The Rochester Zeniths were another of this area’s professional basketball teams, coming after the NBA Royals and before the current Rochester RazorSharks.
The Zeniths were dominant on the court but dysfunctional in many other regards. The team’s first season ended after only 11 games when the league disbanded. Local coaching legend Mauro Panaggio was replaced for a year by a team owner who decided that he wanted to coach. The Zeniths bounced from home to home and played many games on a carpet-lined concrete floor that substituted for a hardwood court.
Meanwhile, the team won two championships during its brief five-plus-year tenure with a roster that included local Glenn Hagan. Ultimately, the Zeniths folded because of low attendance.
Dick Hill of Hill TV owned the team when it first started play in early 1978. He named the team “Zeniths” after the brand of TV sets he sold in his well-known Winton Road store. The Zeniths’ first season — what there was of it — came as members of the newly formed All-American Basketball Association.
Problems quickly arose. Hill threw in the towel after a month, with his team sporting a league-best 10-1 record. Many of the owners in the eight-team league ran ramshackle operations, as Rick Woodson wrote in a February 1978 Democrat and Chronicle story.
“If there ever was a house built on sand, it was the AABA,” Woodson wrote. “As a business venture, it has to rank right in there with peddling treasure maps of Central Park.”
Woodson labeled the league “Dick Hill and the seven dwarves.” By the time the Zeniths withdrew, several other teams had already folded and the league lasted just that one year. Hill was reportedly the only owner to pay his players in full.
Hill didn’t quit, though. Determined to keep things going, the Zeniths joined the established Continental Basketball Association for the 1978-79 season. The team, coached by Panaggio, posted a 36-12 record and won the playoffs. Panaggio was named the league’s coach of the year.
After that first CBA season, Hill sold half the team to Art Stock, a millionaire nightclub owner who ran a bar on Scottsville Road called Art Stock’s Playpen North. Stock appointed himself as coach and general manager of the Zeniths and Panaggio was fired. That lasted one year until Panaggio was brought back.
Years later, Panaggio told Bob Matthews of the Times-Union that the removal was his biggest regret with the Zeniths.
“Art put up the dough — he agreed to pay half the bills, and he wanted to coach,” said Panaggio, who previously coached at Franklin and East high schools and at Brockport State. “I understood. But having to sit that year out after our first championship was my greatest disappointment in the CBA.”
Stock and Hill sold the team in August 1980 to a group led by Panaggio, who became coach again. He led the team to another title and remained with the Zeniths until the end. That wasn’t too far down the road.
The Zeniths over the years played at the War Memorial, the Dome Arena in Henrietta and at Monroe Community College. The Dome was the place with the green-carpet-covered floor. Sneakers didn’t squeak and basketball bounces didn’t resonate the way they do on a hardwood floor. A news story from the time noted that a veteran Zenith warned a newcomer, “Don’t fall on the carpet. It’ll scar you for life.”
The players and the team were among the best in the league throughout the Zeniths’ tenure. Perennial favorites included Hagan, who had played for Cardinal Mooney High School and St. Bonaventure University; Larry Fogle, whom Panaggio called “probably the best all-around player in the entire CBA”; and Larry McNeill, labeled a “scoring machine.”
The Zeniths set league records for most wins in a season, longest winning streak and highest scoring average for a season.
But much of that success was largely ignored by local fans. Crowds in the hundreds or less turned out for most home games. The biggest crowds came for doubleheaders that included matchups between East High and McQuaid. Most of the audience left after the high school games.
Finally, at the end of the 1982-83 CBA season, Panaggio called it quits. The league bought out the team, and the Zeniths were through. The Zeniths had completed another fine season and again made the playoffs, but the financial beat-downs proved to be too much. The team averaged just below 1,500 fans per game that year. Panaggio said the figures were skewed because of the high turnouts for the high school doubleheaders.
“If we detected any glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel to turn it around at the gate, we’d have stayed,” Panaggio told Bob Matthews in a 1983 Times-Union story. “But we saw no hope.”
The Zeniths finished with a 159-65 record overall in the CBA and a 25-12 record in playoff games. That apparently wasn’t enough to attract enough fans to pay the bills.
“This is not a pro basketball town,” Greg Boeck wrote in a 1983 Democrat and Chronicle story. Even the Royals (featured in an earlier Whatever Happened To … installment), who won an NBA championship during their years here in the 1940 and 1950s, moved away because of poor attendance.
Rochester had another short-lived pro basketball team, the Colonels, who played an abbreviated 1958-59 season in the Eastern Basketball League. The latest pro team, the RazorSharks, have called Rochester home since 2005 and have won several championships.
Morrell is a Rochester-based freelance writer.
About this feature
“Whatever Happened To …?” is a feature that explores favorite haunts of the past and revisits the headlines of yesteryear. It’s a partnership between RocRoots.com and “Hometown Rochester” on Facebook. Have an idea you’d like us to explore? Email us at roc-roots@DemocratandChronicle.com.