Pros vs. Joes No. 11: At 71, Twardzik is still calling games, and having fun doing it at his alma mater

Dave and Kathe Twardzik

Does Dave Twardzik ever wear the NBA championship ring he earned as a starting guard for the 1976-77 Trail Blazers?

“Never,” Twardzik says. “Well, hardly ever.”

Does he keep it in a safety deposit box? In a vault?

“It’s in my sock drawer at home,” he says.

Not that Twardzik doesn’t value it. Even at age 71, 42 years removed from his final NBA game as a player,

he often gets autograph requests on trading cards through the mail. If the seeker encloses a stamped, self-addressed envelope, Twardzik gladly signs and sends it back.

“Just last week I got one,” says Twardzik, sitting in a hotel room in Ruston, La., waiting to serve as radio analyst the following night for Old Dominion’s game against Louisiana Tech. “The guy writes, ‘I don’t mean to bother you, but two questions. What do you miss about playing, and is there anything you look back at and keep thinking about?’ ”

Twardzik reveals his answer.

“The thing I miss is the competition every night,” he says. “You had to be so on top of your game, and it was so intense — you do miss that. There’s nothing like playing in the NBA.

“The thing I think about is winning the championship. When we won it, I was 26. You’re in awe of it and you appreciate it, but the farther removed from playing I get, the more I appreciate it. I look at all the great players in the league who never had a chance to play in the playoffs let alone get to the Finals and win it all.

“When the playoffs start, you see how intense the games are. Every possession is so critical. You see the jubilation in the locker room and you think, ‘I was part of that.’ I wish every player could get that experience.”

Twardzik is in his ninth season calling games for Old Dominion, his alma mater.

“I may make 10, but that will probably be it,” he says.

Two years ago, Dave and wife Kathe moved from Norfolk, Va., to a spot near Pinehurst, N.C. Since then, he has often made the four-hour, 15-minute drive from Pinehurst to Norfolk during the basketball season. He does it in part because he enjoys a great relationship with the Monarchs’ play-by-play man, Ted Alexander.

“I like him on the air and off the air,” Twardzik says. “I have the same relationship with him that I had with the ‘Schonz’ in Portland.”

The “Schonz” is Bill Schonely, the legendary voice of the Blazers from its inaugural season of 1970-71 to 1998. Twardzik was his color man for four seasons, from 1980-84. Schonely never had a better broadcast partner than Twardzik, who injected humor to his always insightful commentary and razzed the Schonz like no one else.

I asked Schonely this week about Twardzik as a partner.

“Can’t imagine there were too many ever better than him as an analyst,” Schonely says. “We had a great chemistry on the air, and I loved the guy as a person.

“One night we were doing a game back East. The Blazers were just getting creamed. As the third quarter was about to begin, I knew the first half had been horrible, but I was trying to make the best of a bad situation. I said something like, ‘Well Dave, looks to me like the Blazers are in position to turn things around here in the second half.” And he says, ‘Schonz, what game are you watching?’ ”

I ask Twardzik about his time in the booth with Schonely. There is a pregnant pause.

“Well,” he says finally, “there are a lot of repressed feelings from working with the Schonz.”

Then he laughs.

“It was a blast,” he says. “It was so easy to work with him. I love the guy. Wish I’d been able to do it longer.”

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Following an excellent college career at Old Dominion — his No. 14 was retired after his senior year — Twardzik was chosen by Portland in the second round of the 1972 draft. The ABA offered more guaranteed money, though, and he chose to stay home to play for the Virginia Squires. Twardzik played four years there but had only one good season, his third, in 1974-75, averaging 13.6 points and 5.3 assists while shooting .546 from the field in 76 games. After the ABA-NBA merger in 1976, he signed with the Blazers, who still held his rights.

Dave Twardzik’s first four pro seasons were with the ABA Virginia Squires

The timing couldn’t have been better. Jack Ramsay came on to coach the team, and Twardzik fit in immediately in the starting backcourt alongside Lionel Hollins. Twardzik was a 6-1 ball of energy who came to be known as “Pinball” for his adventurous forays in traffic, bouncing off bodies on his way to the basket. Dave didn’t shoot often, averaging less than six shots and 10.3 points per game. But he was a remarkable finisher, ending the season with a .612 field-goal percentage. That stood as the franchise single-season record for 43 years, until Hassan Whiteside broke it, shooting .621 during the 2019-20 campaign.

Twardzik has never watched tapes of any of the games from the 1977 championship series against Philadelphia.

“Here’s why,” he says. “I have such a good feeling about it; I would hate to run the risk of tarnishing my memories. As they say, perhaps ungrammatically, ‘Tape don’t lie.’ It blows all your excuses out of the water.”

Excuses aren’t necessary, though Twardzik averaged only 6.7 points and 1.5 assists in 16 minutes a game off the bench in that series, playing behind rookie Johnny Davis. Davis had taken over when Twardzik severely sprained an ankle in Game 5 of the Western Conference semifinal series against Denver. In the deciding Game 6, Davis scored 25 points on 10-for-14 shooting.

Twardzik sat out the entire Western Conference final series in which the Blazers swept the Lakers 4-0. He wasn’t going to miss the finals.

“I told (team doctor) Bob Cook, ‘I have to play,’ ” Twardzik says.

That required some help. With Twardzik’s blessing, Cook injected his ankle — “10 shots pre-game and 10 shots at halftime,” Twardzik says — in each of the first two games of the championship series.

What were in the shots?

“Cortisone was one of the ingredients,” he says. “It was a nice cocktail of things, I believe.”

Unlike Bill Walton — who wound up suing Cook and trainer Ron Culp for injections to his foot during the 1978 playoffs — Twardzik has no problem with what the medical people did.

“I had 100 percent trust in Bob Cook,” he says. “He would not inject a knee. He would never have done anything to damage my body. I had 100 percent faith in Ron, too. He was a fabulous trainer.”

Twardzik estimates his ankle was “about 70 percent” healthy for the first two games.

“I got some relief with the shots,” he says. “But after I had the two series of 10 shots, I felt great. The rest of the series, I felt really good. Never bothered me again. I’m a big advocate of injections. It dissipates through your body and gets the medicine right to the source.”

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Twardzik played four seasons in Portland, retiring at age 29 in 1980 due to a recurring back injury. He reported for training camp prior to the 1980-81 season, but wasn’t able to get healthy enough to play.

Twardzik “Pinball” sobriquet resulted from him bouncing off bodies on the way to the basket, as he does here in a dish-off to teammate Bill Walton

“I’d hurt it at midseason the year before,” he says. “In the summer (before the ’80-81 season), it was a big-time problem. I tried physical therapy, acupuncture, a chiropractor … but I could never get over the hump to where I could sustain practice and be in position to play.”

For four years, Twardzik served as the Blazers’ director of community relations, speaking and making appearances in addition to his radio duties. In 1984-85, he switched to the club’s marketing department and stayed there two years. When Ramsay was fired after the 1985-86 season and got hired to coach the Indiana Pacers, Twardzik went with him as an assistant coach.

“Kathe and I thought we would never leave Portland, we loved it so much,” he says. “But Jack says, ‘David, would you consider coming on the bench with me?’ I thought the world of Jack. I said, ‘If you’d asked me five years ago, no way. But being around the Blazers and getting the chance to analyze the game … I would love to.”

Once Twardzik arrived in Indianapolis, Ramsay had a sit-down with him.

“I want to tell you a couple of things,” Ramsay said. “One, always have an offseason home away from the city where you’re coaching. The second thing is, you’re going to get fired.”

“I said, ‘Jack, I just took this job two minutes ago,’ ” Twardzik says. “He said, ‘If you’re in it long enough, it will happen.’ And I was thinking, ‘Maybe this isn’t the career path I want to take.’ ”

Twardzik was to learn that you get fired in a front-office position, too.

He spent the 1989-90 season as an assistant coach with the Los Angeles Clippers, then worked five years as director of player personnel for the Charlotte Hornets. In 1995, he had a two-year run as general manager at Golden State, hiring Rick Adelman as his head coach. After his firing in 1997, Twardzik served three years as a scout — a year in Denver and two years in Sacramento. He was an assistant coach in Detroit during the 2000-01 seasons, took two years off and then began a 10-year run with Orlando, first as director of player personnel, then as assistant GM.

Starting at 21-61 his first season, the Magic gradually progressed and peaked with back-to-back 59-win seasons in 2008-09 and 2009-10, reaching the NBA Finals the former season. They were 37-29 and made the playoffs in lockout-shortened 2011-12, the year the Magic fired Twardzik along with coach Stan Van Gundy.

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Life has been less stressful since then.

“I miss it,” he says of the NBA. “I don’t follow it as much anymore. The game has changed so much. I’m blessed that I played as long as I did and had the career I did — and also, when I had it.”

Dave looks back on his decade living in Portland with fondness.

“Portland was fabulous,” he says. “Loved the city. We have tremendous friends there. The fans throughout the state were great. I really enjoyed doing the summer radio tour through the state. The support for the team throughout the state and the region was unbelievable. What a great place to live.”

Last summer, Dave and Kathe spent 10 days in Oregon, in part for Dave to participate on an ESPN documentary on the championship season.

“We drove down the coast and stayed at Salishan for a few nights,” he says. “What fun. Brought back memories.”

The Twardziks will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary in July.

“How about that?” Dave says. “You know what? We have never had a fight. We have disagreed on some things, but never to the point where we’re yelling at each other.”

He pauses for effect.

“I give myself credit for most of that,” he says. Then he breaks into a laugh.

Dave had both knees replaced five years ago.

“I feel really good,” he says. “I used to play a lot of tennis. Not so much now. Kathe and I walk a lot. We ride bikes and sometimes put 25 to 30 miles a day. I’m lucky. Kathe is my best friend. We do almost everything together.”

The Twardziks have two children — Monica, 45, and Matthew, soon to turn 40. Monica has two children, making Dave a grandfather.

“When we were younger, we’d hear people that are my age now saying how great it was to be grandparents,” he says. “In the back of my mind, I’d think, ‘Come on, will you please be quiet? It can’t be that good.’ But it is. It’s even more than that. It’s the best.”

The Twardziks built a house on a lot they purchased about seven miles outside of Pinehurst on a thousand-acre lake.

“I don’t play golf at all,” he says. “We’re lake people. When we lived in Oregon, I bought a boat, a little Boston Whaler. I gave it to Kathe for Mother’s Day one year. Anything I want, I buy for her.”

I laugh. Dave continues.

“So once we bought the lot (near Pinehurst), I told her, ‘We need a boat.’ She said, ‘Let’s get a pontoon boat.”

Guess what the Twardziks bought?

“Actually, I love it,” Dave says. “The grandkids absolutely love it. When the weather is nice, Kathe and I are out on it every day. We take our old-person cruise around the lake.”

Thought Twardzik calls Division I basketball on the radio, he’s not close to the national scene. It’s fair to say that he is probably not the favorite to be the top dog among the celebrities picking NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament games in the “Pros vs. Joes” bracket challenge on kerryeggers.com.

“I’ll be rolling the dice,” he says.

For once, he’s not kidding.

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