By Jerry Briggs
At age 61, Larry Kenon still sports a trim physique.
The lanky, 6-foot-9 San Antonio businessman still moves with the same graceful gait that made him a fan favorite with the Spurs in the 1970s.
He rarely touches a basketball anymore, and yet it almost looks as if he could still play 40 minutes.
In reality, though, Kenon has moved far down life’s road from the days of spotlight introductions at the old HemisFair Arena.
That’s why he will relish Friday night.
It’s the night that the man once known as “Special K” is scheduled to take the spotlight again for induction into the San Antonio Sports Hall of Fame.
More than three decades after the end of his high-flying, five-year run with the Spurs, Kenon will be honored for helping lift the franchise from the ABA into the NBA.
“I’m just glad people realize that, to build any good foundation, you got to start off with the first brick,” Kenon said. “That’s what we were. We were the first brick in the foundation.”
Some have suggested that without a few transactions that brought Kenon, Billy Paultz and Mike Gale from the New York Nets to the Spurs in the summer of 1975, the Spurs might not have made it out of the basketball wilderness in the final year of the ABA.
In fact, franchises such as the Kentucky Colonels and the Spirits of St. Louis never have been heard from again.
But with an attractive roster and a dedicated fan base, the Spurs survived, joining the Nets, the Denver Nuggets and the Indiana Pacers in June 1976 in a merger with the NBA.
“K was there at a time when we had to be good to get into the NBA,” former Spurs executive Bob Bass said. “We had to be, and he was one of the guys responsible for that.”
With George Gervin and James Silas already on the team, Kenon’s arrival gave the Spurs three All-Star quality players.
The team won 50 games in 1975-76.
By 1978-79, only the sixth year of pro basketball in San Antonio, the Spurs won their first playoff series against Julius Erving, Doug Collins and the Philadelphia 76ers and then came tantalizingly close to reaching the NBA Finals.
Letting a 3-1 series lead slip away, they lost to Wes Unseld, Elvin Hayes and the Washington Bullets in seven games in a showdown for the Eastern Conference title.
“I still can’t watch that last game on tape,” Kenon said.
He figures there were too many good memories to dwell on the worst one.
Individually, Kenon averaged 20.7 points and 10.3 rebounds for his Spurs career, becoming the first player in franchise history to hit the magical 20-10 double-double.
The only other players to reach those career numbers with the Spurs since Kenon, now the owner of J K Auto Sales on Rigsby Avenue, have been franchise stalwarts David Robinson and Tim Duncan.
“People forget that there was a time when ‘K’ dunked on everybody,” Gervin said. “He was just an exciting basketball player. He doesn’t get the credit that he deserves for all that he did in the game.”
As a rebounder, Kenon had flair. He could swipe the ball out of the air with one hand and take it on the dribble to the other end of the court for a score.
“He was one of the few players, other than Dr. J, that could do certain things at that time, like palming the ball,” Silas said. “Now, Dr. J was the pied piper (of the ABA). But there wasn’t much drop-off between the two.”
Kenon has lived in the San Antonio area with his family for nearly 40 years after initially resisting the trade from the Nets to the Spurs.
“I was a young man, living in a 24-hour (a day) city like New York, coming to this place that closed down at 10 o’clock,” Kenon said. “I thought I had been banned from the realm.
“I thought, ‘No way I’m going to be able to function in San Antonio after living in New York for two years.’?”
As it turned out, Kenon met life-long friends here only a few weeks after he arrived.
Through those friends, he later met his wife, and they’ve been together since.
Larry and Vanessa Kenon, who is the business operations manager for the office of information and technology at UTSA, live near Boerne and have grown children and four grandchildren.
Kenon and his wife met through a family that Vanessa lovingly calls, “our Chinese relatives.”
Soon after being traded to the Spurs, Kenon met Yok P. Chin and her sons, Ron and Robert, who operated Chin’s Great Wall restaurant on the Northwest side.
Pretty soon, Kenon became more than just a restaurant patron. He became part of the Chin family.
“We just got very close with him,” said Ron Chin, whose family had season tickets from Year 1 of the Spurs’ franchise. “Whenever he was home, he’d just sit in the kitchen at the restaurant. My mom would cook lunch for him, or whatever. He started calling my mom, ‘Mama.’?”
At the time, Robert Chin had a girlfriend, who happened to be roommates with the future Vanessa Kenon.
“I’d be out with them and (Robert) said, ‘I’m tired of you coming on our dates,’?” Vanessa recalled. “I’ve got a black brother that I want you to meet.”
To this day, the two families remain close. Ron Chin’s children, for instance, know the former Spurs’ great as “Uncle K.”
“All our kids know each other, the whole nine yards,” Larry Kenon said. “It’s a pretty tight group.”
When the Spurs entered the NBA in 1976, the top-priced ticket to a game at HemisFair Arena was $7. Fans were blue collar. They were rowdy.
Gervin led the NBA in scoring for three consecutive seasons during Kenon’s Spurs tenure, and four overall, but “Special K” often lit up opponents with games in the 30s or the 40s.
In his last regular-season game with the team in 1980, the former standout from Memphis State poured in 51 points against the Detroit Pistons.
Today, he has a precocious 9-year-old grandson who doesn’t know much about such details.
Kenon said the boy visited his home recently, boldly showing off some new dribbling tricks.
After executing a move, he issued a challenge for his grandfather to duplicate it.
“Quite naturally, I fumbled it,” Kenon said. “He said, ‘Oh, Paw-Paw, you’re just too old.’?”
Gervin, who lives in Spring Branch, enjoyed a good laugh at that story.
“Hey, we’re going to have to show that young man some tape,” Gervin said.
jbriggs@express-news.net
Twitter: @JerryBriggs
SAN ANTONIO SPORTS HALL OF FAME
What: 2013 San Antonio Sports Hall of Fame? Tribute
Who: Norm Charlton, Joe Conrad, Nell Fortner, Larry Kenon, Ed Whitacre Jr.
When: Friday (6 p.m., cocktails and silent? auction; 8 p.m., dinner and induction program)
Where: Alamodome
Tickets: Individual for $175; tables for $1,500, $2,500, $5,000 and $10,000. Reservations can be made online or by ?calling 210-820-2109.
Online: sanantoniosports.org
LARRY KENON
Age: 61, born in? Birmingham, Ala.
Fast facts: A 6-foot-9 forward, he averaged 20.7 points and 10.3 rebounds in a five-year run with the Spurs through 1979-80. .?.?. Only Spurs player from that era to average a 20-10 double-double for his ?career. Only other Spurs to do it since have been ?David Robinson and Tim Duncan. .?.?. Came to Spurs in June 1975 trade with New York Nets. .?.?. Played one season with Spurs in ABA and next four in NBA. .?.?. “Special K” lives with family in Boerne area and owns J K Auto Sales on Rigsby Avenue.
PROFILE SCHEDULE
Jan. 13: Conrad
Jan. 20: Fortner
Jan. 27: Charlton
Feb. 3: Whitacre
Today: Kenon
