It’s not about the ball
Entrepreneur Anthony Veliz ignites a pro basketball stampede in
Salem.
By Oakley Brooks
In March, two weeks before a cast of thousands marched to the
Capitol steps in Salem to protest a pending immigration bill,
Anthony Veliz watched more than 1,000 people file into the
Salem Armory to see his minor league Stampede basketball team
play its first regular season game. Veliz once focused his
energies on Latino empowerment, but this spring he sidelined
ethnic politics for a franchise in the International Basketball
League.
And so did his fans and sponsors. On one side of the Armory on
that night, Harold Wood, owner of Harold’s Quality Auto
Repair, watched the action intently from the suite for which
he’d paid $2,500 as the game’s title sponsor. Wood
describes his view on illegal immigrants succinctly:
“What part of illegal don’t you understand?”
As an avid basketball fan, however, he got hooked on
Veliz’s free-shooting, two-handed-jamming group of
ballers with the rest of the crowd at that first game. There
was a sizable group of Veliz’s extended family and
friends from Woodburn. Russian speakers from that town as well.
And, of course, local Anglos.
“I don’t think any group held the floor in that
respect,” Wood remembers of the diverse crowd. What he
recalls more vividly was how the group ignited when the
Stampede heated up following a slow start. As the team
surged to a second-half lead, eventually racking up 134
points and winning by 20, the Armory turned into a
mini-revival. “I felt like the place was going to explode
it got so loud,” Wood says.
Basketball, and nothing else, was the issue of the hour.
“I think because of who I am people half expected that
it would be all Latino and the music would be in
Spanish,” Veliz says, laughing. (Announcements are in
English.) “We decided we just wanted to put the best
product on the floor. In the world of business, I want to
appeal to the masses, to basketball fans regardless of who they
are.”
“All those issues [such as immigration] are sort
of water under the bridge at the game,” he continues.
“We can come together and enjoy a game whatever your
political affiliation.”
That’s a somewhat more muted Veliz than the one who
spoke up against an English-only schooling movement in the
state Legislature in 2001. He was then a school board member in
Woodburn, where programs are taught in Russian as well as
English and Spanish. Veliz also started an initiative to
register Hispanic voters in the late 1990s, and he made an
unsuccessful run at the Democratic nomination for state
representative in 2002.
His activism dates back to when he was the only Latino on the
Woodburn High School basketball team (at
5’10’’, he could dunk) and he started an
annual basketball tournament to give Hispanics more opportunity
to play. The tourney, now in its 20th year, draws teams from
across the country and the likes of Eduardo Najera, who played
in the tournament as a member of the Mexican junior national
team and is now an NBA regular.
Still, Veliz seems a pensive massager of change rather than a
firebrand. Today at 39, following a stint in Nike’s
community affairs department, he’s eager to be seen as an
entrepreneur in a game he loves and still plays.
“I’m a businessman who happens to be
Latino,” he says. “Once people get to know you,
that label falls away. It’s still around and that’s
OK. It makes you who you are.”
Right now, he’s consumed by the Stampede.
Veliz put up his own cash for the $55,000 the franchise fee
from the 2-year-old IBL, which is headquartered in Portland and
has three of its 24 teams in the area. With his wife, Melinda,
serving as his part-time director of marketing, he’s the
only full-time employee of the Stampede, and does everything
from making sponsorship pitches in his pinstriped suit to
answering phones at franchise headquarters, a two-room cubby of
an office surrounded by insurance agents and optometrists in
North Salem. He attends night practices during the week, makes
road trips around the Northwest on weekends and still wears a
bulbous bandage on his right middle finger stemming from
preparations for the first game, when an unfolding table nearly
tore off the top of his finger.
Despite the expense, he’s signed all of the best
second-tier players he could, including Keizer native Grayson
“The Professor” Boucher, who traveled on the
popular street basketball tour sponsored by AND1 clothing.
“I like his philosophy even if I don’t always
agree with it,” says IBL commissioner Mikal Duilio.
“I question why he needs 13 great players, when he could
get by with eight. But he wants to do everything at the highest
possible level.”
Though the team has attracted decent crowds — Veliz says
he’s hitting his target of 800 people a game —
sponsors have been lukewarm to the Stampede. Veliz hoped to get
$100,000 in sponsorships but only brought in $50,000.
“Everyone is waiting to see if he can make it through
the first year,” Duilio says.
Veliz insists he’ll break even or clear a few thousand
dollars this year. He’s talking about TV and radio
play-by-play in two languages next year. Down the line,
he’d like to promote boxing and become a players’
agent.
Meanwhile, with the Stampede preparing for this month’s
playoffs, Salem residents have turned into dedicated armchair
quarterbacks. Veliz is fielding a flurry of phone calls each
week. Harold Wood thinks Veliz should make it easy for big
league teams to buy the Stampede out of promising
players’ contracts. Another regular tells Veliz what
players should be seeing action. What background music to serve
up at games and how loud is a popular topic among other
callers. It’s all a little more than Veliz bargained for.
“I doubt Paul Allen gets home and has messages on his
machine from fans,” he says.
But he knows, in all the madness, what these calls mean.
“They’re invested,” Veliz says.
“I think this city was looking for a team to rally
around.”
Have an opinion? E-mail f
eedback@oregonbusiness.com
