The Land Of Milk And Honey

In the 1949-50 season, the Rochester Royals of the NBA made it all the way to the conference semifinals behind the efforts of future hall-of-famers Al Cervi, Bob Davies, and Arnie Risen before falling to the Fort Wayne Pistons 0-2. Benvenuti wasn’t much of a sports fan, having had little time to connect with a team working all day and into the early morning hours for most of his life. That was all about to change. The Royals, like Benvenuti, had moved and metamorphosed several times before they would become a significant part of his middle-aged life.

The Royals began life as the Rochester Seagrams in 1923 as a semi-pro, mostly barnstorming team sponsored by the Canadian spirits company that played against teams like the Harlem Globetrotters. In their second full NBA season in 1951, the Royals won their only championship by felling the arch-enemy Minneapolis Lakers 3 games to 1 in the division finals en route to conquering the New York Knicks in 7 games in the Finals. 1945 was the year the Royals officially began play as a full-fledged pro team, playing in both the old National Basketball League and the Basketball Association of America and won the NBL title in their inaugural year. Most of the players then were white, but the Royals were pioneers in integrating pro basketball.

Fans packed Edgerton Park Sports Arena to watch the early days of pro basketball circa late-1940s. The team signed a Black player, William “Dolly” King in 1946, a year before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball. The Royals were one of only two teams to sign a Black player to a “big-time pro contract,” and the reception was not always welcome.

In 1983, the Indiana Pacers were one of the NBA’s worst teams, having lost the luster of their ABA glory days and having made the NBA playoffs only once in a 7-year span, losing in the first round. They were also for sale. In the early hours of a summer morning in that same year, a young man knocked on the door of Benvenuti’s Arden Arcade home, who had several years earlier begun a crusade to bring organized sports to Sacramento. Gregg Lukenbill was a young businessman and visionary who would form the Sacramento Sports Association, a partnership comprising himself, his father and some other local businesspeople with the goal of attracting minor league baseball to Sacramento. After foundering for several years, unable to attract baseball, he enlisted a local sports general manager named Greg “Dutch” Van Dusen to help find out if there were any opportunities to purchase a National Basketball Association franchise. Van Dusen went to the office of attorney and former California State Senator Omer Rains, whom he heard had good contacts in the sports world. As he described it in his best-selling autobiography “Back to the Summit”, which detailed his recovery from an aneurysm that nearly took his life and paralyzed him, Rains identified two different National Basketball Association teams that were for sale. Since Lukenbill hadn’t had success luring baseball, he considered it to be an opportunity to bring some kind of big-league sports to Sacramento, even if it meant putting baseball on ice.

With the opportunity at hand to buy an NBA team but insufficient capital to invest in a team and a facility to house them, Lukenbill approached several deep-pocketed potential investors with no luck. When even Buzz Oates rejected him, he gave it one last buzzer-beating attempt. When Benvenuti invited him inside to hear his pitch that morning, a partnership was born that would bring major league sports to Sacramento for the first time and usher in a new age for the City.

“One time he found out there was a couple of basketball teams for sale, regular NBA,” recalled Benvenuti. “And he figured ‘geez I can’t get nothin else, maybe I’ll get one of them, bring it to Sacramento cuz at least we’d have something here, right now we got nothin’. We had no football, no baseball, no big league or small league. Nothin. And he heard about me, we never knew each other, except what you read about in the papers, you know, we’re building some project or somethin. So he came over to my house one night and introduced himself and said ‘I’m Gregg Lukenbill, I build houses with my father, and I’ve got two NBA teams that I could buy, one is the Indiana Pacers and the other is the Kansas City Kings’. He says ‘I can buy ‘em both for around ten million or eleven million dollars and that’s a pretty good price’.”