The most forgotten great player in NBA history: Former Sixers star Andrew Toney remains a quie ·

07 Jun 2024, 00:00

By Gordie Jones

The middle-aged guy, a little thick in the midsection, was wearing a green Terrell Owens jersey and carrying a beer back to his seat in the Georgia Dome that September night in 2005.

This was Andrew Toney? The guy who, as a Sixer two decades earlier, had tortured the hated Celtics? The guy they came to call the “Boston Strangler”? The guy who compelled Red Auerbach to bring in a new perimeter defender, year after year, in an attempt to slow him down?

Yes, it was. It was like seeing D.B. Cooper or the basketball equivalent of Bigfoot. Nobody from the Philadelphia area, it seemed, had actually seen Toney in years. Not since his feet had gone bad and his relationship with management had soured, derailing a career that seemed likely to take him to the Hall of Fame.

Weeks earlier, he had emailed me at the publication where I worked. That was surprising enough. I knew him only as well as someone could know an athlete from the back of a crowded postgame media pack in the Spectrum’s spartan home locker room — which is to say, not at all.

Toney, by then living outside of Atlanta, had an agenda, though. He wanted to explain why he hadn’t been hired as an assistant coach under Maurice Cheeks, his friend and former point guard, who had just become the Sixers’ coach. So he went on and on in the email about how things had played out in his negotiations with the front office — how, in exchange for a cut in salary, he had asked about plane tickets for his family, lodging, et cetera, but had been rebuffed.

That led to a phone conversation in which I asked about his health. He claimed he still wasn’t right, 16 years after he retired.

“If I go out jogging,” he said, “I’ll jog a lap and a half (around a track). Then it will turn into a limp.”

He also downplayed his long-ago feud with Harold Katz, the team’s former owner.

We agreed to meet face to face, since both of us would be on hand for the Eagles’ season opener against the Falcons — the first game of an ill-fated post-Super Bowl campaign that would feature another player-management squabble, that one largely between Owens and Andy Reid.

Which is how I wound up on the Georgia Dome concourse before that game, a Monday nighter, trying to pick Andrew Toney out of the milling crowd. Deciding that the dude in the T.O. jersey was in fact my man, I followed him to his seat. We spoke a little more. I told him I hoped we could do so again at some point in the near future. There was so much ground to cover, so much to unearth about such a mercurial guy.

In time, I would write about his unsuccessful quest to become an assistant — clumsily, in retrospect. The follow-up interview never came to be — he had said all he wanted to say.

Since then, not much has changed. He maintains an arm’s-length relationship with the organization, as well as the Delaware Valley media (though not his teammates on the 1982-83 championship team). And the exploits of others over the intervening years — Charles Barkley, Allen Iverson, Joel Embiid — have blotted out much of the memory of a guy who last played on Feb. 27, 1988. (Toney did not respond to The Athletic’s requests for an interview for this piece, either.)

But not all of it. There are still those of a certain age, including Barkley, who recall Toney’s Ferrari-like first step, his limitless range and his unorthodox jumper. (He released the ball in front of his forehead, with his chest thrust out, like Superman or a supermodel.)

And they remember his boldness. Definitely that.

To Bob Ryan, who during his long career at The Boston Globe became a revered chronicler of the game, Toney is “the most forgotten great player in NBA history.”

Julius Erving considered that designation as he settled into a seat in a lounge within the Wells Fargo Center before a recent Sixers game.

“I think,” Dr. J told The Athletic, “Andrew likes it that way.”

“Lunchbox” — that’s what all the Sixers called M.L. Carr, the Celtic often assigned to guard Toney early in his career. Informed of this recently, Carr was neither insulted nor surprised — in truth, he knew he had little chance against the Strangler.

“In his offensive game,” Carr said, “there were no faults at all.”

So Carr, who before landing in Boston in 1979 had stops in the Eastern League, the ABA, Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary (as a guard, not an inmate) and Detroit (with the Pistons), explored the gray areas of the rulebook and beyond.

“I shouldn’t say this, but my goal was to get him out of the game with a hit,” he said. “That’s what I was trying to do all the time.”

Toney seemed unbothered by that, or anything else. He loved the big stage, and there was none bigger than the old Boston Garden. That’s where his career was defined, and where for all intents and purposes it ended.

To some extent, it began there, too, midway through his 1980-81 rookie year, when Toney clambered off the team bus at street level, surveyed the building’s bowels for the first time and pondered just how one might find his way upstairs to the arena.

Or as he put it: “Where the gym at?”

Perfect. To him, it was just a gym, as opposed to the place hallowed by Russell, Cousy, Havlicek and Bird. Just another playpen, just another proving ground.

“As good as Dr. J and Moses (Malone) were, I think everybody on our team was more fearful of what Andrew Toney would do against us,” ex-Celtic Danny Ainge, now the team’s general manager, said during a recent phone interview with The Athletic.

Andrew Toney warms up before the 1983 All-Star Game. (Andrew D. Bernstein/NBAE via Getty Images)

Auerbach kept looking for somebody to put a stranglehold on the Strangler, bringing in Gerald Henderson in 1980, Ainge in ’81, Quinn Buckner in ’82.

“Like everybody else, I got my butt kicked,” Buckner told me.

Ainge, who put his major-league baseball aspirations on hold to cast his lot with the C’s, once said he literally had sleepless nights before guarding Toney. For the most part, he still remembers it that way.

“There’s always a little bit of stress when you guard the great ones,” he said. “I put him in a category as (one of) the great ones, because you just knew he was capable. I wouldn’t say he had as good a career as the Isiah Thomases and the Magic Johnsons or the Michael Jordans or the guys like that, but you certainly prepared for him equally, because he was capable of having a special game against you at any time.”

None of the old Celtics remember Toney saying much on the court, only that he brought the noise. It wasn’t until Dennis Johnson arrived in ’83 (courtesy of a larcenous trade Auerbach engineered with Phoenix) that the C’s slowed their antagonist — and because Toney started to break down the following year, it can’t be said with complete certainty that D.J., one of the finest defensive guards ever, was really the answer, either.

Toney was that good, that tenacious.

“He is,” Ryan said, “the most contemptuous offensive guard I have ever seen. He looks at his defense with contempt.”

No argument from Buckner.

“It was like, ‘How dare you come out here, thinking you could guard me?’” he said. “That’s the energy he played with: ‘You can’t guard me. I know you can’t guard me.’ It was definitely a contempt.”

Among his own teammates, he was no less headstrong, even waving Erving and Malone out of the post so he could break his man down. Nobody did that to players of that stature, and Erving claims now not to have minded, pointing out the many times Toney set him up with alley-oops — not even Cheeks was capable of delivering such passes so deftly.

“Now with Moses, if he wouldn’t throw it in to Moses,” Doc said with a chuckle, “Moses wasn’t OK with that.”

There wasn’t a shot Toney wouldn’t take, nor a play he wouldn’t break. On the occasions when Toney took matters into his own hands, Sixers coach Billy Cunningham would invariably stomp down the sideline and scream: “ANDREWWW!”

“It just went in one ear, and out the other,” Cunningham recalled recently. “With other people I might not do that, because it might really affect them, but it did get Andrew’s attention once in a while.”

Once in a while.

“I’m sure,” Cunningham said, “there were times he just tolerated me, which is fine, because sometimes when you know what’s there, you need to push a little bit. And I think that was Andrew’s case.”

The familiar tableau played out in the extreme in a January 1983 game between the Lakers and Sixers in the Spectrum — a riveting matchup that pitted the defending champs against the champs-to-be, as it turned out. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar didn’t play because of a headache (or, perhaps, a bout of Moses-itis), but it didn’t matter. Back and forth they went.

Magic Johnson had his usual triple-double. Erving threw down a particularly theatrical dunk over Michael Cooper, one that is a staple of highlight packages to this day. The game came down to the final seconds of overtime. Cunningham drew up a post-up for Malone, a play that would be initiated by Cheeks.

And true to form, Toney relieved Cheeks of the ball immediately after it was inbounded.

“Then I get up and I’m walking down the sideline, and he kind of waves me back,” Cunningham said.

Toney drove and pulled up from about 10 feet, on the side of the lane. With various Lakers flying at him — it was an absolute tangle of limbs — he kissed a shot off the glass for the win.

“Hey, he was not afraid of failure,” Cunningham said.

Julius Erving (left) and Andrew Toney during a Sixers celebration at Veterans Stadium in June 1983. (Bettmann / Getty Images)

“I think,” Erving said, “you need to have a guy on the team who has a hard head. He’s the guy that’s going to be different. He’s not going to do everything by the book. … He was definitely the X-factor, as well as being an All-Star and superstar.”

Toney, who was in fact twice an All-Star during his eight-year career, notched his career-high of 46 on the Lakers in 1982, and averaged 22 points per game when the Sixers swept L.A. in the ’83 Finals.

But he will forever be linked to the Celtics, and to the nickname he inherited from World B. Free, who hardly needed one. Toney dropped 30, 39 and 34 on them in the ’82 Eastern Conference Finals, the latter in a Game 7 victory in the Garden, after the Sixers had coughed up a 3-1 series lead for the second straight year. He also lit the C’s up for 25 in a single quarter in a game that year.

But a strange thing happened the next time the two bitter rivals met in the conference finals: Toney hesitated. Again the scene was the old Garden, now long gone. And as usual Game 5 was a knock-down, drag-out affair. The Celtics, up 3-1 in the series, were clinging to a two-point lead. The Sixers were clinging to hope.

With the clock melting away, the ball, naturally, found its way to Toney.

He took Erving’s pass in the left corner, in front of the Sixers’ bench, and for an instant, mulled his his options: Stay or go? Timeout or not?

Larry Bird, seeing an opening, poked the ball free. Celtics win.

The descent followed. Toney’s aching feet limited him to 87 games over the last three seasons. Only belatedly — and only after that falling out with Katz, who didn’t believe Toney was as injured as he was letting on — was he diagnosed with stress fractures to both navicular bones. (An injury to just one such bone, along with subsequent complications, deprived Joel Embiid of two full seasons.)

Toney’s retirement became official in February 1989. He was 31.

Now he hides in plain sight, having settled with his family outside of Atlanta some two decades ago. (His son, Channing, one of three children he has by his wife Priscilla, played hoops at Georgia, Alabama-Birmingham and as a professional overseas.)

Andrew, 61, was an elementary school teacher for several years — first in P.E., then health — before taking on roles as an an instructional coach for Gwinnett County Schools’ Community-Based Mentoring Program, and for Project Reconnect, which is geared toward helping teens who don’t graduate from high school. Toney’s work, Cunningham said, brings him in contact with young people who are “not only at-risk,” but those who “have been through the mill a couple times.” Toney has done it so well that he was recognized by a Georgia state senator in 2015.

He does return to the Delaware Valley from time to time, notably when he was inducted into the Philadelphia Sports Hall of Fame in 2013. He was gracious with autograph-seekers and the like, according to former Sixers general manager Pat Williams, who emceed the event, but Toney had one stipulation: No interviews.

John Nash, who succeeded Williams as the Sixers’ GM, also had a friend who was seeking to do a documentary about Toney a few years back, but that was a non-starter.

Beyond that, Nash has heard that Toney, an avid golfer, once traveled to the Philadelphia area and was looking for a place to play. He settled on a course in Glen Mills, signing in as “T. Andrews” and learning that he had been grouped with three businessmen he had never met before.

Three businessmen from — wait for it — Boston.

The round went along, and from what Nash heard, the businessmen began talking about how much they enjoyed the era of Bird, Kevin McHale and Robert Parish. Toney allowed that he, too, likes basketball, but never breathed a word of his identity.

I asked Nash if he might be able to confirm that story with Toney, since the younger man has become the de facto social chairman for the ’82-83 title team. Nash said he didn’t think Toney would be willing to do that. (Nor were any of the course officials certain Toney had played there.)

So file that under stories you at least wish were true.

Andrew Toney holds the NBA Championship trophy in May 1983. (Jim Cummins/NBAE via Getty Images)

Toney maintains regular email contact with those associated with the championship club — “and it’s always hysterical,” Cunningham said. There are jibes at Cheeks and Earl Cureton. There’s even some good-natured back-and-forth between Toney and Katz; according to Nash, the two are now “close friends.”

“They get along great,” said Bobby Jones, sixth-man extraordinaire of the championship team. “Andrew rips him in emails and makes fun of him, and Harold shoots back.”

The odds of that were long.

“They locked horns for a while,” Nash said, “but that’s water under the bridge at this point in time.”

Katz, who could not be reached for this story, paid for everybody to gather in Las Vegas in 2013, for the 30th anniversary of the championship team. Of the players, only Marc Iavaroni and Mark McNamara were unable to make it. Everyone else golfed and dined and retold old stories. The gathering has since taken on a certain poignance, as it was the last time they would all be together. Moses Malone died two years later.

Against that backdrop, Toney’s estrangement from the current team — if it can even be called that — seems odd. There are those, like Williams and Erving, who believe there is still some resentment on Toney’s part at the way he was treated over the last three years of his career, even though that has nothing to do with anybody in the organization now.

And there are those who simply shrug.

“It’s Andrew,” Cunningham said. “That’s the only explanation I have for you. There’s no animosity. … It’s just his way.”

They all believe Toney was bound for the Hall of Fame before his body betrayed him. They compare his on-court ferocity to that of Russell Westbrook, his explosiveness to that of Allen Iverson (and some aren’t altogether sure that Toney wouldn’t be remembered as the better player, had his career played out). They also believe that a Sixers team featuring Toney and Barkley in the late ’80s and early ’90s would have been formidable.

Toney was that good, that bold. And if he drove his head coach a little crazy, his former teammates believe there was a silver lining to that, too.

“We all kind of laugh: Better that Billy yells at him than anybody else,” Jones said with a chuckle.

Ultimately, Jones added, Toney’s heart was in the right place. He wanted to win. He dared to be great. For some, that won’t ever be forgotten.

Gordie Jones is a longtime freelance writer based in Lititz, Pa. At various times in his career, he has covered the Eagles, 76ers and Phillies, as well as Penn State football.

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The most forgotten great player in NBA history: Former Sixers star Andrew Toney remains a quie

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