In the vast, dead space of the Allstate Arena last March, a few hundred people turned out to watch the Chicago Skyliners, the city’s representative in the minor-league American Basketball Association. The announcer confused the team with the new XFL football franchise–referring to them as “the Enforcers”–and a pregame rendition of the national anthem sounded like a dirge. But Mike Naiditch, sitting courtside on a folding chair, looked like the happiest man alive.
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Back in 1991 Naiditch went to a high school game in the western suburbs and ended up sitting next to Steve Yoder, coach of the the University of Wisconsin Badgers. Yoder was in the process of recruiting Michael Finley, a promising player at Proviso East and an honor student who intended to study business at UW. When Yoder introduced Finley after the game, Naiditch offered the young athlete a summer internship at the Chicago Stock Exchange, and Finley spent the next three summers working for him.
By June 1995, Finley had blossomed into a potential first-round choice in the NBA draft, and he asked Naiditch to advise him in choosing an agent. “I saw the pain and agony of all the losing agents,” Naiditch recalls, “and I said there is no way I would ever do that, especially seeing the good people who were trying to get Mike. I sympathized with them.”
At one point the stock was valued at $270 a share, but in March 1997 Michael de Guzman, a Filipino geologist employed by the company, allegedly committed suicide by jumping out of a helicopter over the jungles of Borneo, and nine days later reports that there was no gold sent the stock plummeting. “It turned out the company was a total sham,” says Naiditch. “They bought some gold and buried it underground and had this guy dig it up. The stock went from $20 to one penny. We were on the verge of having to shut down the business.”
Naiditch thinks he might have found an NBA-caliber player in Darrell Johns, a senior at Chicago State. A native of Kokomo, Indiana, the seven-foot-one Johns played basketball in junior college and briefly at Iowa State before transferring to Chicago State. Naiditch attended the school’s home games and made sure Johns was aware of him; he contacted coach “Bo” Ellis and prepared a dossier that outlined his business strategy. Johns had more established agents courting him, but in late March he signed with Naiditch.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Robert Drea.
