Also from "SI": "When the brothers were juniors at Indiana, Warner Brothers saw their pictures in 'Life' and offered them seven-year contracts."

I briefly got my greasy, grimy hands on a 1970 basketball card of Tom Van Arsdale, a talented cager out of Indiana who was then playing for the Cincinnati Royals. The back of the card notes that “Tom is interested in the stock brokerage business.” It also provides his impressive offensive stats.

It doesn’t mention that Tom had an identical twin named Dick, who also played hoops, and that the two were especially close. An excerpt about the brothers  from a 1972 Sports Illustrated article titled “A Slight Case Of Unmistakable Identity“:

“From the time of their premature births on Feb. 22, 1943 (Tom is the older by 15 minutes) until they graduated from Indiana, they spent only two nights apart. Their toys were identical, and only after they left high school did they wear unlike clothes. ‘If we had orange juice for breakfast, Mom would measure the glasses precisely to make sure they contained the same amount,’ says Tom. ‘That way neither one of us would get mad at her.’

The Van Arsdales’ closeness almost knocked Tom out of the pros before he stepped on a court. Drafted in succession in 1965 at the beginning of the second round by New York and Detroit, the twins were separated for the first time when they left for their rookie camps. Tom quit the Pistons soon after and returned home with the excuse that he wanted to go to law school. He bought his law books but never went to class. ‘The sole reason for leaving Detroit was because Dick wasn’t around,’ he recalled last week. ‘It was a case of acute loneliness. It was like when you have a girl friend in high school and for some reason you can’t be with her. All you want is to be with her, and nothing else and no one else can make you happy. I called Dick in New York and he convinced me that things weren’t going to be any better if I didn’t play, so I went back to the Pistons.'”