April 13, 1961: For years, Abe Saperstein had been enduring the slurs and digs of organized basketball, which referred to his menagerie of ball wizards as "trained giraffes playing stooges and sparmates." In the late 1940s, it finally got under his skin of which, by the way, there's a lot. "You might say," wrote publicist Bill Miller delicately, "Abie's ire rose."