Sports

Vecsey shares induction with NBA greats

SPRINGFIELD, Mass. — The defini tion of a tough room is one filled with NBA people at a dinner recognizing Post basketball columnist Peter Vecsey, print recipient of the 2009 Curt Gowdy Media Award. And Vecsey knew it as soon as he got to the podium last night.

“If there is anybody here I haven’t insulted here over the last 40 years, I apologize,” Vecsey said.

And true to his career and persona, a writer who got his start covering the American Basketball Association, used his dais time during the two-day Hall of Fame program leading up to tonight’s induction to promise to use his new Hall vote towards the enshrinement of players and coaches from that league who used up their best years prior to the merger.

“Mel Daniels, Slick Leonard, Roger Brown,” said Vecsey, and they were just the tip of Vecsey’s list of NBA players, too, who are not in and should be.

“Dennis Johnson, Jamal Wilkes, Chet Walker, Tex Winter, Richie Guerin, Gene Shue, Milton Kutscher (the Poconos hotel owner who ran summer all star games for the stricken Maurice Stokes),” said Vecsey, who has blasted the greats in addition to those he has never been shy in pointing out are far from great.

A lifetime in basketball has been spent not just writing the long-running column read by NBA persons in existence — “Ninety-seven percent and the other three percent are liars,” said master of ceremonies Ernie Johnson — but working for TNT and NBC, and interacting with Hall of Famers, current and about-to-be.

“Once again, Michael Jordan is tagging on my coattails,” Vecsey had joked exclusively with The Post, not with the crowd. “He always tried to make it about him, but we know differently.”

Inductees Jordan, John Stockton, Jerry Sloan, David Robinson, C. Vivian Stringer and Doug Collins, fellow Gowdy award winner on the electronic side, were in the house and some were not spared.

Vecsey called Stockton the “toughest interview I ever had to do,” but told how the all time NBA assist leader had finally, after Vecsey has stopped the taping to implore some life from the interviewee, had come up with a usable anecdote about his brother.

The writer told of an all-nighter with Sloan on the hotel lawn during NBA summer meetings and of the decency of Robinson, who for all his humanitarian work, may never get a better compliment than Peter Vecsey finding nothing bad to say about him.

“Last game David Robinson played was when the Spurs beat the Nets for the championship,” said Vecsey. “I’m walking across the floor interviewing him and I’m being harassed by someone in the stands.

“This guy is calling me every name in the book. David could hear him because the Coliseum was cleared out. But he just kept talking to me, trying to give me something before I went up in the stands looking for the guy. David was no different with me than with everyone, a class act.”

Vecsey had privately noted the irony of time and place of being honored with Collins.

“When Doug Collins was drafted (No. 1 overall) by the 76ers, it was during the days I used to run charity games around the country and overseas.

“I had a game lined up in Springfield, paying guys like he and Charlie Scott and Artis Gilmore, Julius (Erving) and Oscar $500, and Collins breaks his foot in it and plays in only 25 games his rookie year. I maimed him as a player and here we are going in as commentators together.”

jay.greenberg@nypost.com