Tonight at 7 p.m., the Milwaukee Bucks meet the Boston Celtics for Game 2 of the first round of the 2018 NBA Playoffs. Yes, the Bucks are down one game, but no matter what happens over the course of the next week, they’ll always be ours. But never mind that…take yourselves back to the winter of 1985, when the Bucks were in danger of being moved to Minnesota!
Yes, in this vintage news clip from KSTP 5 in Minneapolis-St. Paul, a small crew of Milwaukee radio DJs (including the still-kicking-it Steve Palec) can be seen camped out at the not-yet-demolished Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome, protesting two groups’ plans to buy the Bucks and move them to Minnesota. “If they want a team, that’s fine with me, as long as it’s not our Bucks,” Palec says. “They can buy our beer, but not our team.”
This guy agrees:
Back in ’85, the Bucks were in danger of moving when team president Jim Fitzgerald and his ownership partners decided to put the franchise on the market. Minneapolis-St. Paul—with no pro basketball team of their own at the time—had two groups express interest in the deal. Happily, none other than businessman/future senator/lifetime George Webb devotee Herb Kohl stepped in and bought the Bucks for a cool $18 million, keeping them in Wisconsin to this day. (Thirty-three years later, the team was valued at $1 billion.)
And nice try on the “Well, Milwaukee stole a baseball team from Seattle” thing, Minnesota news anchor. [via The TV Madman]