by John Fox
She also didn’t know about Under Armour.
“My mom and I were still figuring out what I should wear. I had these heavy cotton sweatpants, long cotton shirts, cotton head scarf. I was so hot and uncomfortable.”
Her coaches stood behind her commitment. They began researching light, breathable fabrics, looking for the perfect balance between high-tech comfort and hijab modesty. But there was still the social discomfort of being a symbol of Muslim identity in post-9/11 America. Enough referees questioned her attire that the team had to carry a letter of permission from the Massachusetts Athletic Association. Although she wasn’t the first Muslim woman to play at that level, the precedent wasn’t encouraging. The previous year, University of South Florida co-captain Andrea Armstrong was forced to quit the team when her conversion to Islam and adoption of the dress code led to a reprimand from her coach and hate mail from fans.
I asked Bilqis if she’d experienced similar incidents with spectators or rivals.
She shrugged the question off. “Most players and fans were totally respectful, but there were definitely some who said things.”
Her mother, who’d been sitting in the kitchen within earshot, chimed in.
“It was hard to watch sometimes. I remember once, she was taking the ball in from the sideline and behind her some idiot yelled ‘Terrorist!’ I hate to say it, but that kind of thing happens off the court too.”
Her father, who wears his gray beard long following Muslim custom, relayed a recent experience of his own from the day when the news broke of Osama bin Laden’s killing.
“I go into the store to get the paper and the owner holds up the headline and asks me if I’m going to cut my beard now. Then he says, ‘Only kidding.’ Can you believe that? Why would he think that’s funny?”
Bilqis never let the insults and trash talk get to her, though, and in four years never got a technical foul. Her standard line, coming back to the bench after an incident was, “It’s okay.” Then she’d go back in and unleash buckets of fury in response. By the end of her freshman year she had topped 1,000 points and by senior year she was averaging 40 points a game. The recruitment letters started arriving in the mail.
“They were double-teaming her when she didn’t have the ball, literally stuck to her like glue,” Joe said. “When she got the ball she’d have to drive through triple teams or more but she’d always find a way to the basket. I’d never seen anything like it. It was the Qisi show.”
Bilqis started her senior year with 2,300 points—just 400 points shy of Lobo’s record—and word began to spread.
“Scouts started calling, ESPN started calling, there was a fever building around her quest for the record,” said Joe.
But beyond the media swirl, the greatest effect was within the community. Bilqis became a household name and a symbol of pride, not just for Muslims, and not just for the black community, but for a city in need of a hero—a basketball hero, no less. By mid-January she was within 38 points of the record and playing at the Hoop Hall Classic tournament at Springfield College. Rebecca Lobo arrived with her family, wishing luck to her heir apparent as TV cameras rolled.
“I wasn’t really focused on the record,” said Bilqis. “I just wanted to win the game.”
New Leadership was down by 18 with 31 seconds left. She had 36 points when she fired an open three-pointer from 24 feet and it bounced out. She’d have to wait another game for her big moment.
The next game was supposed to be at the small elementary school gym that New Leadership borrowed for home games, but it needed to be moved to Commerce High to accommodate the crowd of more than 1,000. Bilqis was nervous that night, knowing recruiters, WNBA coaches, reporters, and the mayor of Springfield were all going to be in the stands. It took a long time for her to catch her rhythm and get on the board. Finally she got fouled and put up her 2,711th point, anticlimactically, on a free throw.
As she pursued the record and became a media sensation, Bilqis had to get comfortable with the idea of being more than just another talented ballplayer. She came to embrace her role as a symbol of hope and inspiration for people. She knew that every time she stepped out on the court she was opening minds and challenging stereotypes of Muslim women. And she played her part knowing that she was just building on a long legacy, that she owed a debt to a long list of pioneers who “cleared the lane” for her and made her achievement possible.
Senda Berenson, the “founding mother” of women’s basketball, arrived at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, in 1892 at the age of 24 to be “director of physical culture.” A Lithuanian immigrant who had come to Boston with her family when she was seven, Berenson found herself cordially accepted but socially isolated as the only Jewish staff member on a Christian campus of 800. One former student’s description of her gives a hint of the kinds of bias she confronted. “She was smart and attractive, and not particularly Jewish . . . I mean some Jewish people are very different-looking from others and she was very attractive looking and perfectly dressed.”
Berenson was intelligent and focused, a woman with a mission: “Many of our young women are well enough in a way, yet never know the joy of mere living, are lazy, listless and lack vitality,” she wrote of the challenge she had come to take on. Like Naismith, she inherited her own group of incorrigibles and was challenged to find physical activities that were both fun and appropriate for a young Victorian woman to engage in. She came upon Naismith’s article in the Triangle newsletter about the new game that he’d invented in Springfield, just 20 miles south, and decided to give it a try with her class.
According to Naismith’s accounts, women were already playing at the YMCA Training School before Berenson staged the first organized game. A few teachers who had been coming by at lunchtime to watch the men play asked Naismith whether he saw any reason why women couldn’t play as well. “I told them that I saw no reason why they should not,” he replied. “I shall never forget the sight that they presented in their long trailing dresses with leg-of-mutton sleeves, and in several cases with the hint of a bustle. In spite of these handicaps, the girls took the ball and began to shoot at the basket.”
Naismith’s openness to having women play his game was progressive for the time. Women had, of course, been playing ball and chipping away at the glass ceiling of sports for centuries. As early as 1427, a young Flemish woman named Margot, dubbed the “Joan of Arc of Tennis,” became the sensation of Paris for humbling the city’s best male jeu de paume players while playing both backhand and forehand—without a racket. A century or so later Mary, Queen of Scots, an avid golfer, ran afoul of the church for hitting the links just a few days after her second husband’s passing. Women were joining the scrum in folk football games for as long as there are records of the games, though they were barred from formal Association play until the late 1890s. And Jane Austen in 1798 was among the first to write of the joys of baseball, with organized women’s teams following around 70 years later.
Despite this proud if erratic history, the idea that girls and women could withstand and even benefit from the rigors of athletic competition was still regarded as controversial. Members of the “fairer sex” were seen as physically and emotionally frail, their bodies designed by nature for childbearing and little more. Women were not allowed to vote or own property. And the prevailing attitudes of the day toward sexuality dictated that they be bound in tight corsets and wrapped in yards of fabric, making basic movement a chore. “Until recent years,” wrote Berenson, “the so-called ideal woman was a small waisted, small footed, small brained damsel, who prided herself on her delicate health, who thought fainting interesting, and hysterics fascinating.”
When Berenson started at Smith, however, attitudes were slowly beginning to shift. Women had begun to expand beyond their traditional roles as wives and mothers to fill new jobs in teaching, social work, and factories. Writing in 1903, Berenson captured the sea change that was under way and how it placed new demands on women:
; Now that the woman’s sphere of influence is constantly widening, now that she is proving that her work in certain fields of labor is equal to men’s work and hence should have equal reward, now that all fields of labor and all professions are opening their doors to her, she needs more than ever the physical strength to meet these ever increasing demands. And not only does she need a strong physique, but physical and moral courage as well.
This new game of basketball, she determined, was exactly what her young Smith women needed to get them in shape for a new century. Designed to reward skill and agility rather than brute force, the game was deemed fitting for women in a way that football or even baseball was not. So on a gray March day in 1892, she posted a note on the outer door of the gym that read “Gentlemen are not allowed in the gymnasium during basket ball games.” An unexpected crowd filed into the gym with school colors and banners to watch the freshman and sophomore classes play the new game. Berenson hung wastepaper baskets on either side of the gym and divided the teams. Then, in tossing the ball in the air for the first tip-off, she struck the arm of the freshman captain and dislocated the girl’s shoulder. “We took the girl into the office and pulled the joint into place, another center took her place, and the game went on,” wrote Berenson.
Clearly, this was not going to be easy.
Senda Berenson tossing up the ball, Smith College, 1903.
But basketball seemed to instantly tap a deep vein of excitement and liberation in every woman who played, producing the same “feeling of freedom and self-reliance” that suffragist Susan B. Anthony credited to bicycling, another popular women’s activity of the time. Early teams captured this feeling in their names: The Atlantas, a San Francisco high school team named for the fleet-footed Greek goddess. The Amazons and Olympians at Elizabeth College in North Carolina. The Suffragists and Feminists, African American schoolteacher teams in Richmond, Virginia. Although Berenson’s version of the game—with rules modified to minimize physical contact—accommodated prurient notions of feminine decorum, it wasn’t long before women broke out beyond the genteel elite college scene.
The 1920s and 1930s marked an early high point for women’s suffrage and sport. Women won the right to vote, Amelia Earhart crossed the Atlantic by plane, and Mildred “Babe” Didrikson barnstormed her way into the American mainstream. Didrikson, who grew up in the gritty oil town of Beaumont, Texas, and went on to be a basketball star, pro golfer, and Olympic gold medalist, symbolized a new breed of woman athlete unfazed by middle-class stereotypes of femininity. When asked by a reporter if there was anything she didn’t play, she quipped, “Yeah, dolls.” Working-class women like Didrikson, used to the physical demands of laboring in factories or on farms, enjoyed the exercise, fun, and camaraderie that basketball offered and didn’t much care what the men thought of that.
Requiring just a ball and a makeshift hoop, the game spread rapidly through small rural towns, Indian reservations, and city projects. Social mores of every kind were repeatedly challenged and battle lines drawn. In Iowa, when the high school athletic association voted in 1925 to end women’s competition, one coach famously declared, “Gentlemen, if you attempt to do away with girls’ basketball in Iowa, you’ll be standing in the middle of the track when the train runs over!” That train made a lot of stops before it finally arrived in 1972 in the form of Title IX and, despite attempts to derail it, it’s stayed on track ever since.
Seven decades before Bilqis had to grit her teeth through anti-Muslim taunts, a team called the Philadelphia SPHAs endured similar slurs and threats on the court, but played on. The SPHAs, which stood for South Philadelphia Hebrew Association, got their start in the tough “cager” days when courts were ringed by wire or rope cages to prevent players from diving into spectators’ laps after loose balls. Until 1913, out-of-bound rules matched those of Walter Camp, awarding the ball to whichever team chased it down first. This was not by a long shot the no-contact sport Naismith had envisioned. Joe Schwarzer recalled returning home after his first cage game with rope burns across his back. Strategically positioned ladies were known to stab opposing players through the mesh with hatpins, and in coal regions of Pennsylvania fans would heat nails with miner’s lamps and throw them over the net at players.
And that was just the standard treatment. As a Jewish team that proudly stitched the Star of David and the Hebrew letters samekh, pe, he, aleph to their jerseys, the SPHAs had to deal with far worse. “Coffins and hangmen’s nooses would sometimes be painted on hometown floor to mark their spots, and in one hall the team was greeted with signs around the balconies saying, ‘Kill the Christ-Killers,’ ” recalled one player. The SPHAs began as a team of Jewish grade school kids that took on, and defeated, all comers in Philadelphia’s settlement houses. Like the kids from New Leadership, distant karmic heirs to their hardwood chutzpah, the SPHAs lacked a home court and were known as the Wandering Jews. They nevertheless wandered their way into seven American Basketball League titles between 1933 and 1945, at the same time their brethren in Europe were being shipped to concentration camps.
Before Bill Russell, Elgin Baylor, Wilt Chamberlain, and the era of black ascendancy, the cage was dominated by Jewish stars like Nat Holman, Eddie Gottlieb, and Harry Litwack who made up nearly half the players in the league.
Why were the Jews so good? Well, if you followed the logic of Paul Gallico, a top sportswriter of the time at the New York Daily News, it was because “the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind, flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smart-aleckness.” Others, in the days before height was seen as a critical advantage, even suggested that the shorter Jews had “God-given better balance and speed.” When Jews faded from the game, handing the ball off to blacks in the 1950s, the same kind of pseudo-genetic theories were dusted off to explain the “natural” athletic ability of African American superstars.
To say that basketball was a Jewish game before it was an African American one would be to miss the point entirely. It was, and remains at heart, a city game. Whoever ruled the asphalt ruled the game. As Red Auerbach, the cigar-smoking son of Russian Jews who coached the Boston Celtics to nine NBA championships from 1956 to 1967, described growing up in the tenements of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the 1920s: “Everywhere you looked, all you saw was concrete, so there was no football, no baseball, and hardly any track there. Basketball was our game.”
In March 1939 it was the New York Renaissance Big Five who ruled the asphalt and led the game as world champions. The Rens, called by John Wooden “the greatest team I ever saw,” were the first all-black professional basketball team. They got their name from the Renaissance Casino and Ballroom at 138th Street and Seventh Avenue, where a second-floor ballroom served as their home court. The team was formed in 1923 by Smilin’ Bob Douglas, a West Indian entrepreneur who grew up playing cricket and soccer but fell in love with basketball the first time he saw it played and decided to form his own team. Through the 1920s and 1930s the Rens were the toast of Harlem, playing for well-off tuxedo and ballgown-wearing blacks who came out to enjoy an evening game followed by dancing.
The Rens invited team after team to Harlem and one by one sent them home in defeat. Wrote the editor of a black newspaper, “It is a race between white teams to see which one can defeat the colored players on their home court, but so far, none of them have been successful.” That race was ended in 1925 by the Original Celtics, setting off one of the greatest early rivalries in basketball. Contrary to their name, the Celtics (no relation to the Boston Celtics) were an ethnic hodgepodge of Irish, Jewish, and German players who’d grown up together in the projects of Hell’s Kitchen. Over the next several years, the two teams traded wins in front of as many as 10,000 fans, and in the process found friendship and mutual respect.
When the American Basketball League was formed in 1926, it invited the SPHAs and other teams made up of urban ethnic minorities to join up. But the Rens and other black teams were rejected, and would be for another 20-plus years. In solida
rity for their rivals and friends (and, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar argues, because there was more money to be made elsewhere), the Original Celtics refused to join the league. Through the 1930s, whenever the Celtics faced the Rens, Celtics center Joe Lapchick would hug Tarzan Cooper of the Rens in front of the crowd as a gesture against racism, eliciting boos and even death threats. “When we played against most white teams, we were colored,” said Bob Douglas years later. “Against the Celtics, we were men.”
Barred from organized league play, the team took their show on the road, barnstorming through small towns in the Midwest and South. During those Jim Crow days when blacks were forced to drink from separate water fountains and attend separate schools, signs outside many gyms might as well have read, “Black men can’t jump—here.” In some states, like Georgia and Alabama, interracial play was banned by state ordinance. In others, games featuring the Rens against all-white local teams got the most return at the gate. To pay the bills in those Depression years, they maintained a grueling schedule, traveling continuously between January and April and playing games every day, with two games on weekends. Douglas later estimated the team covered 38,000 miles a year at their traveling peak.
In small rural towns, the Rens often found themselves shut out of hotels and restaurants after traveling hundreds of miles. Gas station owners with rifles would refuse to fill their bus. Eyre “Bruiser” Saitch, a star of the team and pioneering black tennis champion, recalled how they “slept in jails because they wouldn’t put us up in hotels. . . . We sometimes had over a thousand damn dollars in our pockets and we couldn’t get a good goddamn meal.” Inside the small-town Masonic halls and school gyms where they played, things weren’t any easier. Referees routinely called more fouls against them than their white competitors. In one game against the Chicago Bruins, the Rens got called for 18 fouls while the Bruins had zero. When their manager protested an unfair call, a riot squad had to be called in to save the team from being killed.