THE Last Shootout FOR Dan Issel : No Matter How Much Nuggets May Have Paid Dan Issel, He Has Always Given Them, and Fans, Full Value for Their Dollar

DENVER —  While his Denver Nugget teammates were still sleeping in their Los Angeles hotel rooms early last Monday morning, Dan Issel slipped on blue jeans and cowboy boots and went to Hollywood Park to look at a horse.

It wasn’t just any horse. It was a promising 2-year-old colt, sired by Alydar, that trainer D. Wayne Lukas had bought for $1.6 million last summer from a Kentucky breeding farm partly owned and operated by Issel.

So, since Issel happened to be in town with the Nuggets for the National Basketball Assn. Western Conference championship series, he couldn’t pass up a chance to see how his once-prized yearling has developed. Besides, Issel was finished in time for practice, which was across the street at the Forum.

“Wayne Lukas says that colt is the most promising 2-year-old he has this year,” Issel said. “He’s an Alydar colt out of a mare called Secretarial Queen. I watched him gallop today and I think he’s going to be good.”

Clearly, Dan Issel, 36, is ready for retirement. After 15 seasons as a professional basketball player--the last 10 in Denver--Issel will be heading out to pasture with his horses once the playoffs are over for the Nuggets, who will play the Lakers here today in Game 4.

Issel will leave with something more than 27,482 points, 11,135 rebounds and almost as many memories of people, places and games from his outstanding career in the NBA and the old American Basketball Assn. But Issel says he probably won’t have time to relive it all. New challenges in horse racing beckon.

“Dan is so anxious to retire he’s got it down to how many (game-day) shoot-arounds he could possibly have left,” Denver Coach Doug Moe said. “I’m not kidding.”

Typically for Issel, who became pro basketball’s fourth-highest scorer by working hard and getting the most from his talent, he won’t be easing into retirement.

The day after the playoffs end for the Nuggets, the Issel family--Dan, wife Cheri, and children Sheridan and Scott--will move from Denver to a 160-acre horse farm near Lexington that Issel bought last year. The next morning, Issel will be out pitching hay, caring for his valuable broodmares and haggling over prices with high-rolling buyers.

It is a life of early mornings and occasionally late nights, nursing ill foals, a life that Issel can’t wait to begin.

“Running a horse farm is a lot of work,” Issel says. “But it’s what I want to do.”

But first, there’s one last stretch run he has to make.

Dan Issel’s farewell tour, which began in January when he announced that he would retire at the end of the season, is about to close after getting enthusiastic receptions in almost every NBA city.

The last two months of the regular season, Issel has been honored in pregame ceremonies from Seattle to Philadelphia. Utah Coach Frank Layden gave Issel a rocking chair. Clipper General Manager Carl Scheer, formerly the Nuggets’ president, gave Issel and his family a trip to Hawaii. In San Antonio, it was a pair of cowboy boots, in Houston a briefcase and in Philadelphia a commemorative plaque.

“Maybe I should hand out farewell tour jackets,” Issel said with an embarrassed laugh.

It all sort of overwhelmed Issel, who never expected such a fuss over his retirement.

“It’s been real nice,” Issel said. “At first, I wasn’t real comfortable with it, but I thought that it was nice that people would take the time to do that. But it has taken away from basketball.”

To others, however, it isn’t at all surprising that Issel is being saluted for his achievements.

If you count the 12,823 points Issel scored in six ABA seasons to his NBA total, which the NBA doesn’t, he is the game’s fourth-leading scorer behind Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Wilt Chamberlain and Elvin Hayes. He is the Nuggets’ all-time leader in almost every statistical category imaginable--scoring, rebounding, assists, steals, field goals, free throws, minutes played and games played.

Statistics alone could never sum up of Issel’s career, though. It is his work-ethic approach to the game that separates him from other players of similar ability. No matter how much the Nuggets have paid Issel all these years, he has always given them their money’s worth in effort.

Issel is certainly not among the NBA’s flashy players. A slow-footed, 6-foot 9-inch center who lost his front teeth in junior high and always seems to have a scowl on his reddened face, Issel is constantly fighting for rebounds among taller players who jump better, diving on the floor for loose balls, and shooting 15-foot jump shots that are seemingly automatic.

“His determination and style is what got him through the years,” Moe said. “He had to go against guys like Kareem. Dan’s game is move and run and work twice as hard as any other center. Other centers just lay on each other and walk up and down the court.”

To Issel, all-out is the only way he knows how to play. He laughs when it was suggested that he is the best garbage player in the history of the league.

“Just because I dived on the floor and I didn’t slam dunk like Julius Erving, it still counted for two points,” Issel said. “If I have to get on the low box and try to go head to head with some of the other centers, I’m going to come out second best. I’ve had to work harder because I’m not a true center, and that means shooting outside and running up and down the court.”

Because of his no-nonsense style, Issel never has been considered a superstar, even though he will finish with a scoring average of 23.3 points. If Julius Erving, his compatriot from the old ABA days, is the Doctor, Issel is the Orderly.

Kids rarely, if ever, watched Issel on television and then went out to the schoolyard and emulated his moves. If they did, they went home with floor burns on their knees and elbows.

The funny thing is, now that Issel is retiring, he’s getting recognition and publicity. When the Nuggets made their last regular-season visit to San Antonio, where a bitter rivalry from the ABA days has endured, the vocal Spurs’ fans gave Issel a standing ovation.

“It makes you proud,” Nugget assistant coach Allan Bristow said. “You see the fans begin to stand, one by one. Hard-core guys. Blue-collar people. Clapping and paying tribute. It’s something special.”

Working people can relate to Issel, even though he made $614,000 this season. Scheer, who was Issel’s boss for nine years in Denver, said that Issel was a bargain at whatever price. Out of a possible 1,230 regular-season games, Issel played 1,218.

“One of the highlights of my professional life were the years with Dan Issel,” Scheer said. “He represents everything that’s good about professional sports. The way he approaches his job is admirable.

“His statistics underscore the consistency of his performance. He came to play every night, through injury or illness. He’s played with a 103 temperature, broken fingers, wrapped legs, swollen knees. He’s had everything and rarely asked for a night off.”

Said Issel: “I’ve always been able to play through pain and little bumps and bruises. I’m as proud of that record (games played) as I am the scoring. I think I gave people their money’s worth every night. That was important to me.”

It also is important to Issel that he lend his name and time to charities in Denver and the rest of Colorado. He has worked most extensively with the Denver Cancer Society and, corny as it may sound to some, says it is an athlete’s responsibility to give something back to the community.

“He’s just a class guy,” Moe said. “That’s all.”

Earlier this season, when Issel’s brother, Greg, needed a kidney transplant, Dan volunteered to be the donor. It turned out that Dan’s blood type wasn’t compatible with Greg’s, but Dan would have gone through with it, even if it had meant ending his basketball career earlier than he planned. Issel’s father, Robert, was the eventual donor.

“In some ways, Dan Issel is as big in Denver as Magic Johnson is in L.A.,” Scheer said. “Dan’s not big on charisma, like Magic. But he is regarded with the greatest respect.”

It may seem that Issel is too good to be believable. There has to be a chink in the armor if you just look hard enough, right?

But even Moe, who likes to good-naturedly poke fun at his players, can’t find any material to use on Issel.

“What I like about him is that he’s not a stuffed shirt,” Moe said. “Dan might come over out of the blue and say to you, ‘Where did you get that bleeping shirt?’ or ask why I don’t wear a tie. He’s not serious all the time.

“Irv Brown (Denver’s TV broadcaster) uses all these cliches and one of them is about players with ‘good upper-body strength.’ So last year, when Irv asked Dan to come on the pregame show, Dan went into the locker room and stuffed towels and shirts inside his warmup jacket. He comes out all bulky and says--on the air, remember--’How do you like my upper-body strength, Irv?’ It busted everybody up.”

Playing jokes on teammates and friends is just one thing Issel will miss when he walks away from basketball.

“I’m going to miss the friendships you make in basketball,” he said. “You live with these people seven months out of the year, spend more time with them than with your family. I’ve always enjoyed just playing the game.

“I take (basketball) for what it is--a game you’re trying to entertain people with. We’re not doing something important, like negotiating with the Russians against nuclear weapons. I’ve always had a good time playing. I’ll miss the competitiveness of the games.”

Issel said that the greatest memory of his career is of the 1974-75 season, when he and Artis Gilmore led the Kentucky Colonels to the ABA championship, the only title Issel has won. “If that (Kentucky) team had gone into the NBA intact, it would’ve been one of the better teams,” Issel said. “With a center like Artis and an outside shooter like Louis Dampier and several others who put in some time with the NBA, that was a pretty decent ball club.

“You always say that individual stats aren’t that important. You say it because you are expected to say it. But when we won the championship, I realized how true it was. All summer long, you walked around with your head up and didn’t have to answer questions about what went wrong.”

But after that championship season, Kentucky owner John Y. Brown traded Issel to a team called the Baltimore Claws, which folded before it even played a game. It was purely a business decision by Brown, who was losing money and eventually lost his team when the NBA and ABA merged.

Before the merger, Issel was traded to Denver. As Issel recalls, he wasn’t happy at first.

“I realized in 1975 that basketball was a business,” Issel said. “But eventually, Denver was a great move for me.”

In Issel’s 10 seasons in Denver, he was the cornerstone of the team. Players and coaches would come and go, the franchise would come close to folding several times, but Issel remained.

“The team has gone the full circle now,” Issel said. “My first two years in the NBA, we won the division and were in the Western Conference finals. Then, we hit rock bottom. And now, we’ve started to come back. I think the franchise is stronger now than at any time since I’ve been there.”

Unfortunately for Issel, now that the Nuggets are successful again, he is past his prime. Not that Issel couldn’t hang around and play another season or two if he wanted. “He can’t do all the same things he used to do,” Moe said. “His quickness is gone. But he still is as good as ever--for a limited time. We don’t play him as much, but down in the fourth quarter, when we need it, Dan’s been every bit as good.”

In Game 2 of the Laker series, when Moe was searching for a different lineup, he replaced starting center Wayne Cooper with Issel. Issel responded with 22 points, shooting 8 for 13 from the field, in the Nuggets’ 136-114 win.

So, Issel proved that he still can play. The thing is, he doesn’t want to play, anymore. He really wants to retire.

Ask Issel about his horses and he takes out his wallet, not to show off snapshots of his kids, but to look at a list of mares and foals that he and his partner, Tom Gentry, own under the name of Blue Grass Breeders, Inc.

Some of the past champions Issel’s mares have been bred to are Spectacular Bid, Alydar, Perrault and Mr. Prospector. On this day, Issel was happy to take out the list because a mare bred to Mr. Prospector had foaled that morning.

“I always have to have my list handy, so I know what’s going on,” said Issel, who, after a quick count, said he was part-owner of 12 mares, 10 yearlings and 11 foals. “I just own bits and pieces of them. Tommy (Gentry) is the experienced horseman.”

Not that Issel is a novice, by any means. Issel got interested in thoroughbred racing when he was being recruited by the late Adolph Rupp at the University of Kentucky. Rupp took Issel, who had spent his young life on a farm that had only cows and pigs, to some of Lexington’s largest breeding farms. He met Gentry during that time, and after one trip to the track, Issel was hooked.

“Dan and Cheri were engaged at that time and I decided to treat them to the track,” Gentry said. “They won $65 that day, but they were so excited you would’ve thought it was $65,000.”

Issel was never really interested in the betting aspect of racing, though. He always thought a great way to make a living would be to breed horses and watch them go from wobbly foals to strong runners.

“There’s a correlation between a race horse and a human athlete,” Issel said. “You want horses that are big, strong, athletic looking, but that doesn’t guarantee you a winner. You look at the bloodline, of course, but I think you have to look at the conformation of a horse, too.

“But, just like with athletes, you’ve got to have a touch with (horses) to get the most out of them. Look at John Henry. That horse was sold once for $1,100, because people hadn’t found a way to take a look at his heart.”

Issel hopes to have his own John Henry some day, but he realizes that some breeders toil for years without great success. As anyone who knows Issel will attest, however, he thrives on hard work.

“Dan doesn’t know what work is yet,” Gentry said, laughing. “There’s so much work. I stayed up all night with a foal the other day. There are no set hours in this business. You work until you’re done, whenever that may be.”

That comes as no surprise to Issel, who lived on a farm in Missouri until he was 12. Then his family moved to the big city--Batavia, Ill., population 7,000.

“There’s always work to do on a farm,” Issel said. “Even more so in our case because my father (Robert) worked 40 hours a week as a painter and ran the farm. We worked long and hard every day to keep the farm going.”

For the last 10 years, Issel and his boyhood friend from Batavia, Cincinnati Bengal quarterback Ken Anderson, have owned a farm specializing in corn, tobacco and soy beans on the outskirts of Lexington. Each lived and worked there during his respective off-seasons.

“I love to farm,” Issel said. “We’ve been fortunate. The average farmer today is batting his head against the wall because now, everything has to be perfect to survive. If everything goes right and you happen to get a good harvest, everybody else has a good harvest, too, so the prices go way down. When the prices are up for corn and wheat, nobody has any.

“I think it’s one of the major problems in the country. Some farms that have been in families four or five generations can’t make a go of it. The day will come when corporations will own thousands of acres, so that the family farmer will become a dinosaur. I’d like to see something done because nobody works harder than the farmer.”

Issel assures you that not many will work as hard as he will to make his horse farm as successful as his basketball career. He says just can’t wait to roll up his sleeves, take out his false teeth and get to work.

But Moe isn’t so sure that Issel has basketball totally out of his system yet.

“He’s going to work so much harder around the farm than he ever worked in practice, he’ll be begging to come back,” Moe joked at a recent testimonial dinner for Issel. “He’ll be out of retirement next year, I guarantee you, and we’ll do this again next year.”

No chance, Doug.

Issel said he plans to visit Hollywood Park again when the Nuggets head back to Los Angeles Monday.