At the time, 1980 didn’t seem to be an important yr to launch a latest skilled sports franchise. Interest rates were high. The Iranian hostage crisis dominated national attention. A presidential election loomed. There was a general feeling of pessimism and uncertainty for a lot of Americans.
But Norm Sonju had a vision—inspired by God, perhaps, but in addition from data and market evaluation that showed Dallas had untapped potential as a National Basketball Association (NBA) city.
For two years, Sonju had worked to make his dream a reality. Now, in 1980, when his plans looked like they may be crumbling, he turned to 2 Bible verses he had learned from his mother as a toddler: “Call to me and I’ll answer you and inform you great and unsearchable stuff you have no idea” (Jer. 33:3), and “Neither height nor depth, nor anything in all creation, will have the opportunity to separate us from the love of God that’s in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 8:39).
“The truth of God’s Word made such a difference in my attitude in those hectic days of starting the franchise,” Sonju would write a decade later. “I knew that God was on top of things even when things looked hopeless.”
Sonju’s Christian faith was greater than a source of comfort. It was the central force behind his efforts to bring the NBA to Dallas, fueling his hopes for what the team could turn into and providing the purpose of reference to the owner who had the cash to animate his vision.
These days, Christian athletes appear to be in every single place in skilled sports: kneeling in prayer, pointing to the sky, writing Scripture on their shoes, thanking God from the rostrum and in front of television cameras.
But the origin of the Dallas Mavericks was not only an effort to create and construct an NBA franchise that included Christian players. It was also an effort guided by Christian values.
The son of Norwegian immigrants, Sonju grew up in Chicago before enrolling at Grinnell College in Iowa. Though he played on the basketball team, his role as a bench player indicated that professional sports weren’t in his future—a minimum of as an athlete.
After graduating in 1960, Sonju made his way back home. He earned an MBA from the University of Chicago, got involved with Campus Crusade for Christ (now generally known as Cru), and took a job as an executive with ServiceMaster, an organization founded by Marion Wade and shaped by an evangelical ethos centered on “service to the master.”
As Sonju learned easy methods to infuse his faith together with his role as an executive, his love for basketball continued. He developed friendships with NBA players Don Nelson and Paul Neumann, and with legendary basketball coach and pioneering civil rights advocate John McLendon.
He also befriended two NBA executives who shared his evangelical faith: Jerry Colangelo, who worked for the Chicago Bulls from 1966 to 1968 before departing to guide the Phoenix Suns, and Pat Williams, who served because the Bulls’ general manager from 1969 to 1973 before moving on to an extended profession with Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Orlando.
These connections put Sonju on the within two emerging sports institutions. First was a growing evangelical subculture in sports, the “Christian athlete movement,” a network of ministries just like the Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Athletes in Action, Pro Athletes Outreach, and Baseball Chapel that established team chapels, Bible studies, and off-season retreats in college and pro sports.
Second was the NBA. Although skilled basketball trailed behind baseball and football in popularity throughout the Seventies—limited, partly, by a racial backlash from white fans who complained a few league through which over 70 percent of the players were African Americans—the potential for growth was present. In 1977, when Sonju was hired to run the Buffalo Braves (because of Colangelo’s suggestion), he was uniquely positioned to merge his passions for Jesus, basketball, and business.
“I find the teachings of the Scriptures applicable day-after-day in business, even basketball,” he told reporters during his first yr on the job.
Sonju spent that yr overseeing Buffalo’s move to a latest city. When the team ended up in San Diego, changing their name to the Clippers, Sonju didn’t join them. In the search process, he fell in love with Dallas’s potential as an NBA market. Sonju settled in town in 1978 with the goal of bringing an expansion franchise to town.
To get a team in Dallas, nonetheless, Sonju needed money. He found it in Donald J. Carter.
The son of Mary Crowley, an evangelical businesswoman who built Home Interior and Gifts right into a direct-sales empire and served on the board of Billy Graham’s association, Carter made his fortune by investing in and managing his mother’s business. He followed his mother’s Southern Baptist faith too, attending Dallas’s First Baptist Church and supporting evangelical ministries.
He had little interest in basketball until he was introduced to Sonju by his pastor, W. A. Criswell. At first, Carter was suspicious. Sonju was efficient and practical, a buttoned-up business executive trained in the newest corporate strategies. Carter, whose ten-gallon cowboy hat became a fixture at Mavericks games, was more of a risk-taker with an intuitive mindset, attributing his success more to his heart than his head.
Carter often framed these differences in regional terms. “He’s a Yankee,” Carter said of Sonju. “You can’t make an actual down-home person out of a Yankee overnight.” Yet the 2 bonded over their shared goal: to construct an NBA team shaped by their evangelical faith and cultural values.
It was a vision that had political resonance. White evangelical voters on the time were mobilizing around Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaign, inspired by his support for conservative family values and his description of the United States as a “shining city on a hill” for the world to follow.
Sonju and Carter saw their team, too, as a model for others to emulate.
“What an example we could set for the NBA and our country if we had a brand-new, clean model that worked good,” Sonju told Sports Illustrated. “Dallas is football country, however it’s also Bible Belt country. We can win the respect of the individuals with wholesomeness and goodness and respect for God and country.”
In April 1980, the NBA awarded the duo their franchise. In October 1980, two weeks before Reagan’s election, the team began to play.
As Sonju and Carter launched into their project, they spoke of putting together a “team stuffed with Roger Staubachs.” The star quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys, though a Catholic, was a powerful supporter of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and a distinguished cultural symbol representing conservative moral values.
But while baseball and football had developed a cohesive network of outspoken Christian athletes like Staubach, the NBA lagged behind. There were Christians within the league, but they weren’t organized as a part of a movement, and evangelical sports ministries didn’t have a powerful presence. This was due partly to the disconnect between a predominantly Black league and a Christian athlete movement led primarily by white evangelicals.
Recognizing that he couldn’t simply fill out a roster with Christian players, Sonju thought strategically. He was especially enthusiastic about his first player acquisition after the expansion draft: the signing of Ralph Drollinger. The seven-footer had been a back-up center for UCLA within the Seventies before turning down opportunities within the NBA to play for Athletes in Action (AIA), an evangelistic basketball team sponsored by Campus Crusade for Christ.
In 1980, nonetheless, Drollinger decided the time had come to make his move to the NBA. Sonju outbid other teams with a guaranteed contract of $400,000. He knew Drollinger wouldn’t be a star player, but he thought the middle might be a frontrunner throughout the team while helping to galvanize the evangelical movement within the league.
Drollinger would later recall that the Mavericks “told me they were going to be the primary Christian team within the NBA.” A young reporter in Dallas named Skip Bayless also took note, wondering if “you needed to be a born-again Boy Scout” to affix the Mavericks roster. “These guys can speak at First Baptist, but can they play?” he asked.
In Drollinger’s case, the reply was no. His NBA profession lasted six games and featured more personal fouls than points scored. He also turned out to be a liability as a substitute of a frontrunner throughout the locker room. “It was considered one of the worst mistakes of my profession,” Sonju later said, and a reminder that born-again players didn’t necessarily result in on-court success. (In the Nineteen Nineties, Drollinger went on to turn into a controversial right-wing political activist.) In fact, within the team’s very first game, it was Abdul Jeelani, a Muslim player, who scored the primary points in franchise history.
Still, there have been other ways to shape the team’s culture and to present a picture linked with evangelical Christianity. Sonju hired former AIA staff members like Paul Phipps to work within the front office, recruited girls from a neighborhood chapter of Campus Crusade for Christ to function ushers, and led Bible studies for his staff. He invited Dallas pastor Tony Evans—early in his long and influential profession in ministry—to function a team chaplain.
Sonju also implemented a pre-game ritual unique to Dallas. Instead of the national anthem, Sonju had “God Bless America” played at home games, and he insisted that players stand at attention in the course of the song, “arms straight, no gum chewing,” presenting a picture, in his mind, of unity and respect.
With their deal with constructing a positive culture and cultivating a family-friendly environment, Sonju and Carter found a winning formula that attracted fans. Led by players like Rolando Blackman, Mark Aguirre, and Derek Harper, the Mavericks’ record progressively improved annually, culminating in five straight playoff appearances between 1983 and 1988.
“I feel the explanation that franchise has done so well,” former staff member Paul Phipps said in 1984, “is because they’d plenty of individuals who desired to honor God in what they did. And God honored their effort.”
But while some Dallas locals took to calling the team the “First Baptist Mavs,” and a neighborhood magazine described the Mavericks as “probably the most Christian-influenced organization in pro sports,” the team’s religious repute didn’t receive widespread national attention.
In an era dominated by the Lakers’ Magic Johnson, the Celtics’ Larry Bird, and the rise of Michael Jordan, Dallas couldn’t break through on the large stage. By 1996, when Carter sold the team and Sonju retired, Dallas had not turn into the NBA “city on a hill” that they’d envisioned.
But their efforts weren’t in vain. As Carter and Sonju brought their personal Christian faith into the work of constructing an NBA franchise, nonetheless imperfectly, they learned to adapt to the pluralistic culture of sports. And by making a shared Dallas cultural institution for fans of all faith traditions to enjoy, they offered a sworn statement and witness of its own.
Paul Putz is assistant director of the Faith & Sports Institute at Baylor’s Truett Seminary and writer of the forthcoming book The Spirit of the Game: American Christianity and Big-Time Sports.
