SWC75
Bored Historian
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A while back I completed a two year project of telling the history of baseball with a stat I had invented "bases produced" and a pre-existing stat, (runs produced) as objective backbone. I've decided to take a similar approach to investigating the history of other sports, beginning with basketball.
1925-31
Pre-History
Basketball was invented by a Canadian, Dr. James Naismith, who had become the Physical Education Instructor at the Springfield, Massachusetts YMCA, in 1891. He was looking for something for his students to do indoors during the winter other than the much-hated calisthenics he had been using. People had been playing games involving throwing a ball through a hoop for some time: the ancient Mayan played a game with a vertical hoop in which the captain of the losing team would be sacrificed to the Gods and the winning players would be awarded the spectators clothes, (which much have occasioned some impassioned halftime speeches from the captains and the wearing of old clothes by the spectators).
But for all Naismith knew, he was breaking new ground. His game went through a lot of experimentation: one game was played with 50 players on a side, which proved a bit cumbersome. Eventually he got that down to 5. He started with a hockey-like penalty of sitting out a certain period for fouls and counted all infractions, including traveling, as a foul but he got that straightened out, too. There was no 10 or 3 second counts until 1932 and a center jump after each basket until 1937. To prevent the ball from going out of bounds, a net was constructed around the court, making it look like the players were in a cage, (which caused them to be called “cagers”).
Photo: http://hooptactics.com/Content/Pictures/Picture.ashx?PicId=135871
Players learned to propel themselves off the net like pro wrestlers. (Spectators learned to stick them with cigarettes and hatpins.) That lasted until the 1920’swhen the cage was replaced by a rule that the last team to touch the ball lost it to the other team. But other than that, the game was recognizably basketball from early on.
The game became hugely popular in the YMCA’s across the country and spread to the colleges as well. But the YMCA administrators soured on it because it involved only a few players at a time and the style of play was becoming “unchristian”, including players being punched when the ref wasn’t looking. They decided to ban the game from their gyms, which caused the more devoted players to rent armorys and dance halls as places to play. They typically could not afford the rent so they would pass the hat among the fans to pay the rent and then split whatever was left among themselves Professional basketball was born!
The earliest claim for being the first professional game was in Herkimer, New York in 1893 at the Fox Opera house. Unfortunately, evidence for it is lacking. Then there was a claim that the Rochester YMCA had defeated the Syracuse YMCA 21-3 in January, 1895. The Rochester Y retorted that that wasn’t their team but some other Rochester team that the Syracuse Y had had the bad judgement to play against, implying that the Rochester team was a professional team. There’s also a claim that the first professional game took place in a Masonic Hall in Trenton New Jersey in 1896. Each member of the home team was paid $15 and there was enough left over to pay the team captain an extra dollar on top of that. It was a beginning.
Soon promoters became involved, hiring the best players in an area on a per game basis to play local teams. “Many promotors offered dancing before and after games. A band might play from 6-8PM for dancing. Then the floor would be cleared for the game. Then the music and dancing would resume.” The dance floors weren’t great for traction and sometimes the basket would be on a stage. The spectators, sometimes fueled by alcohol, could be rowdy at times and there were plenty of chairs to throw at the players. Sometimes the basket was up on a stage, which put an emphasis on shooting the basketball over “taking it to the hole”
All of this led to the first touring teams and this became the dominant form of pro basketball until the 1940’s. But the idea of having leagues didn’t take long to occur to people. This first ever league was grandly called the “National Basketball League” in 1898 but all the teams were in the Philadelphia area. It lasted 5 years. There were also the New England league, the Hudson Valley league, the Tri-County League and others of the same ilk. They all lasted a few years if that. The touring teams were the most successful and famous, although they sometimes paused to play league ball. The Buffalo Germans won 111 straight games from 1908-1911. The Troy Trojans won two Hudson River League titles from 1908-10 then jumped to the New York State League and won three titles there, then went barnstorming and won 38 straight games through 1915. They were famous for their use of bounce passes and credited with the invention of the fast break. The South Philadelphia Hebrew Association had a team called the “SPHAs” led by Eddie Gottlieb and they became the dominate team in that city. . And, in New York in 1912 a team was founded called the Celtics which came to dominate not only New York City but the entire era.
The Celtic invented much of modern basketball, or at least claimed to. They were a lot like the Baltimore Orioles baseball teams of the 1890’s: so many of their players became famous players and coaches, they dominated the narrative of how the game developed. But they certainly at least perfected the “pivot” play involving running the offense though a high post center, the give-and-go, and the switching man-to-man defense. Center Joe Lapchick became an expert at not only winning the opening tap and jump balls but using it as a pass to a teammate who would be streaking down court for a lay-up. The 6-5 Lapchick was the top center of the day. Other famous players were Dutch Dehnert, who preceded Lapchick at center and is said to have invented the pivot game, Nat Holman, the epitome of the early point guard, high scoring Johnny Beckman, Pete Barry “an aggressive rebounder” and speedy Davey Banks.
World War I put basketball on the back burner but teams and leagues appeared not long after the armistice. The Celtics returned to New York to find another team using their name and a lawsuit resulted in a name change to The Original Celtics. They played at the 71st Street Armory. Tex Rickard, who ran Madison Square Garden, came up with a rival team which he called the New York Whirlwinds. At the end of the 1921 season they met at the Armory and the Whirlwinds won 40-27. The Celtics won a second game 26-24. . The third was never played because the Celtics hired the Whirlybirds two top players, Nat Holman and Chris Leonard to play for them and the Whirlybirds refused to play them.
The Kingston Colonels claimed the “World’s Championship” for 1923 when, led by their star Benny Borgmann they beat the Celtics. Borgmann went on to become probably the top player of the era but the Celtics were the most famous team. The Celtics had hired a young newspaperman named Ed Sullivan to do their publicity and he made them the most famous team in basketball, one everybody wanted to play for. If they played against a good player, they wanted him to become a Celtic. They barnstormed to afford the salaries they paid their players, which were the highest in the business. The team drew as much as 25,000 fans to a game and their players were paid as much as $12,000 a year, a princely salary for the time. They won 193 of 204 games in 1922-23 and 89 of 99 games the next year.
The team finally broke up in 1928 when their owner, Jim Furey, was convicted of embezzling from Arnold Constable clothing store, of which he was the head cashier, (his day job), and wound up in Sing Sing. But they left a legacy of showing how popular the sport could be, which in turn led to the first attempt to create a league of national scope.
The First American Basketball League
That first attempt was, in part, the product of an already successful league of national (or at least regional) scope in another sport. Joe Carr, the President of the National Football League and a Washington laundry magnate named George Preston Marshall organized the American Basketball League in 1925. This was not a metropolitan, state or regional league. Carr was installed as its President and put franchises in Boston, Brooklyn, Washington Rochester, Buffalo, Fort Wayne, Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago – a team owned by George Halas. Unlike the NFL, the new league was based in the larger cities (the NFL had teams in Pottsville, Rock island, Canton, Hammond and Duluth, among others). Also, instead of having just a pennant race, (all 20 NFL teams that year were in one division and played a single schedule), they had a split season. Brooklyn won the first half at 12-4 and Cleveland won the second half with a 13-1 record. They then swept Brooklyn in the championship series, 3-0. Attendance was good: a total of 22,000 for the three games. Several of the teams took on the Original Celtics, who were still barnstorming and had turned down an invitation to join the league, in exhibition games - and all of them lost. Then the Celtics decided to join the league for the next season.
The Celtics took over the Brooklyn franchise, (which had gotten off to an 0-5 start before they joined up). Brooklyn went 13-3 with the Celtic’s stars Nat Holman,, a 5-11 point guard, Joe Lapchick, a 6-5 center and Johnny Beckman, nicknamed “the Babe Ruth of basketball” , (well, he was their highest paid player). They finished 4th in the first half but ran away with the second half, going 19-2 and sweeping Cleveland 3-0 in the championship series. One of the teams they beat out was a new team organized by player-coach Eddie Gottlieb, the Philadelphia Warriors, containing many players from the SPHAs.
For the 1927-28 season, the league split in two divisions, (six years before Carr’s NFL would do so). The Celtics were now the New York franchise and they blew through an expanded schedule to go 40-9 and beat out Gottlieb’s Warriors by 11 games. They then beat them in a best of 3 playoff series and the 3-1 win over Fort Wayne in the finals. The Cleveland Rosenblums, (named after owner Max Rosenblum, who also owned a department store), spurred by new acquisition Vic Hanson, won their first 8 games But Hanson quit after 22 games, citing his disappointment with his contract and the roughness of the professional brand of ball. (As Vic was a football player I suspect the former was the big factor.) Cleveland was 15-7 with Vic in the line-up and 7-22 without him. The Celtics were the league’s biggest drawing card but domination hurt the league’s attendance. And then their owner got sent “up the river” and the Celtics went out of business. Meanwhile, Marshall’s Washington team also went out of business. He’d spent $65,000 trying to beat the Celtics and win a title. But he would be back- in Carr’s other league
The Celtic players were distributed to the other teams for the 1928-29 season. The Rosenblums were the chief beneficiary, picking up Lapchick, Pete Barry and Dutch Dehnert. The league went back to a split season and Cleveland won the first half, with a 19-9 record. Fort Wayne, led by Benny Borgmann and Rusty Saunders, won the second half but got swept by Cleveland, 0-4, in the championship series, despite Borgmann scoring 40 points, (half of his team’s output) in the four games. The Chicago team was coached by George Halas.
The stock market crash hit before the 1929-30 season got underway. But the league had no reason to believe this was more than a temporary setback so they added some new teams, including one called the Syracuse Al-Americans, which was made of players who had been prominent as collegians, (but not Hanson, who was playing baseball at the time). They went 4-20 and folded before the season ended. . Jim Furey had been released from Sing Sing and tried to get the New York Celtics back together but found the old gang was too old and that he was too broke. These new Celtics dropped out after 10 games and a 5-5 record. Their players were put back on the market and strengthened other contenders, including Cleveland, who won the first half and got beaten out by one game in the second half by Rochester, who they beat 4 games to 1 for the championship.
Attendance was dropping drastically in the hard economic times and the bell was tolling for the ABL. They had 7 teams for the first half of the season but only five for the second half benny Borgmann won his third straight scoring title with an average of 8.8 points per game. The two time defending champions Cleveland Rosenblums folded after playing only a dozen games. The Brooklyn “Visitations” beat the Ft. Wayne Hoosiers 4-2 in the finals. After the season it was announced that the league would have to suspend operations due to all the money the owners had lost trying to keep the league going. Coach Phog Allen of Kansas said “professional basketball, as a money-maker, apparently has had its day.” But they’d proven there could be a basketball league at the national level, if the economic conditions were right. Eddie Gottlieb said “We had big buildings and players on monthly salaries and we stretched from New York to Chicago. But we were just three or four years ahead of our time.”
1925-31
Pre-History
Basketball was invented by a Canadian, Dr. James Naismith, who had become the Physical Education Instructor at the Springfield, Massachusetts YMCA, in 1891. He was looking for something for his students to do indoors during the winter other than the much-hated calisthenics he had been using. People had been playing games involving throwing a ball through a hoop for some time: the ancient Mayan played a game with a vertical hoop in which the captain of the losing team would be sacrificed to the Gods and the winning players would be awarded the spectators clothes, (which much have occasioned some impassioned halftime speeches from the captains and the wearing of old clothes by the spectators).
But for all Naismith knew, he was breaking new ground. His game went through a lot of experimentation: one game was played with 50 players on a side, which proved a bit cumbersome. Eventually he got that down to 5. He started with a hockey-like penalty of sitting out a certain period for fouls and counted all infractions, including traveling, as a foul but he got that straightened out, too. There was no 10 or 3 second counts until 1932 and a center jump after each basket until 1937. To prevent the ball from going out of bounds, a net was constructed around the court, making it look like the players were in a cage, (which caused them to be called “cagers”).
Photo: http://hooptactics.com/Content/Pictures/Picture.ashx?PicId=135871
Players learned to propel themselves off the net like pro wrestlers. (Spectators learned to stick them with cigarettes and hatpins.) That lasted until the 1920’swhen the cage was replaced by a rule that the last team to touch the ball lost it to the other team. But other than that, the game was recognizably basketball from early on.
The game became hugely popular in the YMCA’s across the country and spread to the colleges as well. But the YMCA administrators soured on it because it involved only a few players at a time and the style of play was becoming “unchristian”, including players being punched when the ref wasn’t looking. They decided to ban the game from their gyms, which caused the more devoted players to rent armorys and dance halls as places to play. They typically could not afford the rent so they would pass the hat among the fans to pay the rent and then split whatever was left among themselves Professional basketball was born!
The earliest claim for being the first professional game was in Herkimer, New York in 1893 at the Fox Opera house. Unfortunately, evidence for it is lacking. Then there was a claim that the Rochester YMCA had defeated the Syracuse YMCA 21-3 in January, 1895. The Rochester Y retorted that that wasn’t their team but some other Rochester team that the Syracuse Y had had the bad judgement to play against, implying that the Rochester team was a professional team. There’s also a claim that the first professional game took place in a Masonic Hall in Trenton New Jersey in 1896. Each member of the home team was paid $15 and there was enough left over to pay the team captain an extra dollar on top of that. It was a beginning.
Soon promoters became involved, hiring the best players in an area on a per game basis to play local teams. “Many promotors offered dancing before and after games. A band might play from 6-8PM for dancing. Then the floor would be cleared for the game. Then the music and dancing would resume.” The dance floors weren’t great for traction and sometimes the basket would be on a stage. The spectators, sometimes fueled by alcohol, could be rowdy at times and there were plenty of chairs to throw at the players. Sometimes the basket was up on a stage, which put an emphasis on shooting the basketball over “taking it to the hole”
All of this led to the first touring teams and this became the dominant form of pro basketball until the 1940’s. But the idea of having leagues didn’t take long to occur to people. This first ever league was grandly called the “National Basketball League” in 1898 but all the teams were in the Philadelphia area. It lasted 5 years. There were also the New England league, the Hudson Valley league, the Tri-County League and others of the same ilk. They all lasted a few years if that. The touring teams were the most successful and famous, although they sometimes paused to play league ball. The Buffalo Germans won 111 straight games from 1908-1911. The Troy Trojans won two Hudson River League titles from 1908-10 then jumped to the New York State League and won three titles there, then went barnstorming and won 38 straight games through 1915. They were famous for their use of bounce passes and credited with the invention of the fast break. The South Philadelphia Hebrew Association had a team called the “SPHAs” led by Eddie Gottlieb and they became the dominate team in that city. . And, in New York in 1912 a team was founded called the Celtics which came to dominate not only New York City but the entire era.
The Celtic invented much of modern basketball, or at least claimed to. They were a lot like the Baltimore Orioles baseball teams of the 1890’s: so many of their players became famous players and coaches, they dominated the narrative of how the game developed. But they certainly at least perfected the “pivot” play involving running the offense though a high post center, the give-and-go, and the switching man-to-man defense. Center Joe Lapchick became an expert at not only winning the opening tap and jump balls but using it as a pass to a teammate who would be streaking down court for a lay-up. The 6-5 Lapchick was the top center of the day. Other famous players were Dutch Dehnert, who preceded Lapchick at center and is said to have invented the pivot game, Nat Holman, the epitome of the early point guard, high scoring Johnny Beckman, Pete Barry “an aggressive rebounder” and speedy Davey Banks.
World War I put basketball on the back burner but teams and leagues appeared not long after the armistice. The Celtics returned to New York to find another team using their name and a lawsuit resulted in a name change to The Original Celtics. They played at the 71st Street Armory. Tex Rickard, who ran Madison Square Garden, came up with a rival team which he called the New York Whirlwinds. At the end of the 1921 season they met at the Armory and the Whirlwinds won 40-27. The Celtics won a second game 26-24. . The third was never played because the Celtics hired the Whirlybirds two top players, Nat Holman and Chris Leonard to play for them and the Whirlybirds refused to play them.
The Kingston Colonels claimed the “World’s Championship” for 1923 when, led by their star Benny Borgmann they beat the Celtics. Borgmann went on to become probably the top player of the era but the Celtics were the most famous team. The Celtics had hired a young newspaperman named Ed Sullivan to do their publicity and he made them the most famous team in basketball, one everybody wanted to play for. If they played against a good player, they wanted him to become a Celtic. They barnstormed to afford the salaries they paid their players, which were the highest in the business. The team drew as much as 25,000 fans to a game and their players were paid as much as $12,000 a year, a princely salary for the time. They won 193 of 204 games in 1922-23 and 89 of 99 games the next year.
The team finally broke up in 1928 when their owner, Jim Furey, was convicted of embezzling from Arnold Constable clothing store, of which he was the head cashier, (his day job), and wound up in Sing Sing. But they left a legacy of showing how popular the sport could be, which in turn led to the first attempt to create a league of national scope.
The First American Basketball League
That first attempt was, in part, the product of an already successful league of national (or at least regional) scope in another sport. Joe Carr, the President of the National Football League and a Washington laundry magnate named George Preston Marshall organized the American Basketball League in 1925. This was not a metropolitan, state or regional league. Carr was installed as its President and put franchises in Boston, Brooklyn, Washington Rochester, Buffalo, Fort Wayne, Cleveland, Detroit and Chicago – a team owned by George Halas. Unlike the NFL, the new league was based in the larger cities (the NFL had teams in Pottsville, Rock island, Canton, Hammond and Duluth, among others). Also, instead of having just a pennant race, (all 20 NFL teams that year were in one division and played a single schedule), they had a split season. Brooklyn won the first half at 12-4 and Cleveland won the second half with a 13-1 record. They then swept Brooklyn in the championship series, 3-0. Attendance was good: a total of 22,000 for the three games. Several of the teams took on the Original Celtics, who were still barnstorming and had turned down an invitation to join the league, in exhibition games - and all of them lost. Then the Celtics decided to join the league for the next season.
The Celtics took over the Brooklyn franchise, (which had gotten off to an 0-5 start before they joined up). Brooklyn went 13-3 with the Celtic’s stars Nat Holman,, a 5-11 point guard, Joe Lapchick, a 6-5 center and Johnny Beckman, nicknamed “the Babe Ruth of basketball” , (well, he was their highest paid player). They finished 4th in the first half but ran away with the second half, going 19-2 and sweeping Cleveland 3-0 in the championship series. One of the teams they beat out was a new team organized by player-coach Eddie Gottlieb, the Philadelphia Warriors, containing many players from the SPHAs.
For the 1927-28 season, the league split in two divisions, (six years before Carr’s NFL would do so). The Celtics were now the New York franchise and they blew through an expanded schedule to go 40-9 and beat out Gottlieb’s Warriors by 11 games. They then beat them in a best of 3 playoff series and the 3-1 win over Fort Wayne in the finals. The Cleveland Rosenblums, (named after owner Max Rosenblum, who also owned a department store), spurred by new acquisition Vic Hanson, won their first 8 games But Hanson quit after 22 games, citing his disappointment with his contract and the roughness of the professional brand of ball. (As Vic was a football player I suspect the former was the big factor.) Cleveland was 15-7 with Vic in the line-up and 7-22 without him. The Celtics were the league’s biggest drawing card but domination hurt the league’s attendance. And then their owner got sent “up the river” and the Celtics went out of business. Meanwhile, Marshall’s Washington team also went out of business. He’d spent $65,000 trying to beat the Celtics and win a title. But he would be back- in Carr’s other league
The Celtic players were distributed to the other teams for the 1928-29 season. The Rosenblums were the chief beneficiary, picking up Lapchick, Pete Barry and Dutch Dehnert. The league went back to a split season and Cleveland won the first half, with a 19-9 record. Fort Wayne, led by Benny Borgmann and Rusty Saunders, won the second half but got swept by Cleveland, 0-4, in the championship series, despite Borgmann scoring 40 points, (half of his team’s output) in the four games. The Chicago team was coached by George Halas.
The stock market crash hit before the 1929-30 season got underway. But the league had no reason to believe this was more than a temporary setback so they added some new teams, including one called the Syracuse Al-Americans, which was made of players who had been prominent as collegians, (but not Hanson, who was playing baseball at the time). They went 4-20 and folded before the season ended. . Jim Furey had been released from Sing Sing and tried to get the New York Celtics back together but found the old gang was too old and that he was too broke. These new Celtics dropped out after 10 games and a 5-5 record. Their players were put back on the market and strengthened other contenders, including Cleveland, who won the first half and got beaten out by one game in the second half by Rochester, who they beat 4 games to 1 for the championship.
Attendance was dropping drastically in the hard economic times and the bell was tolling for the ABL. They had 7 teams for the first half of the season but only five for the second half benny Borgmann won his third straight scoring title with an average of 8.8 points per game. The two time defending champions Cleveland Rosenblums folded after playing only a dozen games. The Brooklyn “Visitations” beat the Ft. Wayne Hoosiers 4-2 in the finals. After the season it was announced that the league would have to suspend operations due to all the money the owners had lost trying to keep the league going. Coach Phog Allen of Kansas said “professional basketball, as a money-maker, apparently has had its day.” But they’d proven there could be a basketball league at the national level, if the economic conditions were right. Eddie Gottlieb said “We had big buildings and players on monthly salaries and we stretched from New York to Chicago. But we were just three or four years ahead of our time.”
