The Ball (30 page)

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.

T
o 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 solidarity 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.

Despite the odds, in 1932–1933 the embattled Rens posted a 120–8 record, with six of those losses to the Celtics. In one grueling 86-day stretch that year, they played and won a near-impossible 88 games. By 1939, they were a national phenomenon, so it was no surprise when they were tapped to be one of a dozen teams to compete in Chicago in the first World Professional Basketball Tournament. The organizers wanted to field the best teams in the country, black and white, league-affiliated and not. The winning team would get $1,000 and the world champion title. The Celtics lost in the first round, and the SPHAs were forced to withdraw due to injuries. In round one the Rens trounced a team called the New York Yankees and went on to face their neighborhood counterparts, the Harlem Globetrotters.

The two all-black barnstorming teams had followed very different paths to the championships. The Rens played the game hard and straight up, determined to win on their terms and show that blacks had the same abilities as whites. The Globetrotters, a team with equally talented players, were formed by promoter Abe Saperstein to entertain whites. Their version of basketball, full of clowning and trickery, was a form of black pantomime that played to white stereotypes and paid off handsomely at the box office. The Rens resented being overshadowed by the Trotters and their traveling minstrel show. Said Bob Douglas in 1979, “I would never have burlesqued basketball. I loved it too much for that.”

There was no burlesque or pantomime that day, however. Just two teams battling to become world champions and prove they had it in them. The Rens came out on top and in front of a mostly white crowd of 3,000 went on to defeat the white Oshkosh All-Stars to seize the title. Blacks everywhere celebrated the symbolic victory. After the game, Douglas held a banquet for his team and handed out championship jackets that read
COLORED WORLD CHAMPIONS
. John Isaacs, the team's six-foot guard, asked to borrow a razor and carefully cut out the word “colored.” Douglas protested that he was ruining the jacket, but Isaacs just replied, “No, just making it better.”

In a sense, “making it better” has been basketball's aspiration all along, part of the game's founding DNA. Of all the major sports played in the world today, it's the only one that was invented wholesale, and the only one designed to serve a social purpose. The father of basketball was no seer and no genius of the hardwood. He didn't foresee the need for the dribble or the jump shot. He admitted only to having played the game twice and to have preferred wrestling for exercise and other sports for watching. He naively argued that basketball was a game to be played, not coached, and true to his belief remains to this day the only coach in University of Kansas history with a losing career record.