property for a gas station.”
His portfolio grows from there, and while Herb Simon’s name rarely makes it in the local papers – and then only in listings for campaign contributions – leaders of Downtown Indy know who he is, and ask him and Mel to purchase the Pacers in 1983. Here we are, 41 years later – Mel died in 2009 at age 82 – and Herb Simon is the NBA’s longest-running owner. He’s hired Larry Bird (twice) and Donnie Walsh, Rick Carlisle (twice) and Kevin Pritchard. He’s had teams reach the Eastern Conference Finals in 2013 and ’14, only to be derailed by LeBron James’ first “super team” in Miami. He’s kept the Pacers in Indianapolis. Let’s say that again: He’s kept the Pacers in Indianapolis.
Herb Simon is one of the leaders of Downtown Indy, but he won’t talk about it, so while Herb listens, beaming at his son, I’m asking Sean about his father’s connection to Indianapolis.
“It’s a special relationship,” says Sean, a student at Southern California majoring in business and minoring in law. “My dad moving to the city as a young man, trying to start a career, and the city taking its trajectory in development. It’s almost like they’ve grown together. When he made the purchase of the team, the team obviously wasn’t in a great spot and the city isn’t where it is now, and that only furthered that bond. It happened together, and that’s why it stayed together for so long.”
We’ve had two NBA All-Star games Downtown, countless concerts at Market Square Arena and then Gainbridge Fieldhouse, and the arrival of the Colts in 1984. The NCAA came in 1999, bringing a men’s or women’s Final Four every few years. A 316-room hotel, the Hyatt Place/ Hyatt House, opened in 2019 across the street from Gainbridge Fieldhouse. Herb and Mel Simon didn’t do all of that, no. But does any of that happen without them?
No.
Maybe the stability of the Pacers, and the Downtown Indy growth it stimulated, isn’t why Herb Simon is in the Hall of Fame. Or maybe it is. Were you in the room for the voting? Me neither. Herb doesn’t claim to know how or why he made it, but as he said, “You can’t turn down this honor when it’s bestowed upon you.”
And then he continued, what passes for a soliloquy from this 89-year-old man:
“I’m thankful, I’m humbled, that’s it.”