SWC75
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TWO LEAGUES AND ONE TOURNAMENT
In the 1920’s an organization originally called the American Professional Football Association came into being. It was largely a collection of small town and small city teams mostly in the Midwest: Akron, Decatur (Illinois), Buffalo, Chicago, Rock Island (Illinois), Dayton, Rochester, Canton, Detroit, Cleveland, Hammond (Indiana), Columbus, Muncie (Indiana) and later Evansville, Green Bay, Washington, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, New York, Louisville, Tonawanda, (New York), Racine, Milwaukee, Evansville, Duluth, (Minnesota), Toledo, St. Louis, Frankford, (Philadelphia), Kansas City, Kenosha, (Wisconsin), Pottsville, (Pennsylvania), Providence, Los Angeles, Hartford, Brooklyn, Staten island, Orange (New Jersey) and the Oorang Indians, who represented La Rue, Ohio. After the first two years they were known as the National Football league. Eventually they got rid of the small towns and cities, (except for Green Bay, where the citizens owned the team after the franchise had to offer stock to pay off a civil suit from a fan who had been paralyzed when he fell off the grandstand), and settled into the big cities it represents today.
In 1937 a new basketball league was formed. It was also based in the Midwest and included the sort of those small towns and cities the NFL had by then abandoned: Akron, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Warren, (Pennsylvania), Columbus, Oshkosh, Whiting (Indiana), Fort Wayne, (Indiana), Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Kankakee (Illinois), Dayton and alter Anderson, (Indiana), Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, Flint, Hammond, Richmond, Rochester, Sheboygan, Syracuse, Waterloo and Youngstown and “Tri-Cities”, which were Moline and Rock Island, Illinois and Davenport, Iowa.
But there was a difference. The NFL contained a lot of town teams, most of who had existed on at least a semi-pro level before the league was formed and were independent organizations. The new NBL was more an out-growth of Amateur Athletic Union basketball, which was a rising force in the 1930’s. The AAU had held the first ever national championship in 1897, (won by the 23rd Street YMCA in New York City), They first held a women’s national tournament in 1926, won by the Pasadena Athletic Club. Companies found AAU teams were good advertising and many college stars got steady jobs from companies if they would play for their basketball teams. The AAU had its own set of leagues, one of which was known as the Midwest Basketball league. Three steams from that league, the Akron Firestone Non-Skids, the Akron Goodyear Wingfoots and the Fort Wayne General Electrics, decided they wanted to test themselves against professional teams. They invited other teams, the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Buffalo Bisons, the Warren Penns, the Oshkosh All-Stars the Whiting Ciesar All-Americans, the Indianapolis Kautskys, the Richmond King Clothiers, (who became the Cincinnati Comellos in January), the Kankakee Gallagher Trojans and the Dayton Metros to join them.
The Akron teams were named after tires. The Warren team was named after their state’s founder, William Penn. They got sponsorship from White Horse Motors in Cleveland and moved there to become the Cleveland White Horses. Columbus was sponsored by a sporting goods firm. The Ciesar All-Americans were named after owner Edie Ciesar, an automobile dealer in Whiting a suburb of Chicago. He later moved the team to nearby Hammond. Similarly, the Kautskys were named after their owner, Frank Kautsky, who owned a grocery store chain. The Richmond team was owned by Rob McComas, who named it after his clothing store and then sold it to Gus Comello of Cincinnati, another clothier, who then got flooded out by the Great Flood of 1938: the team disappeared under the waves. The Kanakee Gallagher Trojans were simply the roster of the Gallagher Business School in Kanakee. They managed to win just 3 of 14 games and then folded. None of their players had ever played pro ball before and none ever did again. (Not even Tarzan Woltzen or the Meyer brothers, Big and Little Moose, both of whom were Kickapoo Indians).
The two Akron teams remind me of the musical themes their sponsors used when I was growing up in the 1960’s:
Firestone: Goodyear: Goodyear Commercial #1 (1962)
The Non-Skids and the Wingfoots dominated the Eastern Division in the first year of the NBL, (1937-38), going 14-4 and 13-5, respectively. They and the Fort Wayne General Electrics were able to recruit players from all over the country by offering them career management positons in their companies. The Wingfoots swept a best of three series from the Non-Skids in the playoffs, 26-21 and 37-31. The Oshkosh All-Stars, who had been the best touring team in the Midwest for some years, won the west with a 12-2 record behind the league’s dominant player, 6-4 center Leroy “Cowboy” Edwards, who led the league in scoring with a phenomenal 16.2 points per game.. But they barely beat out the Whitng Ciesar All-Americans and their star point guard, Johnny Wooden, (yes, that John Wooden), who was second in scoring at 11.0 and who out-scored Edwards in their playoff series 33-31. But Oshkosh beat Whiting in both games, 40-33 and 41-38. The Wingfoots then won the first league championship by winning 2 of 3 from Oshkosh, ironically winning 29-28 and 35-27 on the road while losing 31-39 at home. You can see from the scores how phenomenal Edwards and Wooden’s scoring was: They were scoring half and a third of their team’s points, respectively.
The Non-Skids came back with a vengeance the next year to dominate the league with a 24-3 record. The Wingfoots were in a distant tie for second at. 14-14. There were no semi-finals in 1938-39 and Akron won a great 3-2 series from Oshkosh 50-38, 36-38, 40-29, 37-49, 37-30. The league was starting to recruit college stars en mass and the Non-Skids got the best haul with Paul Nowak and Johnny Moir of Notre Dame and Jerry Bush from St. John’s. But their star was 6-3 center “Soup” Cable who averaged 10.9ppg, second to Edward’s 11.9. Edwards dominated Cable in the playoff, 70 points to 41 but his Oshkosh teammates couldn’t overcome Akron’s balanced scoring.
The NBL now began to draw players from the ABL, including Nat Frankel who joined a new team, the Detroit Eagles, for 1939-40. Another new team was the re-organized Chicago Bruins, again owned by George Halas and which included some of the Bears football team in the line-up. (they went 14-14). The line-ups continued to change, except for one: the Akron Firestone Non-Skids, who didn’t need to change: they still had the best team in the league. They went 18-9 to beat out the Eagles, (17-10) in the east. Oshkosh tied the Sheboygan Redskins at 15-13 in the west, then beat them 2 out of three (the semi-finals were back). Akron did the same to Detroit and then again beat the All-Stars in 5 games for the title, losing the first two games in Oshkosh, 37-47 and 46-60 before winning three in a row at home, 35-32, 41-40 and 61-60, a tremendous championship series. Notice the higher scores, which were indicative of more talent coming into the league and a higher pace to the games. The final game was 39-39 at the half.
In 1940, the Indianapolis Kautskys left the league to become an independent touring club. The league decided to drop the divisions and Oshkosh won 10 for their first 11 games and went on to win the pennant with an 18-6 record. Akron and Sheboygan finished tied for second at 13-11. The Non-Skids had once again stood pat but the league was passing them by. The All-Stars had added 6-5 Bob Carpenter to Edwards and together they were a combination nobody in the league could match. They swept Akron 2-0 and Sheboygan 3-0 in the playoffs.
The ABL was still in business, with teams in New York, Brooklyn, Jersey City, Kingston (New Jersey), and Philadelphia, (as well as the Bronx Yankees, who went 1-11 in 1937-38 and then folded out of embarrassment). Essentially, they were the eastern major league and the NBL was the western major league, although they never met in a championship series.
They were still going with the split season concept and New Haven, who had finished second to the Jersey Reds in the first half, moved to New York to become the “New York Jewels” and won the second half over the Reds, who won an exciting championship series, 35-34, 30-33, 30-22, 26-24, 33-37 and 30-28. The scores were still pretty low. Phil Rabin of Kingston won the scoring championship with 13.2.
The next year they dropped the split season concept in favor of a pennant followed by a four team playoffs, similar to the Shaughnessy Playoff system in baseball’s International league. The Kingston Colonials won the pennant with a 28-9 record over the Philadelphia SPHAs who were 24-9. Then they both lost the semi-finals to the Reds and the Jewels, respectively. The Jewels then swept the Reds in the finals, although all the games were close: 34-30, 40-36 and 37-34 in OT Rabin was again the leading scorer at 10.3 per game.
In 1939-40 the SPHAs and a new team, the Washington Heurich Brewers, (Heurich being a DC are brewing company), tied at 19-13. The SPHAs won the playoff for the pennant 34-27. Then came another experiment: a round-robin playoff which the SPHAs swept with an impressive 7-0 record. Bobby McDermott won the scoring title with 11.0 over Rabin, who slipped to 8.5.
The league was down to only 5 teams in 1940-41: the SPHAs, the Brewers, the Jewels, the Baltimore Clippers and a team that began the season as the Troy Haymakers and wound up as the Brooklyn Celtics. They went back to the split season concept and the SPHAs won the first half, the newly minted Celtics the second. The SPHAs then won the title 48-38, 40-26, 50-43, 30-29. Note the somewhat higher scores. Petey Rosenberg won the scoring title with 8.9 ppg.
Meanwhile in Chicago, a man named Edward W. Cochrane had an idea. He was the sports editor of the Chicago Herald-American. Chicago sports editors had a history of coming up with ideas. Maybe it was their centrally located positon in the country from which they could see everything. (There’s no Great Lakes bias.) Arch Ward, sports editor for the Chicago Tribune came up with the ideas for the Baseball All-Star Game, the College football All Star game, (in which the defending pro champion would play a team of the top college players), the Golden Gloves amateur boxing tournament and later the All-America Football Conference. Ward’s activities may have inspired Cochrane, (who, of course would have been his rival) to create the World Professional Basketball Tournament.
“At the time there were no less than a score of professional basketball teams, all advertising themselves as world’s champions,” Cochrane remembered two years later. The tournament was born “out of the chaos of these conflicting claims,”
New York Rens Won First World Pro Basketball Tournament On Today's Date | The Black Fives Foundation
Cochrane was ahead of his time in inviting the New York Renaissance and Harlem Globetrotters to play in the tournament to play all-white teams in the tournament. Of course, as the article says: “Had either of these teams been omitted, the basketball-knowing public would have been suspicious.” But it was a courageous move for 1939 in any case, although it should be noted that they were put in the same bracket, thus avoiding the possibility of an all-black title game...
Besides the Rens and the Trotters, there were the New York Celtics and Bronx Yankees of the ABL, the Oshkosh All-Stars and Sheboygan Redskins of the NBL, and the independent teams the Chicago Harmons, the Fort Wayne Harvesters, Clarksburg Oilers as well as a team from the House of David.(The former AAU teams in the NBL didn’t participate: their players had jobs.) The Rens, Globetrotters, All-Stars and Redskins made it to the semi-finals. The Rens beat the Trotters, 27-23, (even for then a low-scoring game) while the All-Stars easily took care of the Redskins, 40-23.
This set up a real summit meeting in the final. The All-Stars had the greatest center of the day, LeRoy ‘Cowboy’ Edwards and had beaten the Rens in a 1937 best of seven series, (that went all 7 games), for the “World Championship of Basketball” (by their mutual declaration). The Rens, who had a total record of 122-7 that season, had an exceptional point guard in Clarence ‘Fats’ Jenkins, a great if aging center in Charles ‘Tarzan’ Cooper, the ironically nicknamed, (everyone had one in those days), the ironically named William ‘Pop’ Gates, who had joined the team out of high school and Johnny “Wonder Boy” Isaacs who had done the same a couple of years earlier. Aside from the 5-6 Jenkins, the rest of the team was all over 6 feet tall, impressive size for those days. Cooper, Gates and Isaacs are all individually in the Hall of Fame and the Rens were inducted as a team in 1963.
They avenged their defeat of two years earlier with a 34-25 victory over the All-Stars in the final. It was an all-black team defeating an all-white team for a national (and ‘world’) championship 27 years before the Texas Western- Kentucky game. After the game the 41 year old Jenkins announced his retirement, (he’d been playing since 1914). He couldn’t top this accomplishment or find a better note to end his long career on.
Here’s a terrific inter-active article on the Rens:
Meet the Rens, the Basketball Team Time Forgot
In 1940 the tournament Invited three NBL teams: Oshkosh, Sheboygan and Chicago and an ABL team, Washington, to play ten independent teams: The Rens, the Globetrotters, The Fort Wayne Harvesters, the Rochester Seagrams, the Kenosha Royals, the Canton Bulldogs, the Clarksburg Oilers, the House of David, the Waterloo Wonders and the Syracuse Reds. The Harvesters, Seagrams, Royals, Bulldogs, Oilers and the House of David all went down in the first round. In the quarterfinals, Syracuse beat Sheboygan 39-30, Washington beat Waterloo 35-21 and Chicago beat Oshkosh 40-38. The Trotters, who played the entire tournament with only 5 guys, and the Rens were once again bracketed together and played a classic, won by the Trotters 37-36, called by many the greatest game they had ever seen.
In the 40’s the Rens, who had been the dominant African American team of the 20’s and 30’s but that would change in the 1940’s as the Globetrotters came into their own. According to “Harlem Globetrotters: an Illustrated History” by Chuck Menville, The Globetrotters were able to survive the war, when gas was rationed and travel was difficult, by “following a carefully planned route that insured they hit an army camp between every two or three cities so they could purchase hard-to-find gasoline and tires.” With the players taking turns driving the team in a school bus, they once played 13 games in a week. In 1940, they had a season record of 159-8.
They also made two moves: one forgotten, one never to be forgotten, both important. They hired their first ever white player, Bob Karstens of the House of David, (he’s shaved his beard in the picture in the book). They also hired a long-armed baseball player whom Abe Saperstein had learned about when he tried to get a franchise in the Negro baseball leagues. His name was Reese Tatum and he played for the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro National League, where he learned to put on a show for the fans. “Sometimes he would stretch as far as he could from first base toward the pitcher’s mound, his long arm draped on the ground and his mitt slipped out toward the end of his fingers to gain additional inches, practically handing the ball back to the pitchers. Or he’d casually let an opponent sprint to within a step of first base and then stomp his foot on the bag just in time. And the spectators ate it up. “
It was those long arms that convinced Saperstein Tatum could become a basketball player. And it was his crowd-pleasing antics that convinced Saperstein that he would be an asset to the Trotters. It was the beginning of turning the team into a troop of entertainers rather than just basketball players. “The non-athletic-looking Tatum was barely 20 years old, stood 6-3 and had arms that hung to his knees. When out-stretched, they spanned an incredible 84 inches. In fact, it was this rubbery reach that had earned him his lifelong nickname during a high school football game. He leaped into the air to snag a pass with his telescopic skyhooks and someone shouted “Look at the ol’ Goose Fly”. Goose Tatum became the first “Clown Prince of Basketball”, a role later played by Meadowlark Lemon.
Karstens contributed some routines he’d learned with the House of David, including the “Magic Circle” the players formed during warmups where they did various tricks with the ball. He also invented the “goofball”, a basketball with an off-center weight. How was it being the only white player on a black team? “You’d be surprised how few people even asked about it. If you can do the job and the tricks, you’re accepted by the other athletes.” When the Trotters found it hard to get adequate opposition, Karstens became the manager of a permanent opposition team- the “Boston Whirlwinds”. They were different than the Washington Generals, who, led by Red Klotz, served as the Globetrotter’s foils years later. “This was to be a tough bunch of competitors- no pushovers….A credit to Karstens, the Whirlwinds once even beat the Trotters, in Alexandria, Virginia, by a single point.”
So the Trotters survived as a touring team even as the leagues took over pro basketball and went on to become the international symbol of the sport and, at the same time a relic of the early days of the pro game.
The Syracuse Reds were founded by Frank Basloe in 1939. They played anyone who would play them- from a Baldwinsville High School alumni team to the Original Celtics and the New York Rens. It initially included a couple former SU players Wlmeth Sidat-Singh, Mark Haller, Edgar Sonderman and Lloyd “Skids” Sanford as well as Tom Rich from Cornell, Bob Nugent, who had played at CBA and a young guard by the name of Al Cervi. They played at the Jefferson Street Armory. By the time of the 1940 tournament, Sidat-Singh had moved on to the Rochester Seagrams
George Halas still owned the Chicago Bruins but no longer coached them: someone named Sam Lifschultz did. Halas would later sell a controlling interest in the team to the United Auto Workers and they would be renamed the Studebackers, (a team owned by a union!). The Bruins, led by Honey Russell, took a care of Washington 46-38 in the semifinals while the Globetrotters beat the Reds 34-25. The Trotters then beat the Bruins in another classic, taking a 20-13 lead, giving up a dreadful 1-18 run but closing the game with 10 points in a row to win the championship, 31-29.
In 1941 the WPBT invited The ABL’s Philadelphia SPHAs and the NBL”s Chicago Bruins, Detroit Eagles, Oshkosh All-Stars and Sheboygan Redskins to compete with 11 independent teams: the defending champion Globetrotters, the Rens, the Davenport Central Turner Rockets, the Indianapolis Kautskeys, (who had left the NBL), the Newark Elks, the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons, (who were about to join the NBL), the Dayton Sucher Wonders, Rochester Seagrams, the Bismarck Phantoms, the Kenosha Royals and the Toledo White Hats. The Redskins, the Rockets, the Kautskys, the Elks, the Zollner Piston, the Silver Wonders, the Seagrams and the Phantoms, all went down in the first round.
For the first time, white teams beat both the Rens and the Globetrotters. Detroit nipped the Trotters, 37-36 in the quarterfinals. The Rens embarrassed Kenosha 43-15. Oshkosh beat the SPHAs, 38-31 while Toledo eliminated Chicago 43-31. But then Detroit also nipped the Rens, 43-42 in the semis and Oshkosh beat Toledo, setting up an all-NBL final, which the Detroit Eagles , behind their 6-5 center, Ed Sadowski, and fine point guard, Buddy Jeanette, won 39-37.
It was the first of 7 WPBT titles in the last 8 years of the tournament’s existence to be won by NBL teams, a run that established the National Basketball League – and league basketball itself- as the dominate force in professional basketball.
In the 1920’s an organization originally called the American Professional Football Association came into being. It was largely a collection of small town and small city teams mostly in the Midwest: Akron, Decatur (Illinois), Buffalo, Chicago, Rock Island (Illinois), Dayton, Rochester, Canton, Detroit, Cleveland, Hammond (Indiana), Columbus, Muncie (Indiana) and later Evansville, Green Bay, Washington, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, New York, Louisville, Tonawanda, (New York), Racine, Milwaukee, Evansville, Duluth, (Minnesota), Toledo, St. Louis, Frankford, (Philadelphia), Kansas City, Kenosha, (Wisconsin), Pottsville, (Pennsylvania), Providence, Los Angeles, Hartford, Brooklyn, Staten island, Orange (New Jersey) and the Oorang Indians, who represented La Rue, Ohio. After the first two years they were known as the National Football league. Eventually they got rid of the small towns and cities, (except for Green Bay, where the citizens owned the team after the franchise had to offer stock to pay off a civil suit from a fan who had been paralyzed when he fell off the grandstand), and settled into the big cities it represents today.
In 1937 a new basketball league was formed. It was also based in the Midwest and included the sort of those small towns and cities the NFL had by then abandoned: Akron, Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Warren, (Pennsylvania), Columbus, Oshkosh, Whiting (Indiana), Fort Wayne, (Indiana), Indianapolis, Cincinnati, Milwaukee, Kankakee (Illinois), Dayton and alter Anderson, (Indiana), Chicago, Cleveland, Denver, Detroit, Flint, Hammond, Richmond, Rochester, Sheboygan, Syracuse, Waterloo and Youngstown and “Tri-Cities”, which were Moline and Rock Island, Illinois and Davenport, Iowa.
But there was a difference. The NFL contained a lot of town teams, most of who had existed on at least a semi-pro level before the league was formed and were independent organizations. The new NBL was more an out-growth of Amateur Athletic Union basketball, which was a rising force in the 1930’s. The AAU had held the first ever national championship in 1897, (won by the 23rd Street YMCA in New York City), They first held a women’s national tournament in 1926, won by the Pasadena Athletic Club. Companies found AAU teams were good advertising and many college stars got steady jobs from companies if they would play for their basketball teams. The AAU had its own set of leagues, one of which was known as the Midwest Basketball league. Three steams from that league, the Akron Firestone Non-Skids, the Akron Goodyear Wingfoots and the Fort Wayne General Electrics, decided they wanted to test themselves against professional teams. They invited other teams, the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Buffalo Bisons, the Warren Penns, the Oshkosh All-Stars the Whiting Ciesar All-Americans, the Indianapolis Kautskys, the Richmond King Clothiers, (who became the Cincinnati Comellos in January), the Kankakee Gallagher Trojans and the Dayton Metros to join them.
The Akron teams were named after tires. The Warren team was named after their state’s founder, William Penn. They got sponsorship from White Horse Motors in Cleveland and moved there to become the Cleveland White Horses. Columbus was sponsored by a sporting goods firm. The Ciesar All-Americans were named after owner Edie Ciesar, an automobile dealer in Whiting a suburb of Chicago. He later moved the team to nearby Hammond. Similarly, the Kautskys were named after their owner, Frank Kautsky, who owned a grocery store chain. The Richmond team was owned by Rob McComas, who named it after his clothing store and then sold it to Gus Comello of Cincinnati, another clothier, who then got flooded out by the Great Flood of 1938: the team disappeared under the waves. The Kanakee Gallagher Trojans were simply the roster of the Gallagher Business School in Kanakee. They managed to win just 3 of 14 games and then folded. None of their players had ever played pro ball before and none ever did again. (Not even Tarzan Woltzen or the Meyer brothers, Big and Little Moose, both of whom were Kickapoo Indians).
The two Akron teams remind me of the musical themes their sponsors used when I was growing up in the 1960’s:
Firestone: Goodyear: Goodyear Commercial #1 (1962)
The Non-Skids and the Wingfoots dominated the Eastern Division in the first year of the NBL, (1937-38), going 14-4 and 13-5, respectively. They and the Fort Wayne General Electrics were able to recruit players from all over the country by offering them career management positons in their companies. The Wingfoots swept a best of three series from the Non-Skids in the playoffs, 26-21 and 37-31. The Oshkosh All-Stars, who had been the best touring team in the Midwest for some years, won the west with a 12-2 record behind the league’s dominant player, 6-4 center Leroy “Cowboy” Edwards, who led the league in scoring with a phenomenal 16.2 points per game.. But they barely beat out the Whitng Ciesar All-Americans and their star point guard, Johnny Wooden, (yes, that John Wooden), who was second in scoring at 11.0 and who out-scored Edwards in their playoff series 33-31. But Oshkosh beat Whiting in both games, 40-33 and 41-38. The Wingfoots then won the first league championship by winning 2 of 3 from Oshkosh, ironically winning 29-28 and 35-27 on the road while losing 31-39 at home. You can see from the scores how phenomenal Edwards and Wooden’s scoring was: They were scoring half and a third of their team’s points, respectively.
The Non-Skids came back with a vengeance the next year to dominate the league with a 24-3 record. The Wingfoots were in a distant tie for second at. 14-14. There were no semi-finals in 1938-39 and Akron won a great 3-2 series from Oshkosh 50-38, 36-38, 40-29, 37-49, 37-30. The league was starting to recruit college stars en mass and the Non-Skids got the best haul with Paul Nowak and Johnny Moir of Notre Dame and Jerry Bush from St. John’s. But their star was 6-3 center “Soup” Cable who averaged 10.9ppg, second to Edward’s 11.9. Edwards dominated Cable in the playoff, 70 points to 41 but his Oshkosh teammates couldn’t overcome Akron’s balanced scoring.
The NBL now began to draw players from the ABL, including Nat Frankel who joined a new team, the Detroit Eagles, for 1939-40. Another new team was the re-organized Chicago Bruins, again owned by George Halas and which included some of the Bears football team in the line-up. (they went 14-14). The line-ups continued to change, except for one: the Akron Firestone Non-Skids, who didn’t need to change: they still had the best team in the league. They went 18-9 to beat out the Eagles, (17-10) in the east. Oshkosh tied the Sheboygan Redskins at 15-13 in the west, then beat them 2 out of three (the semi-finals were back). Akron did the same to Detroit and then again beat the All-Stars in 5 games for the title, losing the first two games in Oshkosh, 37-47 and 46-60 before winning three in a row at home, 35-32, 41-40 and 61-60, a tremendous championship series. Notice the higher scores, which were indicative of more talent coming into the league and a higher pace to the games. The final game was 39-39 at the half.
In 1940, the Indianapolis Kautskys left the league to become an independent touring club. The league decided to drop the divisions and Oshkosh won 10 for their first 11 games and went on to win the pennant with an 18-6 record. Akron and Sheboygan finished tied for second at 13-11. The Non-Skids had once again stood pat but the league was passing them by. The All-Stars had added 6-5 Bob Carpenter to Edwards and together they were a combination nobody in the league could match. They swept Akron 2-0 and Sheboygan 3-0 in the playoffs.
The ABL was still in business, with teams in New York, Brooklyn, Jersey City, Kingston (New Jersey), and Philadelphia, (as well as the Bronx Yankees, who went 1-11 in 1937-38 and then folded out of embarrassment). Essentially, they were the eastern major league and the NBL was the western major league, although they never met in a championship series.
They were still going with the split season concept and New Haven, who had finished second to the Jersey Reds in the first half, moved to New York to become the “New York Jewels” and won the second half over the Reds, who won an exciting championship series, 35-34, 30-33, 30-22, 26-24, 33-37 and 30-28. The scores were still pretty low. Phil Rabin of Kingston won the scoring championship with 13.2.
The next year they dropped the split season concept in favor of a pennant followed by a four team playoffs, similar to the Shaughnessy Playoff system in baseball’s International league. The Kingston Colonials won the pennant with a 28-9 record over the Philadelphia SPHAs who were 24-9. Then they both lost the semi-finals to the Reds and the Jewels, respectively. The Jewels then swept the Reds in the finals, although all the games were close: 34-30, 40-36 and 37-34 in OT Rabin was again the leading scorer at 10.3 per game.
In 1939-40 the SPHAs and a new team, the Washington Heurich Brewers, (Heurich being a DC are brewing company), tied at 19-13. The SPHAs won the playoff for the pennant 34-27. Then came another experiment: a round-robin playoff which the SPHAs swept with an impressive 7-0 record. Bobby McDermott won the scoring title with 11.0 over Rabin, who slipped to 8.5.
The league was down to only 5 teams in 1940-41: the SPHAs, the Brewers, the Jewels, the Baltimore Clippers and a team that began the season as the Troy Haymakers and wound up as the Brooklyn Celtics. They went back to the split season concept and the SPHAs won the first half, the newly minted Celtics the second. The SPHAs then won the title 48-38, 40-26, 50-43, 30-29. Note the somewhat higher scores. Petey Rosenberg won the scoring title with 8.9 ppg.
Meanwhile in Chicago, a man named Edward W. Cochrane had an idea. He was the sports editor of the Chicago Herald-American. Chicago sports editors had a history of coming up with ideas. Maybe it was their centrally located positon in the country from which they could see everything. (There’s no Great Lakes bias.) Arch Ward, sports editor for the Chicago Tribune came up with the ideas for the Baseball All-Star Game, the College football All Star game, (in which the defending pro champion would play a team of the top college players), the Golden Gloves amateur boxing tournament and later the All-America Football Conference. Ward’s activities may have inspired Cochrane, (who, of course would have been his rival) to create the World Professional Basketball Tournament.
“At the time there were no less than a score of professional basketball teams, all advertising themselves as world’s champions,” Cochrane remembered two years later. The tournament was born “out of the chaos of these conflicting claims,”
New York Rens Won First World Pro Basketball Tournament On Today's Date | The Black Fives Foundation
Cochrane was ahead of his time in inviting the New York Renaissance and Harlem Globetrotters to play in the tournament to play all-white teams in the tournament. Of course, as the article says: “Had either of these teams been omitted, the basketball-knowing public would have been suspicious.” But it was a courageous move for 1939 in any case, although it should be noted that they were put in the same bracket, thus avoiding the possibility of an all-black title game...
Besides the Rens and the Trotters, there were the New York Celtics and Bronx Yankees of the ABL, the Oshkosh All-Stars and Sheboygan Redskins of the NBL, and the independent teams the Chicago Harmons, the Fort Wayne Harvesters, Clarksburg Oilers as well as a team from the House of David.(The former AAU teams in the NBL didn’t participate: their players had jobs.) The Rens, Globetrotters, All-Stars and Redskins made it to the semi-finals. The Rens beat the Trotters, 27-23, (even for then a low-scoring game) while the All-Stars easily took care of the Redskins, 40-23.
This set up a real summit meeting in the final. The All-Stars had the greatest center of the day, LeRoy ‘Cowboy’ Edwards and had beaten the Rens in a 1937 best of seven series, (that went all 7 games), for the “World Championship of Basketball” (by their mutual declaration). The Rens, who had a total record of 122-7 that season, had an exceptional point guard in Clarence ‘Fats’ Jenkins, a great if aging center in Charles ‘Tarzan’ Cooper, the ironically nicknamed, (everyone had one in those days), the ironically named William ‘Pop’ Gates, who had joined the team out of high school and Johnny “Wonder Boy” Isaacs who had done the same a couple of years earlier. Aside from the 5-6 Jenkins, the rest of the team was all over 6 feet tall, impressive size for those days. Cooper, Gates and Isaacs are all individually in the Hall of Fame and the Rens were inducted as a team in 1963.
They avenged their defeat of two years earlier with a 34-25 victory over the All-Stars in the final. It was an all-black team defeating an all-white team for a national (and ‘world’) championship 27 years before the Texas Western- Kentucky game. After the game the 41 year old Jenkins announced his retirement, (he’d been playing since 1914). He couldn’t top this accomplishment or find a better note to end his long career on.
Here’s a terrific inter-active article on the Rens:
Meet the Rens, the Basketball Team Time Forgot
In 1940 the tournament Invited three NBL teams: Oshkosh, Sheboygan and Chicago and an ABL team, Washington, to play ten independent teams: The Rens, the Globetrotters, The Fort Wayne Harvesters, the Rochester Seagrams, the Kenosha Royals, the Canton Bulldogs, the Clarksburg Oilers, the House of David, the Waterloo Wonders and the Syracuse Reds. The Harvesters, Seagrams, Royals, Bulldogs, Oilers and the House of David all went down in the first round. In the quarterfinals, Syracuse beat Sheboygan 39-30, Washington beat Waterloo 35-21 and Chicago beat Oshkosh 40-38. The Trotters, who played the entire tournament with only 5 guys, and the Rens were once again bracketed together and played a classic, won by the Trotters 37-36, called by many the greatest game they had ever seen.
In the 40’s the Rens, who had been the dominant African American team of the 20’s and 30’s but that would change in the 1940’s as the Globetrotters came into their own. According to “Harlem Globetrotters: an Illustrated History” by Chuck Menville, The Globetrotters were able to survive the war, when gas was rationed and travel was difficult, by “following a carefully planned route that insured they hit an army camp between every two or three cities so they could purchase hard-to-find gasoline and tires.” With the players taking turns driving the team in a school bus, they once played 13 games in a week. In 1940, they had a season record of 159-8.
They also made two moves: one forgotten, one never to be forgotten, both important. They hired their first ever white player, Bob Karstens of the House of David, (he’s shaved his beard in the picture in the book). They also hired a long-armed baseball player whom Abe Saperstein had learned about when he tried to get a franchise in the Negro baseball leagues. His name was Reese Tatum and he played for the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro National League, where he learned to put on a show for the fans. “Sometimes he would stretch as far as he could from first base toward the pitcher’s mound, his long arm draped on the ground and his mitt slipped out toward the end of his fingers to gain additional inches, practically handing the ball back to the pitchers. Or he’d casually let an opponent sprint to within a step of first base and then stomp his foot on the bag just in time. And the spectators ate it up. “
It was those long arms that convinced Saperstein Tatum could become a basketball player. And it was his crowd-pleasing antics that convinced Saperstein that he would be an asset to the Trotters. It was the beginning of turning the team into a troop of entertainers rather than just basketball players. “The non-athletic-looking Tatum was barely 20 years old, stood 6-3 and had arms that hung to his knees. When out-stretched, they spanned an incredible 84 inches. In fact, it was this rubbery reach that had earned him his lifelong nickname during a high school football game. He leaped into the air to snag a pass with his telescopic skyhooks and someone shouted “Look at the ol’ Goose Fly”. Goose Tatum became the first “Clown Prince of Basketball”, a role later played by Meadowlark Lemon.
Karstens contributed some routines he’d learned with the House of David, including the “Magic Circle” the players formed during warmups where they did various tricks with the ball. He also invented the “goofball”, a basketball with an off-center weight. How was it being the only white player on a black team? “You’d be surprised how few people even asked about it. If you can do the job and the tricks, you’re accepted by the other athletes.” When the Trotters found it hard to get adequate opposition, Karstens became the manager of a permanent opposition team- the “Boston Whirlwinds”. They were different than the Washington Generals, who, led by Red Klotz, served as the Globetrotter’s foils years later. “This was to be a tough bunch of competitors- no pushovers….A credit to Karstens, the Whirlwinds once even beat the Trotters, in Alexandria, Virginia, by a single point.”
So the Trotters survived as a touring team even as the leagues took over pro basketball and went on to become the international symbol of the sport and, at the same time a relic of the early days of the pro game.
The Syracuse Reds were founded by Frank Basloe in 1939. They played anyone who would play them- from a Baldwinsville High School alumni team to the Original Celtics and the New York Rens. It initially included a couple former SU players Wlmeth Sidat-Singh, Mark Haller, Edgar Sonderman and Lloyd “Skids” Sanford as well as Tom Rich from Cornell, Bob Nugent, who had played at CBA and a young guard by the name of Al Cervi. They played at the Jefferson Street Armory. By the time of the 1940 tournament, Sidat-Singh had moved on to the Rochester Seagrams
George Halas still owned the Chicago Bruins but no longer coached them: someone named Sam Lifschultz did. Halas would later sell a controlling interest in the team to the United Auto Workers and they would be renamed the Studebackers, (a team owned by a union!). The Bruins, led by Honey Russell, took a care of Washington 46-38 in the semifinals while the Globetrotters beat the Reds 34-25. The Trotters then beat the Bruins in another classic, taking a 20-13 lead, giving up a dreadful 1-18 run but closing the game with 10 points in a row to win the championship, 31-29.
In 1941 the WPBT invited The ABL’s Philadelphia SPHAs and the NBL”s Chicago Bruins, Detroit Eagles, Oshkosh All-Stars and Sheboygan Redskins to compete with 11 independent teams: the defending champion Globetrotters, the Rens, the Davenport Central Turner Rockets, the Indianapolis Kautskeys, (who had left the NBL), the Newark Elks, the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons, (who were about to join the NBL), the Dayton Sucher Wonders, Rochester Seagrams, the Bismarck Phantoms, the Kenosha Royals and the Toledo White Hats. The Redskins, the Rockets, the Kautskys, the Elks, the Zollner Piston, the Silver Wonders, the Seagrams and the Phantoms, all went down in the first round.
For the first time, white teams beat both the Rens and the Globetrotters. Detroit nipped the Trotters, 37-36 in the quarterfinals. The Rens embarrassed Kenosha 43-15. Oshkosh beat the SPHAs, 38-31 while Toledo eliminated Chicago 43-31. But then Detroit also nipped the Rens, 43-42 in the semis and Oshkosh beat Toledo, setting up an all-NBL final, which the Detroit Eagles , behind their 6-5 center, Ed Sadowski, and fine point guard, Buddy Jeanette, won 39-37.
It was the first of 7 WPBT titles in the last 8 years of the tournament’s existence to be won by NBL teams, a run that established the National Basketball League – and league basketball itself- as the dominate force in professional basketball.
