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THE "SCHEMING, FLASHY TRICKINESS" OF BASKETBALL'S MEDIA DARLINGS, THE PHILADELPHIA "HEBREWS" - ERR…SIXERS

By Jon Entine

The Philadelphia basketball team had a pint-sized but flashy star shooter. Its old school coach was more teacher than tough disciplinarian. References to the Biblical David abounded in the media.

Sounds like the NBA's new media darling, the Philadelphia 76ers, who captured the hearts of much of America with their gritty determination.

Nope. It's the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association SPHAs (pronounced "spas"), which dominated basketball in the 1920s and '30s. It's a team steeped in basketball lore.

The flashy shooter was set-shot expert Inky Lautman and the Biblical David was the six-pointed star on the early SPHA's jerseys. The savvy coach was Eddie Gottlieb, who was also the owner of the most successful team in basketball history. In fact, the Hebrews as they were called, eventually morphed into the NBA's first champion, the 1946-47 Philadelphia Warriors, long before Gottlieb moved the team west to San Francisco in 1962.

Today, the only thing Jewish about the current Sixer team is coach Larry Brown, who starred on the 1961 U.S. gold-medal team at the Maccabiah Games. Brown was born in Brooklyn, that "other" Jewish basketball town.

There are plenty of parallels between the Jewish stars of years past and today's "flashy" black players. The players then and now were subject to sometimes egregious racial stereotyping. The newest showmen of modern basketball, such as Allen Iverson and Kobe Bryant are singled out for their "athleticism" and "natural talents", rather than their well-rounded play. Such stereotypes reflect a long tradition that goes back more than seven decades, when the game emerged from the ghettos of Philadelphia, New York and Baltimore. Sportswriters then used to wax about the gaudy skills of "natural athletes." Sounds familiar, except the stars had names like Dutch Garfinkel and Doc Lou Sugerman, and the top teams were the Philadelphia "Hebrews", the New York Whirlwinds and the Cleveland Rosenblums.

"The reason, I suspect, that basketball appeals to the Hebrew with his Oriental background," wrote Paul Gallico, sports editor of the New York Daily News and one of the premier sports writers of the 1930s, "is that the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind, flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smart aleckness." Writers opined that Jews had an advantage in basketball because short men have better balance and more foot speed. They were also thought to have sharper eyes, which of course cut against the stereotype that Jewish men were myopic and had to wear glasses, but who said stereotypes had to be consistent?

At the turn of the century, European Jews flooded off immigrant ships into the ghettos of the booming Eastern metropolises. New York and Philadelphia were the epicenters of the basketball world, with the dominant team, the Hebrews, ensconced in South Philly.

"Basketball is a city game," notes Sonny Hill, an executive adviser with the Sixers who has run a high-school summer league for more than 35 years. "If you trace basketball back to the 1920s, '30s, and '40s, that's when the Jewish people were very dominant in the inner city. And they dominated basketball."

Although New York turned out more Jewish stars in pure numbers, the SPHAs were basketball's best known and most successful all-Jewish team. From 1918 onward, the Hebrews barnstormed across the East and Midwest, playing in a variety of semipro leagues that were precursors to the NBA. In an incredible 22-season stretch, they played in 18 championship series, losing only five. In the early years of the Depression, the SPHAs surpassed both of Philadelphia's baseball teams, the Athletics and the Phillies, in popularity.

"Every Jewish boy was playing basketball," Harry Litwack told me a few years ago, before he passed away in 1999. Litwack starred for the SPHAs in the 1930s before moving on to coach Temple University in Philadelphia for 21 years. "Every phone pole had a peach basket on it. And every one of those Jewish kids dreamed of playing for the SPHAs."

"It was absolutely a way out of the ghetto," said Dave Dabrow, a guard with the original Hebrews. Dabrow, who eventually took a job coaching Jewish phenoms at South Philly High, died in 1996. "It was where the young Jewish boy would never have been able to go to college if it wasn't for the amount of basketball playing and for the scholarship."

The first intercollegiate game in the East, a 6-4 shellacking of Temple by Haverford College, took place in March 1894, at the Temple gymnasium. Basketball had a notorious reputation back then. The rules provided for few fouls, making the game a barely controlled melee. In the cases where the basket had a backboard, it was to keep the spectators from interfering with the ball. There was no out-of-bounds on many courts, which were two-thirds the size of a standard basketball court today and often ringed with steel mesh. It was common practice to drive an opponent into the fence, and pileups were as frequent as at hockey games today. Players paraded on and off the court with bandaged legs and bleeding heads. This offended the Victorian sensibilities of the Protestant ruling class in many cities leading to a temporary ban on the game at local YMCAs, which were fearful that their Christian boys would be corrupted.

Not so the Jewish, Irish, Polish and Italian communities, filled with the sons of immigrants. Basketball bridged the highly segregated Jewish and Gentile communities. In Philadelphia, the two best high school squads, Southern and rival Central, were stocked with first-generation Jews. Gottlieb and future SPHAs Harry "Chicky" Passon, Edwin "Hughie" Black, Mockie Bunnin, and Charlie Newman led Southern to city titles in 1914, 1915 and 1916. These Jews introduced a different style of play.

"It was a quick-passing running game, as opposed to the bullying and fighting way which was popular other places," explained Litwack. The best high-school graduates went on to play for one of the church teams, until anti-Semitism heated up. In 1918, 19 year old Gottlieb and some of his former high school buddies convinced the Young Men's Hebrew Association to buy them uniforms, which featured a samach, pey, hey, and aleph-Hebrew letters spelling "SHPAs"-and the Magen David, a Jewish star, as team symbols.

By the end of the 1921 season, the SPHA uniforms had become too ragged to wear, but the YMHA couldn't come up with the money for new ones. Gottlieb, Black and Passon started a local sporting goods store, Passon's -and which also paid for uniforms. With that crisis resolved, the SPHAs ventured out into the world of traveling semipro ball, retaining their team name and Jewish identity. Playing 80 or more games a year and with no home court to call their own, they were sometimes called "The Wandering Jews."

In the early days, the Jewish players earned $5 a game each-big bucks for city kids. Stars like Nat Holman and the "Heavenly Twins" from Brooklyn, Marty Friedman and Barney Sedransky, commanded $200 a month. Salaries escalated as the game's popularity soared, with Sedran (he shortened his name, as did many of that era, as Jews melted into the American mainstream), the 5'4" scoring machine and playmaker, known as the "brainiest" player in the game, once earning $12,000 in a single season.

In a celebrated showdown series in 1926, the Hebrews beat Original Celtics and New York Renaissance, the premier Negro team. though they lost to the league champion Cleveland Rosenblums, founded by a clothing store magnate. The team briefly renamed itself the Philadelphia Warriors, when it joined the fledgling American Basketball League, but it soon reverted to its Jewish roots and its original moniker.

The SPHAs' success attracted up and coming stars from Jewish ghettos along the East coast, including New York favorites "Shikey" Gotthoffer, Red Wolfe of St. John's and Moe Goldman of CCNY. Even when the college basketball champion St. John's team, dubbed the Wonder Five (Four Jews started on the 1929 team) after amassing a 70-4 record in three seasons, moved intact into the American Basketball League as the New York Jewels, it was the SPHAs who dominated. The SPHAS won 11 championships in various leagues from the late 1920s to early 1940s.

With the emergence of National Socialism in Germany and an escalation of anti-Semitism in the U.S., basketball was sometimes a brutal experience. The Jewish players faced incessant racial slurs and biased officials in the small towns in which they played.

"The toughest place was Prospect Hall, the home of the Brooklyn Visitation," said Gottlieb. "Half the fans would come to see the Jews get killed, and the other half were Jews coming to see our boys win. They used to have a balcony that hung over the court, and they'd serve the fans bottle beer and sandwiches. Whenever something would happen down on the court that those Brooklyn fans didn't like, they'd send those bottles down at us." Litwack recalled having to be careful just going down the court: "There was a lady in the front row with hat pins. She used to jab you when you went by."

Tuesday night doubleheaders at the YMHA at Broad and Pine streets attracted crowds of 1,500 or more to watch Lautman, Passon, lady-killer Kaselman and Gottlieb display their skills. At the height of their success, the SPHAs were one of the best teams in the country, sweeping their leagues games and challenging teams in other cities. By this time, the game had spread westward to Chicago. However, with travel costly, the chief rivals were in New York: the Holman coached Hakoahs, the Celtics, a powerful Jewish-Irish team, the Knights of St. Anthony's, which represented the mixed Italian and Jewish Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint, and the New York Rens.

The black players were not allowed to play in the all-white semi-pro leagues that started up and failed numerous times during this era. The encounters between the "Yids" and the "Niggers" were legendary. The Rens were flashy by the standards of the 1920s, though they would seem merely methodical today. Thousands of fans of both teams jammed the temporary seats set up in the marvelous Ballroom at Philadelphia's Broadwood Hotel (for at least one season, team member Gil Fitch also doubled as the bandleader for the dances that followed the games), where tickets went for a lofty 65 cents (35 cents for women).

"Usually when the Renaissance would have you licked, the last three, four minutes of the game, they'd start passing the ball around, and the crowd would to crazy," recalled Gottlieb. According to William "Pop" Gates, the star of the Renaissance, who in 1989, the SPHAs were renowned as a "thinking" team, while the Rens were famous for their "quickness"-stereotypes about Jews and blacks that endure today.

By the late 1940s, dominion over the urban basketball courts had begun to pass to the fastest-growing group of urban dwellers, blacks who were migrating north from dying Southern farms in search of opportunity. The new generation of Jews began moving on to other pursuits - not to mention out to the suburbs. With the Jewish talent moving into teaching and off to dental school, Gottlieb took stock and started the Philadelphia Warriors to play in the newly-launched Basketball Association of America. He skimmed the best talent and sold off the SPHAs to Red Klotz in 1950. Klotz renamed the scraps the Washington Generals, which went on to become the "white kids who can't jump" playing as patsy's to the Harlem Globetrotters.

Gottlieb, now nicknamed "The Mogul", coached the Warriors to the first championship of the BAA, the league that evolved into today's NBA. He finagled to sign home town high school star Wilt Chamberlain in 1959, after he had graduated from Kansas University and played a year for the Globetrotters. But even Wilt could not rescue the sinking Warriors. In 1962, Gottlieb sold the team that he had purchased ten years earlier from his partners for $25,000 to a San Francisco group for $850,000. Gottlieb moved west with his team to become a consulant and and took on the added duties of the NBA's official schedule-maker. He died in 1979.

The Sixers came into being a year after the Warriors left, the Syracuse Nats skipped town to Philadelphia. The Nats were led by Dolph Schayes, considered by some to be the greatest Jewish player in the history of basketball. NBA rookie of the year in 1949 after starring at New York University, Schayes led the Nats to the NBA title in 1955. He was also named to twelve consecutive All Star Games. Schayes took over as coach of the Sixers in 1964, leading them to their first ever title the next season. He was voted one of the game's top 50 all-time players and the last in the long line of great Jewish basketball stars.

After the war, the Jewish legacy in basketball focused mostly on the coaching ranks, frequently manned by former players. Nat Holman capped off his remarkable career in 1949-50, when his City College of New York squad became the first and last team to win the "grand slam" of American college basketball- championships of both the NCAA and NIT tournaments in the same season. Arnold "Red" Auerbach joined the Boston Celtics in 1950 and led them to 9 titles in 10 seasons. William "Red" Holtzman, another CCNY grad who went on to star with Rochester in the BAA and NBA, eventually took the reigns of the New York Knicks, where he won two championships. All of these coaches were elected to the Hall of Fame.

The last remaining link at the professional level to this great Jewish tradition rests with the cerebral Larry Brown of Philadelphia. With Allen Iverson and his scrappy teammates, the underdog 76ers struggled against the the Lakers. But Brown now promises to return, giving David another shot next season at basketball's Goliath.

Jon Entine (www.jonentine.com), a native Philadelphian based in Los Angeles, is author of Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We're Afraid To Talk About It [PublicAffairs], which was recently released in paperback, and from which this article is adapted.

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