by William Cook
Then, on June 6, 1946, a group of like-minded sportsmen, most of whom owned hockey teams as well as some of the largest arenas in the country, got together at the Commodore Hotel in New York and formed the Basketball Association of America (BBA), with eleven teams. Each team paid an entry fee of $10,000. Rosters were set at twelve players and a voluntary team salary cap of $55,000 was established. It was agreed that games would be set at forty-eight minutes with four twelve-minute quarters (or periods). The games would be eight minutes longer than all the other professional, barnstorming, and collegiate games being played at that time. Finally, a fixed schedule of sixty games in a season was set; that was sixteen games more than the rival NBL limit.
Maurice Podoloff was a 5′2″ white-haired Yale-educated lawyer who had been born in Russia. Given the nickname of “Poodles” by his contemporaries, Podoloff was a former president of the American Hockey League who also operated an arena in New Haven, Connecticut. Podoloff was named President of the BBA, and suddenly there was a rival league with teams located in New York, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Toronto, and Providence. These teams would play in arenas such as Boston Garden and Madison Square Garden, rather than in small towns of various regions of the country.
On November 1, 1946, while Bob Cousy and the Holy Cross Crusaders were starting the march toward the NCAA championship, the first BBA game took place at Toronto’s Maple Leaf Garden as the New York Knickerbockers defeated the Toronto Huskies 68–66, and professional basketball as we have come to know it today began.
The early BBA teams traveled by train. Player salaries with the voluntary team salary cap averaged about $6,000. The Philadelphia Warriors won the league championship in that first season led by high-scoring (23.2 points per game), 6′5″ Joe Fulks, a former U.S. Marine and Murray State Teachers College player.
While every team in the BBA played its complete schedule in the inaugural season of 1946–47, the league struggled with sparse crowds. With revenues lower than expected it presented a problem in meeting player salaries and every team lost money. Consequently, by the end of the 1946–1947 season, the BBA had lost four teams due to financial difficulties: Pittsburgh, Toronto, Cleveland, and Detroit. Still, Baltimore joined the BBA for 1947–48, and the league continued to gain marginal popularity.
That same year, the BBA had initiated a college draft in which teams drafted the rights to college players with the last place team getting the number one pick. The draft eliminated teams in the same league attempting to outbid each other and strengthened the weaker teams.
Meanwhile, the NBL remained viable and solvent during 1946–47. With a more regional membership in the NBL, there was less travel and the league saved money. NBL attendance was nearly equal to that of the BBA and with lower player salaries several teams managed to turn a modest profit.
But the NBL had an ace in the hole with George Mikan, the most popular professional basketball player in the country. The former DePaul University star had been signed by owner Maurice White to play for the Chicago American Gears in 1946 for a whopping salary package of $60,000 over five years.
George Mikan, standing 6′10″, was a titan under the basket, and while other teams attempted to harass him, he remained steadfast. When he decided to take the ball to the basket, no one could stop him.
There was temporary high anxiety in the NBL during 1946–47 when George Mikan walked away from the Chicago team and the NBL for a month. Maurice White had attempted to back out of certain incentive clauses in Mikan’s contract. When Mikan returned, everyone gave a sigh of relief, and he then picked up where he had left off, spear-heading the American Gears playoff charge.
Due to George Mikan’s extreme popularity, Maurice White came to the conclusion that he could really cash-in by using him to launch a new league that he would have complete control over. So, at the beginning of the 1947–48 season, White withdrew the American Gears from the NBL and organized the Professional Basketball League of America (PBA). The league began with sixteen teams. White hoped to expand it to twenty-four teams, and he would own all the teams and the arenas. But within only a few weeks it was apparent that the PBA was going to fail and did. Maurice White lost approximately $500,000 dollars in the fiasco, went bankrupt, and lost his business.
With Maurice White and the Chicago American Gears defunct, the Chicago players were distributed over the eleven remaining NBL franchises. George Mikan’s contract was awarded to the Minneapolis Lakers. Mikan joined two other very talented players on the Lakers: forward Jim Pollard and guard Herm Schaefer.
Jim Pollard, a 6′5″ forward, became one of the first players in professional basketball capable of playing the game above the rim. Nicknamed the Kangaroo Kid Pollard, he had a tremendous jumping ability, and although he seldom dunked the ball in games, he would leave his teammates thunderstruck by dunking from the foul line in practice.
All three, Mikan, Pollard, and Schaefer, became a dominating force as the Lakers went on to defeat the Rochester Royals in four games for the 1948 NBL title. For the season, George Mikan averaged 21.3 points per game.
Even with George Mikan’s popularity and small sold-out arenas, the NBL was on the verge of folding. Likewise, entering the 1948–49 season, the BBA was still losing money. But it was willing to take a chance on expanding by rescuing four of the NBL teams: the Minneapolis Lakers, the Ft. Wayne Zollner Pistons, the Rochester Royals, and the Indianapolis Kautskys (later named the Jets). Two other NBL franchises, the Oshkosh All-Stars and Toledo Jeeps, had also sought to jump to the BBA but were turned down.
While the BBA was now a bloated circuit with the inclusion of the four NBL teams, the upside was that those teams brought with them several star players capable of enhancing gate receipts.
With quality players joining the league, the BBA’s popularity would immediately grow to a point where the league was considered marketable. In 1948, the Bowman Company issued a 36-card set of basketball cards featuring BBA players. The cards were in color and measured 2 1/16 x 2 1/2 inches. The set included a George Mikan rookie card that is today highly coveted by sports card collectors.
Mikan had an immediate impact on the league, and for the 1948–49 season, he averaged 28.3 points per game, which amounted to one-third of the Minneapolis Lakers point production.
In the 1949 BBA playoffs, the Minneapolis Lakers advanced to the finals to face the financially strapped Washington Capitals coached by former high school coach Arnold “Red” Auerbach. The Lakers won the first three games of the best of seven series. Then, in game four, George Mikan broke his wrist and the Capitals won. While Mikan played with a cast on his wrist in game five and scored 22 points, the Capitals won again, but the Lakers won game six played in St. Paul to wrap-up the championship. Mikan averaged 27.5 points per game in the series.
The NBL, left with only a few star players such as Dolph Schayes of the Syracuse Nationals and Don Otton of the Tri-City Blackhawks, played through the 1948–49 season, then sought to merge its remaining teams into the BBA. Almost without objection, every remaining NBL franchise was merged into the BBA.
In the fall of 1949, the BBA would begin play as the National Basketball Association (NBA). The league would have seventeen teams that year in three divisions. Going forward, notwithstanding that the Minneapolis Lakers had won the BBA championship in 1949, the first six years of the 1950s would see a former NBL team win the NBA championship.
Racial integration in professional basketball had a long journey to traverse. While there had been several black players who had played professional basketball going back to the mid-1930s, with 6′4″ center Hank Williams of the Buffalo Bisons in the Midwest Basketball Conference, the first black pro in basketball was probably Buck Lew who played in 1904 for the Newbury team in the New England League.
All-black professional teams would occasionally meet all-white professional teams. One of the more memorable meetings took place in 1939 at Chicago Stadium a
s the all-black New York Rens defeated the all-white Oshkosh All-Stars 36–25 in the finals of the World Tournament with 20,000 fans in attendance.
The Rens, named for the Renaissance Ballroom in Harlem, were owned by Harlem businessman Robert Douglas who had organized the team in 1922. He paid his players $150 a month and $3-a-day meal money. Between 1932 and 1936, the Rens rolled-up a won-lost record of 473–49. At one point in 1933, the Rens won 88 straight games. Many of those games would end in fights as all-white teams could not accept losing to an all-black team. In 1948, Douglas broke the team up.
The Rens had advanced to the finals in the 1939 World Tournament by defeating the Harlem Globetrotters in the semifinals. The event was the world’s first integrated tournament championship. John Isaacs, who stood 6′3″, was a member of the Rens. Later, Isaacs stated that as a reward for winning the tournament, the Rens were given jackets that had the words “Colored World Champions” stitched on the back. Offended by the implication, Isaacs went into the office of Rens owner Robert Douglas and said, “Do you have a razor blade I can borrow?”1 Douglas gave Isaacs a single-edge razor blade; he put the jacket on the back of one his teammates and cut the word “Colored” out of the back of it. “So it just said World Champions,” said Isaacs, “because that’s what we were.”2
John Isaacs remained extremely irritated until the day he died on January 26, 2009, by the implication of various New Yorkers, fans, and sportswriters that the 1970 Knicks were the first professional team to win a basketball championship for the city.
John Isaacs, like most of his black contemporaries, never played in the ABL, NBL, or NBA, but rather played in an era of basketball that was billed as the Black Fives. The teams were sponsored by churches, businesses, colleges, YMCAs, and social clubs and were comprised of black amateurs and professionals playing in well-organized barnstorming circuits. The New York Rens and the Harlem Globetrotters were the most famous of these teams. The Rens often played against all-white teams, most notable being another New York team, the Original Celtics, that featured Nat Holman and Joe Lapchick, and the Indianapolis Kautskys that featured future legendary U.C.L.A. coach John Wooden as a player.
The Original Celtics refused to join the ABL in 1925 because the league would not admit the Rens as a member. However, the following season in 1926, the Celtics reconsidered and joined the ABL. The league had been organized by George Preston Marshall, who later would own the Washington Redskins, and due to his racial intolerance would become the last NFL team to integrate its roster in 1960.
The early history of the Harlem Globetrotters was similar to that of the Rens. Abe Saperstein, the son of a Jewish tailor on Chicago’s south side, became a black sports promoter. He was instrumental in promoting Negro league baseball and also assembled a team of highly talented black basketball players he called the Savoy Five. He had them barnstorm all the way across the country to the west coast in the 1930s. Later, the team’s name was changed to Globetrotters. The competition that the Globetrotters usually faced was not very good and to keep the interest of the fans seeing the games, Saperstein began having them employ clowning routines in the team’s format. But the Globetrotters were far more than a basketball vaudeville act, they played superior basketball. Although they were defeated by the New York Rens in the 1939 World Championship Tournament, in 1940 they returned to the tournament and beat the Rens in the quarter-finals.
By 1943, with Reece “Goose” Tatum doing a clown routine at center with his incredible 84” arm span, sometimes looping in twenty-five-foot hook shots, and Marques Haynes playing spectacular legitimate basketball dribbling through multiple defenders, the Globetrotters were a force to be reckoned with when they played the game for real.
In 1948 and 1949, the Harlem Globetrotters, with Tatum and Haynes playing the game for real, would defeat that season’s eventual BBA champion the Minneapolis Lakers and George Mikan twice in exhibition games. The first game in 1948, was played before 17,823 fans at Chicago Stadium with the Globetrotters victorious 61–59. The second game in 1949, also played at Chicago Stadium, drew even a larger crowd of 21,866 and saw the Globetrotters prevail again 49–45.
The Globetrotters would continue to play some very serious and competitive exhibition basketball into the early 1950s, but due to losing an increasing number of black stars to the NBA the club began to focus its brand more on a clowning game that was enormously entertaining and became financially successful on an international stage and that survives until this day. Over the years the Globetrotters have played before kings, queens, popes, behind the Iron Curtain, and in Africa and Australia. In Berlin, the Globetrotters played outdoors before the biggest basketball crowd in history with 75,000.
It wasn’t until the 1950–51 season that the first black players came into the NBA. In 1950, Chuck Cooper of Duquesne University became the first black player to be drafted in the NBA when he was chosen by the Boston Celtics as the 13th player picked in the draft.
Bob Cousy has always proudly pointed out that he played with the first black player to reach the NBA. Celtics owner Walter Brown, making Cooper his second pick in the 1950 NBA college draft, stated, “I don’t give a damn if he’s striped or plaid or polka dot, Boston takes Charles Cooper of Duquesne.”3
Chuck Cooper had attended Duquesne on the G.I. Bill and his legacy is celebrated in civil rights history due to an incident that occurred while he was a player on the Duquesne Dukes squad. On December 23, 1946, in Pittsburgh, Tennessee coach John Mauer refused to put his team on the court with a black player. Dukes coach Charles “Chuck” Davies was adamant about adhering to the long-time administrative policy of the school to not discriminate on the basis of race in its athletic programs. Duquesne had been allowing black players to compete in its athletic programs since the 1920s. One of the first blacks to play sports at the school was Cumberland Posey, who later owned the Homestead Grays in the Negro Leagues. When Tennessee remained steadfast in its decision to not take the court, Duquesne was awarded a 2–0 forfeit of the game.
While Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton became the first black player to sign an NBA contract when he signed with New York Knicks in 1950, it was Earl Lloyd who became the first black player to play in an NBA regular-season game because the schedule had his Washington Capitals team opening one day before the others.
Nat “Sweetwater” Clifton had played college ball at Xavier of Louisiana during 1942 and 1943. He then joined the U.S. Army and served for three years during World War Two. Following the war, Clifton played for the New York Rens and Harlem Globetrotters before joining the Knicks.
Several players chosen in the 1950 NBA college draft would go on to have careers in the NBA that would take them all the way into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame and immediately upon entering the league, help the NBA to keep its footing as a national professional sport while it was still unstable in fan support.
Aside from the issue of black players entering the NBA, the 1950 draft would be a pivotal event in forging the league’s legitimacy by bringing some of its early stars into the game.
In the 1950 draft, the Philadelphia Warriors exercised their territorial draft rights to pick Paul Arizin of Villanova. Arizin, who suffered from asthma, played hard despite his disability and had an immediate impact on the league. In only his second season in 1951–52, Arizin, a line drive shooter, would become the leading scorer with an average of 25.4 points per game. Ultimately, he played ten years in the NBA, missing two years while serving in the armed services during the Korean War and was an All-Star every year he played in the league.
George Yardley of Stanford University was taken by the Ft. Wayne Zollner Pistons and would become the first player in the NBA to score 2,000 career points.
Bill Sharman of USC was taken by the Washington Capitals in the second round as the number 16 pick. Within a year Sharman would be a member of the Boston Celtics; he would be instrumental in helping the Boston Celtics to become one of professional sports’ first dynasties an
d go on to be named as one of the fifty greatest players in NBA history in 1996.
But the player taken in the 1950 NBA draft that would have the biggest impact on NBA history, was Bob Cousy of Holy Cross. Cousy was hopeful that the Boston Celtics, who had the number one pick in the draft, would select him. He had even made plans to settle down in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Although Cousy was well-known in Boston, Walter Brown was not eager to draft him. Brown had drafted several other well-known players from New England colleges in the past few years and been burned. Former Holy Cross players Joe Mullaney, Dermott O’Connell and even All-American George Kaftan had failed miserably wearing a Celtics jersey. In addition, Wyndol Gray and Saul Mariaschin of Harvard and Tony Lavelli of Yale had been busts in Boston.
While Holy Cross had won the NCAA tournament in 1947 when Cousy was a freshman, there was a group of hardcore, very vocal Cousy detractors who were quick to point out that the Holy Cross Crusaders had never won a tournament while Cousy was the leading player on the team. Furthermore, it was alleged that he had never played a good game at Madison Square Garden, the prime basketball task environment that supposedly separated the average players from the good ones or great ones. While all that was not exactly true, the Crusaders had won the Sugar Bowl Tournament in Cousy’s sophomore year, the damage was done.
Of course, there was also the belief among some of the supposedly informed analysts that all the fancy stuff that Cousy exhibited with the behind the back passes and through-the-legs passes would not work in the NBA. Celtics coach Red Auerbach had seen Cousy play with the college all-stars against the Harlem Globetrotters and he advanced the opinion that Bob Cousy was a one-dimension player, all offense and no defense.