The Game Changer: How Hank Luisetti Revolutionized America's Great Indoor Game

By Philip Pallette

Hank, the nimble; Hank, the quick; Hank, the human corkscrew; Hank, as fast as light; Hank, the rubber-boned man, wrote Roy Cummings after seeing a 19-year-old Hank Luisetti perform for the first time in 1936. Cummings sat alone in a deserted gym trying to describe to his readers what he had just witnessed on the basketball court. Luisetti, who learned the game to a background chorus of fog horns and gulls on San Francisco Bay, would later that year introduce New Yorks basketball legions to the jump shot. Now Philip Pallette has created a riveting account of the basketball life of this eminently shy and decent young man who transformed Stanford basketball from a group of fun-loving dabblers into national champions. The Game Changer is a book that rediscovers the long-forgotten adulation basketball fans felt for Luisetti by tracing his journey from boyhood on to becoming basketballs first matinee idol and the man who changed basketball forever.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Mar 11, 2005
• ISBN: 9781418496364

Philip Pallette

Philip Pallette lives not far from Madison Square Garden with his wife, enjoys watching and writing about basketball, and works for an acquisitions firm.  He is currently working on a mystery novel that takes place in 1936 San Francisco, and yes, he does like to play basketball when he gets the chance.

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Table of Contents

Author’s Note

Preface

Peaches and Casabas

One-handed Shot

Setback in Seattle

A Legend is Born

On the Road

The Trojans

The Kiss

The Ghost In a Red Jersey

Red Clay, White Lines: The 1936 Olympic Games

The Hammers of Hell

Buffalo Shuffle

Almost Perfect

Invading the Inland Empire

Another Garden Party

LIU Rematch

Temple and Duquesne: Tragedy and Comedy

In Need of Therapy

Take the Money

Epilogue

End Notes

Author’s Note

This book owes a debt of gratitude to Richards Lyon for providing several photos he took of his 1937 and 1938 Stanford teammates. His words of support and his unfailing enthusiasm to see a book about Hank Luisetti published helped me a great deal. Dr. Lyon was joined by a number of others who have been cheering for Hank Luisetti for nearly seventy years and are still cheering for him. All those who remembered Hank seemed to be inspired to talk about him. Harry Press from Luisetti’s class of 1938, for one, deserves special mention for introducing me around the Stanford campus, the athletic department, the hangouts of yesteryear, and the archives of the Stanford Daily. Harry also introduced me to such wonderful people as Walt Vincenti, Bob Oakford, Jack Laird and Gene Gear—who were teammates and/or classmates of Hank at Stanford.

To the many players who spent time and recounted their stories in person, by phone, by letter, by written or recorded memoir—my thanks and admiration. Among these were Hank Luisetti and Stanford players Bryan Dinty Moore, Leon Lafaille, H. B. Lee, Tom Siebert, Phil Zonne, Bob Oakford, Walt Vincenti, Jack Laird, Bill Leckie, Lyman Calkins, Don Gregory, Bill Cowden, Harlan Copsey, and Bob Burnett. Other players who contributed include: USC’s Jack Hupp and Hal Dornsife, UCLA’s Chet Lappen, Temple’s Deacon Jones, Howard Kahn, and Jim Busha, Washington State’s Ivar Nelson and Orville Johnson, Oregon State’s Wally Palmberg and Frank Mandic, Washington’s Bob McKinstry, CCNY’s Bernie Fliegel, Harold Kaufman and Dave Paris, LIU’s Ossie Schectman and Hank Fishman, Duquesne’s Leon Darkowski, Case Western’s Frank Doc Kelker and Galileo High School’s Louis Bedoni and Paul Sartorio.

A special thank you goes to Robert Habeeb for helping me with factual background on San Francisco. I am grateful to the Stanford Athletic Department people that Harry Press introduced me to, in particular: Sandi Peregrina, Mike Montgomery, and Bob Vasquez. For services and information they provided, I wish to thank the staff of The Stanford Daily, and the following: Rick Hupp, Al Shrier, Charles DeCicco, Kathleen Parrish, Constance Koch, Jessie Rae Calderwood, Ted Lilienthal, Myer Kahn, Albert Grossi, A. J. Agarwal, Mark Gudis, Peter F. Newell, Kirk Moore, John R. Wooden, Rod Commons, the Washington State University Athletic Department, George Edmonston, the Oregon State University Athletic Department, the Temple University Alumni Association, the Duquesne University Alumni Association, the Montana State University Alumni Association, the Hamline University Archives, and Craig Jantz, at the Case Western Reserve University Athletic Department.

I am also grateful to the following people and organizations: Pat Akre and her staff at the San Francisco History Center at the San Francisco Public Library, the Cleveland Public Library, the California State Library, the Denver Public Library, Stacey Zwald at the Oakland Museum of California and the New York Public Library for their assistance in providing me with research materials.

Others to thank are Nancy Hendryx, who supplied me with many good ideas in the presentation of the book and who edited the final manuscript; Patricia Hernandez, who edited an earlier version of the manuscript; Todd Smith, who designed the photo layout; George Foster, who designed the cover. I was inspired by their professionalism and fine work.

A final thank you goes to Mark Glidden, whose wisdom, understanding and good counsel have assisted me immeasurably in completing this book.

Preface

One January afternoon in 1932, a significant event occurred in a high school basketball game, an event which would lead to a profound and lasting change in the way America’s fast growing indoor sport was played. The event took place in drafty Kezar Pavilion, located in the southwest corner of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. During a league contest between Galileo and St. Ignatius, 15-year-old Hank Luisetti, dribbling at high speed, suddenly left his feet and released a one-handed shot from above his eyes. At the time he was 20 feet from the basket. The play happened so fast that it hardly drew notice from those who witnessed it, though it did draw ire from Luisetti’s coach.

The shot did not seem so unusual at that time and in that place—where positive results generally earned higher marks than good form—and besides, Luisetti’s running one-hander was only a small component of his fundamentally sound game.

If the one-hander were the only facet of Luisetti’s game that distinguished him among his peers at the time, the event would have been forgotten, only a slight aberration of form on the part of a 1930s San Francisco high school standout. The shot did not earn lasting notoriety until Luisetti shocked the New York basketball establishment in 1936, and the impact the shot had at that time had less to do with the uniqueness of the shot, than with the very uniqueness of the player himself. The youth of the late 1930s, were they to have at their disposal a popular phrase of the late 20th Century, might have summed things up with one statement: Luisetti rules, Dude! Luisetti was at least a little bit better in nearly every phase of basketball than any player of his time. Much of his game was purely conventional, right down to the planting of his feet and the firing up of a two-hand set shot. Nonetheless, looking at him play on film, one might be tempted to make the observation that a time machine had dropped this fellow off into the era of the 1930s from some future era. How did this happen? How did Angelo Hank Luisetti develop into a player who practically reinvented basketball offense—and then go on to reach the status of a matinee idol? Through an analysis of his career, particularly the three varsity years at Stanford University, these are topics discussed in this book.

Imagine a game of basketball taking place seven decades ago. Familiar sights and sounds—the peel of the referee’s whistle, the echo of young men’s voices, the din of the crowd—blend together with the unfamiliar. Players in gaudy uniforms led by a raven-haired youth dribbling an ungainly ball, racing up and down the court, an appealing look of earnestness on their boyish faces, their rubber-soled sneakers squeaking on varnished maple. Your attention is speared by an unanticipated move, the ball resonating off the floor, a player taking off, twisting in mid-air, the sudden intake of breath, the pure and total silence of the crowd as the raven-haired Luisetti soars on a collision course with the rim, the fingertip release of the ball, and the youth descending, beads of sweat rolling off him after the culmination of another of a thousand sorties, the ball obediently following him off the backboard and through the net.

It was a time when fans knew the difference between a set-up and a set shot and that a casaba tosser was another name for a basketball player; when forty-minute games lasted little more than an hour; when supporters without tickets would offer late arriving fans two to three times the ticket price if the ticket holders would just give up their ducats to a sold out game. No matter what city or what arena—they were there to see what Luisetti would come up with next, what magic play he would make and whether or not he and his team could be beaten. Years later, to those few basketball connoisseurs who had watched both Michael Jordan and Hank Luisetti play in their prime, Luisetti would appear in retrospect to have been a player demonstrating a more modern game than that played by his contemporaries.

Luisetti was an only child who learned English and basketball at almost the same time. In many ways, his life bore similarity to that of famed Yankee slugger Lou Gehrig. Both grew up in inner cities, the only sons of immigrant parents for whom English was a second language. Both young athletes earned their way into prestigious universities, and each had their illustrious athletic careers cut short by a terrifying rare illness.

This book would never have existed if not for the passion of a child who learned to play basketball because he loved it with all his heart. Single-mindedly, devotedly, he played, practiced and soaked up every bit of knowledge and experience then available—and then began forging new and more dynamic ways to play the game he loved. Though the game made him famous, he was truly a player who loved the game more than he loved the fame.

Shortly after Angelo Luisetti turned 28, he lost the ability to play basketball. But while he may have lost the ability to play he retained the ability to love. He loved his family, his work, and his privacy. As the glow of his fame dimmed, he continued to enjoy a long and happy life. As a 27-year old naval lieutenant in March 1944, he won his final game and his final championship. He had led his service league team to an undefeated season, and some experts thought that the St. Mary’s Pre-Flight squad was the best team—professional or otherwise—in the United States. At the time, Luisetti was the nation’s finest player and had influenced a generation of players who, in one way or another, tried to emulate him. He had ushered the game into its modern era and opened the door to the jump shot.

The question may be raised as to whether Hank could play in today’s NBA. Could he even make an NBA roster? Howie Dallmar, Luisetti’s teammate in that final glorious year of 1944 who later became the Stanford coach, once expressed the opinion that to compare any player of Luisetti’s time with players from a later era would be unfair.

On the other hand, one is tempted to pose the question as to how Joe DiMaggio, Stan Musial or Ted Williams would do today in major league baseball. These men were Luisetti’s baseball contemporaries. Could they play in today’s big leagues? If the answer were yes, then certainly Luisetti could and would play in today’s NBA and would probably be an all-star.

Who in today’s NBA most resembles him? As of this writing, Manu Ginobili, who entered the 2003-04 season playing with the San Antonio Spurs, is one player whose game and appearance are reminiscent of Luisetti. Every so often, he puts on a play that is all Hank.

There’s also the fine Oklahoma State University point guard named John Lucas, who recently demonstrated a deft scoring touch by lofting a few running one-handed tosses during drives to the baseline. It is a very difficult shot, and while in his veins young Lucas possesses a basketball pedigree second to no man, perhaps the shot just comes natural to him, as it did 70 years ago to Hank Luisetti.

To clear up confusion about the nature of Luisetti’s running one-hander, it should be noted that there were actually two different shots. One was a running or pivoting hook shot released with either hand; the other was the near-jump shot released right-handed from just above the forehead while in the air and moving towards the basket.

Unfortunately, an extensive film or video archive that would give us an idea of how Luisetti dominated his era does not exist. That doesn’t mean his plays were any less worthy of a highlight reel. We know from hearsay and written sources that Luisetti’s play was often astounding, jaw dropping, awe inspiring, but more importantly, winning, as his teams rarely lost games. On a basketball court, Angelo Hank Luisetti was greatness personified. That’s a fact the world of sport need not—and should not—forget.

*

For many years, Stanford University athletic teams were known officially as the Stanford Indians in all major team sports. Throughout the 1930s several Bay Area sportswriters informally referred to Stanford as the Cards. In the pages that follow, we adhere to the custom of the 1930s, formally referring to the Stanford varsity basketball team as the Indians, but often referring to the team colloquially as the Cards.

Luisetti being carried off by Carlisle.jpg

KNOCKED OUT - 1938

Stanford’s Hank Luisetti (7) is assisted off the court by University of California captain Chet Carlisle (left) and Stanford coach John Bunn following a mid-court collision. Luisetti later returned to the game.

(San Francisco Call-Bulletin)

Peaches and Casabas

The sweat-soaked uniform seemed to have lost its definitive red color. The dazed All-American wearing that uniform was being helped into a sitting position, while all around him popping flash bulbs illuminated a purgatory of hostile fans. Located among these fist-raising Cal rooters was a tall, 21-year-old English major, a former pre-med student named Eldred G. Peck. In another few years, Peck would be known to the world as movie star Gregory Peck, but for the moment Eldred was just another Cal student looking on while a companion pointed out that the All-American, in this case an All-American named Hank Luisetti, could not do much damage if he would just remain seated on the floor. A LIFE magazine photographer was stretched out on the hardwood, pointing his Leica through a forest of legs gathered around Stanford’s 6-foot-3-inch basketball star. LIFE had sent a crew to cover the game, during the fourth minute of which Luisetti broke the national scoring record, coolly pivoting around a defender and flipping in a high, floating left-hander from the right corner. Oh, what a night.

In the minutes just before, Peck had seen California slice into Stanford’s huge lead, the score was 42–32, and time was out with 10 minutes to play.

Immaculately white-clad male yell leaders took to the floor, aiming large megaphones up at the immense Cal cheering section, stirring up a Friday night frenzy. The roar swelled to the top of five-year-old Harmon Gym, and the noise needed no interpretation. Every sweating player, student and fan knew that Cal was making its run. For the Bears to come from behind and tie for the southern division title, it was now or never.

After trailing most of the game by ballooning double digits, the Golden Bears had come from behind, applying an all-out, attacking, man-for-man defense that threw a roadblock up to Luisetti’s raging, racehorse offense. Faced with the tight confines of the Stanford match up zone, Cal attacked inside. Granite-jawed, bleary-eyed center Chet Carlisle, as if hearing the call of the wild, scored a string of leaping baskets close to the hoop, compelling Luisetti to call a timeout.

With the timeout over, the yell leaders still had the crowd stomping out the beat to Big C, the school song. The Cal players huddled in their foul lane, resolutely looking over at their opponents. A composed Luisetti walked to his position within earshot of play-by-play announcer Doug Montel and thought briefly of his mother listening at home. He watched Beebs Lee take the inbounds pass from his roommate, Calderwood, and the notion jumped into his mind that his life as a college basketball player was nearly over. This was shortly before the unthinkable happened—Luisetti being knocked unconscious.

Now as Peck looked on, the raucous cheers that had filled the sold-out arena dropped to a dull murmur. Eight-thousand pairs of eyes focused on Luisetti, flat on his back near the midcourt sideline. The game stopped on the lonely trill of Lloyd Leith’s whistle, the crowd realizing that it was Luisetti, and not another player, who was injured.

The Stanford captain lay motionless for a disturbing length of time, until gradually a sense of hostility penetrated his consciousness. With eyes wide open and the faint buzz of the crowd seeping in, it occurred to Luisetti that there was someone—a priest?—kneeling over him. He had no idea it was 9:20 p.m., Friday March 4; no idea that Stanford was visiting California; no idea the 1938 southern division title was at stake.

Off to the side stood Cal’s colorful, duck-walking Eddie Dougery, meekly protesting to all who would listen, Why would I want to hurt him? Hank was my friend. We grew up together! And it was true. Dougery had once written flattering reports about Luisetti in the Galileo High School newspaper and yearbook.

But it was Dougery who clipped his friend as both were going for a loose ball. Luisetti just about had his hands on the leather when he was jostled from the side. Off balance, his chin was smashed by Dougery’s elbow as Dougery swiped at the ball. Luisetti pitched face down onto the floor like a Saturday night drunk, in the words of the Oakland Tribune‘s Bill Tobitt.

In the days long before Mario Savio’s political activism fired up the Berkeley campus, there were two kinds of kids who showed up at the games: students like Eldred Peck, who behaved themselves, and students who would do things like ignite matches under pennies, toss them out onto the floor, and hope a visiting player would be foolish enough to pick one up, ruining his shooting touch for the evening.

Carlisle, the Cal captain, helped Luisetti up off the floor and handed him off to the Stanford team doctor and managers, who in turn led the injured player to the dressing room.

Contrary to expectations, Stanford clung to its lead after Luisetti went down, as the Golden Bears watched the Indians make basket after basket. Carlisle, unable to keep his mind on the game, blamed himself and blamed his teammates for what they had done to the Stanford captain. The Laughing Boys from Palo Alto seemed to play as though emancipated, running their guard-through plays without Luisetti and without hesitation.

With four minutes remaining, Luisetti unexpectedly returned to the game despite a slight concussion. Coach Bunn tried to keep the captain on the bench, but the boy was insistent. His urgency in wanting to go back in? His mother was listening to the live broadcast, and reentering the game was his way of reassuring her that he was not seriously hurt.

And here comes No. 7, Lo-o-o–setti, Doug Montel droned into the KYA microphone. The boy’s name crossed the airwaves over San Francisco Bay to the darkened kitchen of a railroad flat apartment stacked along a row up Russian Hill, where the call was heard by an anxious woman leaning forward, her face lit only by the faint amber glow of the radio dial. The words meant that her Angelo was on the basketball court again, playing at the game that he loved, and, as this would be the last Stanford game of his she would ever listen to, the memories came back to her, reminiscences of the years of raising him, of having to live on this precipice of a street, of all the cold early mornings of high fog, drizzling rain and again and again, that impossible hill to climb.

Back on the court, Luisetti took off on a tricky, length-of-the-court dribble, tossing a leaping one-hander off the whitewashed backboard and into the netting. "Can’t that dago go, and me from California saying it, too," marveled a Bear fan, who would have to wait until Luisetti graduated before seeing Cal win another title.

Stanford fans were delirious when Luisetti calmly sank a two-hand set shot from 50 feet just as the halftime gun sounded. Seconds before the game ended, he took aim from the same distance and narrowly missed doing it again. Another 50-footer would have been too much for the Bear fans to stomach—or for future generations to believe.

A reserve, Bill Rapp, gathered in the air ball and laid it in. Rapp reveled in the satisfaction of scoring his only basket of the game. When the timer lifted his gun, Peck and the rest of the California faithful found themselves standing, giving the smiling Luisetti an ovation. They had been watching noble Hank, this herald of the jump shot, this working-class kid from the San Francisco docks, revolutionize basketball over the course of three years, watched him transform pedestrian, aristocratic Stanford into a national champion, and in typical fashion, rise up off the floor to finish off the Golden Bears with a game-high 22 points. Little did Peck and the rest of the Bear faithful realize that they would never see a player like Luisetti again.

*

The three gifted young Californians were practically neighbors, city boys from the streets of San Francisco and San Diego. In the spring of 1938, 23-year-old Joe DiMaggio was holding out for a $40,000 contract, and 19-year-old Teddy Samuel Williams was reporting to his first major league spring training camp. But in 1938, there was no major league for Hank Luisetti. The NBA would be a decade and a world war away. Nat Holman, Hall of Fame player of the 1920s and famed City College of New York coach from 1919 to 1960, was earning $12,500 a year as a professional basketball player at the end of the 1920s when he hung up his sneakers and went into college coaching. Ten years later, professional basketball players of Holman’s caliber were fortunate to make $2,500 per year. The Great Depression and the explosive popularity of college basketball had rendered the pro game inconsequential by 1939.

Meanwhile, the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) had long since established a national basketball tournament at practically the same time that baseball established the World Series. It was into one of the time-honored AAU rosters that many basketball All-Americans advanced following graduation. In Luisetti’s case, it was also of consequence that he was a graduate of no ordinary school. He was a Stanford man, and the Stanford grads advising him looked down upon the nefarious state of small-time professional leagues that were struggling to gain acceptance around the country.

The 21-year-old Luisetti, graduating in June with no legitimate professional stage upon which to perform the astonishing range of basketball skills he commanded, took a lucrative summer job by signing a movie contract with Paramount Studios, reportedly receiving $7,500 for a film in which he would reluctantly and awkwardly play himself.

By the time the NBA did materialize, Luisetti was still young enough to realize the fruits of his great talent. Unfortunately, a bout of spinal meningitis in 1944, contracted while on naval duty, changed the course of his life. Thanks to newly discovered sulfa drugs, he survived; but when he awoke from a six-day coma, Luisetti was told that the wonder drug had weakened his heart. His days as a competitive basketball player were over.

Without the kind of professional career that landed DiMaggio and Williams in baseball’s Hall of Fame, the former Stanford star failed to receive the recognition he was due as not only one of the great athletes of his time, but one of the great basketball players of all time. Few of those voting in modern-day polls had ever seen him play.

Despite this, there exists to this day the real body of Luisetti’s contribution: his three varsity years at Stanford University from 1936 to 1938. Unlike Williams and DiMaggio, Luisetti made national headlines participating in a sport at the university level. While Williams and DiMaggio were accomplished performers by the time they reached the age of 21, neither had achieved the national fame that Luisetti had earned as a 21-year-old senior at Stanford. And the closer we look at the Stanford star’s record, the more remarkable his achievements appear. Today we look back and credit Luisetti with ushering in the one-hand shot, the prelude to the jump shot.

But this alone is not why Hank Luisetti and his teammates should be remembered. They should be remembered for winning game after game when consensus said they should not, would not, could not win. They should be remembered for opening the American sports fan’s eyes to a remarkable and exciting style of play still in an ascendant phase of world-wide popularity.

In many games he does impossible things, wrote Bill Leiser in 1938, near the end of Luisetti’s Stanford career. He’ll get from situation one to situation two and bounce from that so quickly to situation three that you swear it must have been three different men rather than one Luisetti in all three places. 1 Leiser went on to explain how one night, Luisetti had smashed into the bleachers, knocked a kid’s glasses off, run back out onto the floor, retrieved the glasses, handed them back to the kid with one hand, received a pass with the other hand, and drove into the basket for the score.

*

In August 1936 at Berlin and later that year on the Kansas University campus, Luisetti met the man who had invented basketball nearly half a century earlier. How could Dr. James Naismith have any idea, looking up into Luisetti’s beaming, handsome face, that this 20 year-old superstar, on his way to New York’s Madison Square Garden, was in the process of revolutionizing his game? Naismith could not have suspected any such thing as he sat down to eat lunch with the Stanford team in a Lawrence, Kansas hotel dining room. Naismith in 1936 could reflect back on how far the game had come. He felt it was far too organized now. After all, it was a game he conceived for physical education classes, not for generating the kinds of profits that Stanford was about to add to the bottom line of the Madison Square Garden college basketball enterprise developed by Ned Irish.

1891. Springfield

One day back in 1891, Naismith looked up and sought guidance. The answer from above came in the form of a peach basket, suspended from the edge of the running track above the YMCA gym floor. Naismith held a shiny new soccer ball at his side and gazed up at the basket he and the YMCA janitor had just attached above the floor. The idea was to throw the ball into the round peach basket—which had to suffice as a substitute for a suitable square box.

Naismith bounced the ball a couple of times, clutched it with two hands, went into a deep squat and, underhanded, lofted the ball up and over the edge of the basket. The ball teetered before coming to rest inside the basket. Naismith, pleased with the result, peered over his glasses at the janitor. The janitor understood that it would be his job to climb the ladder to retrieve the ball, thereby laying claim to being the game’s first rebounder.

The first of Naismith’s original 13 rules for the game was prophetic. It stated: The ball may be thrown in any direction with one or both hands. For 40 years, players threw and shot the ball with both hands. But from the very first day he picked up a ball, Hank Luisetti would take the road less traveled. He threw the ball at the hoop with one hand.

A Canadian who held degrees in philosophy and religion, Naismith had moved to the United States in 1890 to spend a year at the YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts, with the prospect of earning a third degree in physical education. He had won athletic medals while a student at McGill University in Montreal. Athletic games were both his passion and his hobby.

In 1898, Naismith added a fourth degree to his resume–a medical degree from Gross Medical School at the University of Colorado. It was in between the physical education degree and the medical degree that Naismith invented the game of basketball.

Back in Springfield, with his newly minted physical education diploma framed up on the wall, Naismith was assigned the task of coming up with an organized indoor game that would occupy the energies of an unruly class of youngsters during the winter months. Late in 1891, Naismith tested the idea of indoor soccer and indoor lacrosse. With the inherent danger of balls and people smashing into walls and windows, Naismith felt compelled to come up with a better idea.

Part of his solution was to promote the role that vertical space would play in a brand new game concept. By placing the goal high above the players’ heads, gravity would absorb the energy of the players’ exertions, reducing the sense of confinement posed by a gym’s four walls. The fixture of a goal 10 feet off the ground and the size of its opening were absolute designations. How high a player could jump and how accurately they could place the ball through the aperture were limitations only of the players’ skill.

An early enhancement to Naismith’s rules further emphasized vertical space by introducing dribbling, requiring that the ball be bounced in a controlled fashion on the floor if a player wished to advance around the court while keeping possession. Finally, by making the goal’s opening barely big enough for the ball to pass through, and by making the goal parallel to the ground, Naismith substituted finesse for brute force. Students engaged in the sport would have to concentrate on accuracy if they wanted to score, rather than kicking or hurling the ball as hard as they could. In doing so, the sport was relatively safe for both people and windows.

The term shooting baskets gradually came into usage because the concept of putting the ball in the basket required the type of care and attention to technique required in shooting at a target with a firearm or bow and arrow.

Having earned his MD, Naismith left Denver in 1898 for the University of Kansas, where he was to teach physical education and practice medicine for the next 40 years. Meanwhile, the sport of basketball spread nationwide through the YMCA system and continued to undergo modifications. At Kansas, one of Naismith’s students was Forrest Phog Allen, who had taken up the game of basketball at Independence High School in Missouri before enrolling at Kansas in 1905. Allen coached informally at Kansas in 1908 and 1909. Naismith didn’t believe basketball really required coaches, just teachers. Allen was to prove his boss wrong.

Following the precedent set by college football conferences, the league structure of college basketball developed, and schools needed basketball coaches. Allen’s first formal job was at Warrensburg Teachers College. Following his success there, he was formally given the head-coaching job at Kansas in 1920, where he coached for 36 years.

John Bunn, Luisetti’s future Stanford coach, arrived at Kansas in 1917 to study engineering and was already skilled at Naismith and Allen’s basketball. Bunn attended high school in Humboldt, Kansas. Through organized basketball, farm communities could continue into the dead of winter the local rivalries that had developed during football season. Bunn seemed destined for success. He was class valedictorian and excelled at basketball, football, and baseball.

Allen had started his dynasty at Kansas in 1920, Bunn’s junior year. In 1930, when Allen was asked by Stanford to recommend a candidate to take over as varsity basketball coach, he recommended Bunn.

During his interview for the Stanford job in 1930, Bunn was impressive. His talking pictures speaking voice resonated throughout the room, and he managed to charm Stanford’s Board of Athletic Control with his sense of fun and high-energy enthusiasm. Most notable of all were his ideas on how a coach could inspire the best performances out of players—by making the game fun while appealing to their intellect—and his willingness to introduce an innovative system that would be unique to the Palo Alto school. He used the terms freedom and team to describe his system of a freedom offense and team defense. It may have confused the board, but Bunn sounded like he knew what he was talking about! Stanford’s football coach, Glenn Pop Warner, was impressed with Bunn’s football background at Kansas, where Bunn was still remembered for a game-winning touchdown he had scored on a long pass play 10 years earlier.

Bunn and his wife, Bunny, arrived in Palo Alto in the summer of 1930 to begin preparing for the 1931 season. With an engineering background and a mandate to bring a division championship to the Stanford basketball program, he was what more than one of his players would later describe as an intellectual coach.

Early on, Bunn found the competition stifling in the tight, four-team Pacific southern division. Nibs Price at California had enjoyed a stranglehold on the title since 1925. Sam Barry had arrived at USC in 1929 and achieved immediate success, forcing Price to share supremacy. By 1935, Bunn felt his time had already come and gone. Price and Barry had the division wrapped up, and it was more than just rumor that Bunn’s days at Stanford were numbered. After five consecutive losing seasons, culminating with a 9–17 low point in 1935, Bunn had failed to recruit the players needed to run his system. The team was just barely good enough to compete with the other three teams. With only four teams in the division—UCLA being the fourth—there was no margin for error, no chance to fatten up a record with a group of weaker, second division opponents.

In the early 1920s, basketball coaches at major universities in the western states tended to be recruited from sports other than basketball. Coach Hec Edmundson at Washington was the school’s track coach. Coach Price at California had been both assistant and head football coach. Howard Hobson, who would take over at Oregon in 1935, grew up striving to become a professional baseball player. Though basketball was increasing in popularity and acceptance, the new sport was just that—a new sport, and it was also officially designated in many university programs as a minor sport.

By 1930, however, specialists in basketball teaching had begun to emerge. Books on court strategy and tactics had begun to appear. Basketball was by

then a major sport at all the major universities, although its popularity was dwarfed by the popularity (and inherent media coverage) of football. The rivalry in football among the Pacific Coast schools was titanic, with the Pacific Coast champion winning the right to face a national powerhouse on New Year’s Day in Pasadena’s 80,000-seat Rose Bowl.

Knute Rockne had brought out Notre Dame and the Four Horsemen to battle Ernie Nevers and Stanford in the 1925 Rose Bowl, and Wrong Way Roy Riegel had committed his infamous faux pas, taking off with a fumble recovery for the wrong goal in the 1929 Rose Bowl against Georgia Tech.

On the morning of December 1, 1928, 10,000 football fans piled into San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium to listen to a live national radio broadcast of a college football doubleheader. Army would entertain Stanford at Yankee Stadium early in the day. Later, it would be Notre Dame visiting Southern Cal at Los Angeles. Radio technology had not yet developed to the point where national live broadcasts could be received over individual radio sets, so large speakers were set up inside the hall and a colossal scoreboard was erected on stage, enabling fans to see all the details posted as they listened.

The outcome was remarkable. Pop Warner’s Stanford Indians upset heavily favored Army 26-0, setting off a delirious reaction inside the auditorium and shockwaves 3,000 miles away among New York sportswriters. While college football teams would continue making occasional trips across the country for intersectional battles, it would be years before college basketball teams would follow suit. Or would it?

In 1929, when Southern California lured Sam Barry, Iowa’s head basketball coach, into signing a contract to coach the Trojans, it served notice that the Trojans were seeking to achieve a status none of the West Coast teams had managed in the 1920s: national prominence in basketball. The very next year, Stanford followed suit by bringing in Bunn from Kansas. The item distinguishing Barry’s résumé from Bunn’s was head coaching experience at a major college program. Barry had already won a pair of Big Ten championships at Iowa, while Bunn had merely been an assistant at Kansas.

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Price recruited many of his basketball players from the baseball sandlots and his own football program. Basketball was still thought of by hardcore football fans as a girls’ sport or a sissy’s game. Price, however, had been able to sell basketball as a good way to turn football players not into sissies, but into more coordinated athletes, and as a way of keeping a competitive edge going while staying in shape during the off season. By borrowing players from other sports, football and ice hockey players had inevitable influence on basketball as it was played in Price’s time.

Considering 1930s college basketball from a White-Men-Can’t-Jump perspective, it wouldn’t be too far off to say that the game was still developing its own personality. It was far less vertical and much more horizontal. It was a game that had a bit more in common with ice hockey than today’s college game, with plenty of players crashing to the floor after loose balls, resulting in frequent jump ball face-offs.

Meanwhile, Barry had his own special formula for success at Southern Cal. With his Midwestern roots, Barry felt the basketball world revolved around the quality of ball played in the Midwest. He maintained his affiliations with the Iowa and Indiana farm community high schools, well aware of the degree to which basketball had gained a place in the Indiana school athletic programs. Indiana University, Purdue University, and Notre Dame had gotten the cream of these high school players. In the late 1920s, while still at Iowa, Barry had heard of a solid local hero from Martinsville, Indiana, named John Wooden, but made no attempt to coax Wooden out of the state. Instead, in 1928 Wooden went to play for another coaching legend, Piggy Lambert at Purdue and the following year, 1929, Barry left Iowa for USC.

With a winning personality and a love for fancy clothes, Barry fit in very well in the film capital. He began to take advantage of film industry resources in training his players. During the first two weeks of practice, the basketballs were kept locked up in the closet while his minions engaged in ballet classes, rope skipping, and boxing instruction. Barry’s raw material may have been as strong as farm mules, but he was intent on converting these players into graceful athletes that possessed an edge over opponents in balance, coordination, and conditioning.

His team never touched a basketball the first two weeks of practice, remembered Deacon Jones, a freshman at USC in 1937, who later was a starter for the Temple University Owls. They skipped rope and did what today would be called aerobics. He even brought in dance instructors to teach them dancing to improve their footwork. And he was a real ‘Dapper Dan,’ dressed to the nines in the forerunners of Armani suits to Gucci shoes.

Jack Hupp, named to at least one All America team as Southern Cal’s center in 1936, felt that Barry was very methodical. He drilled and drilled us on the fundamentals. He was probably the best coach on the Pacific Coast at that time. He was a gentleman, but at the same time he would get the very best out of you, said Hupp.

Barry’s teams were nationally recognized for this dance training regimen and the healthy infusion of Midwesterners. It is my personal opinion that, year in and year out, the greatest basketball talent comes from the rural communities, right off the farm or from the small high schools, he told the Saturday Evening Post in 1937.2 Barry had always coveted these players because he felt they had a combination of size, strength and stamina to go along with some of the best fundamental basketball training then available to high school players. During the mid-1930s, these Indiana youngsters, all from Depression era farm communities, made up the bulk of the USC squad. Nevertheless, Barry’s three leading players of the era—Lee Guttero, Hupp, and Eddie Oram—all hailed from the Los Angeles area.

As far as varsity basketball competition was concerned, the 1930s Pacific Coast Athletic Conference was divided into two divisions: northern and southern. The southern division consisted of California, Southern California, Stanford, and UCLA. From January to March, these teams played a 12-game schedule in league competition to determine a division champion. The southern division winner would face off against the northern division winner in a best-of-three-game playoff. The site of the playoff series alternated each year between the northern and southern champion’s venue. Even though the system had been functioning since the 1920s, by 1935 it was not making money because the gyms were so small.

With the best-of-three series held at only the one site, the home teams maintained a distinct advantage over the visiting champion. Northern and southern division teams did not officially play each other during the season, so after a long train excursion, the visiting team was usually playing in a strange house before a strange crowd. Estimates put the home team advantage at 10 points simply due to the home court advantage. Lighting and floor surface variances inevitably affected the outcome of games.

Throughout the 1930s, the southern division was known for more physical play than the northern division. Some of the credit for this goes to Price’s influence in getting a few Golden Bear football players to stay in shape during the off-season by playing basketball. Price’s players set the trend for physical play. Barry at Southern Cal felt that time spent waiting for football players to show up and shed their football muscles was time wasted. While not prohibiting football players, he preferred his method of finding wide-body athletes from the Midwest who looked like football players, but were actually dedicated year-round basketball players.

While Barry and Price ruled the south, the trendsetter in the north was Washington’s Edmundson. Edmundson emphasized conditioning to develop stamina, giving his teams the ability to run their competition into the ground. By 1936, the physical game of the south had consistently gotten the better of the speed game of the north, prompting Edmundson to put his most physical team to date on the floor.

In 1935, Barry’s southern division champion Trojans featured two All-Conference players: Guttero and Hupp. Guttero, a senior center, was known as Leapin’ Lee Guttero, or simply Rubberlegs. In a time when each field goal was followed by a jump ball in the center circle of the court to initiate play, having a man who could jump like Guttero was a major advantage. According to Hupp, who had to play against Guttero in practice every day for two years, the handsome, dark-haired son of a Los Angeles baker could touch his elbow on the rim of the basket. At only 6’ 2, Guttero would be considered a marvel in any era. Hupp remembered a time when Guttero had to jump center against a player who was 6’ 9, but the result was always the same. Guttero controlled each and every ball.

Barry, in the 1937 Saturday Evening Post article, wrote that he could never talk about basketball without mentioning Lee ‘Rubberlegs’ Guttero, an Italian youth who loved grand opera and had music in his muscles.3 Barry calculated that in his ability to win the tip-off, Guttero constituted 40 percent of the Trojan offense. The tip-off rule was abandoned in favor of the new throw-in rule in the Pacific Conference southern division in 1935 with the rest of the country following suit two years later. Even without a tip-off play following each basket, Guttero led Southern Cal to the Pacific Coast southern division title during his senior year.

It was this USC team that rode the Cascade Daylight with Barry to Corvallis, Oregon in March 1935 to do battle with Slats Gill and his Oregon State College Beavers, 1935 champions of the northern division. Gill’s Beavers, led by the 6-foot, left-handed junior forward Wally Palmberg, had won the north title by besting Washington, Washington State, Idaho, and the Beaver’s down-state rival the Oregon Ducks led by rookie coach Howard Hobson. While most observers felt that USC had the stronger team, Oregon State (OSC) held the home court advantage. OSC also had the most physical player in the northern division that year: center Earl Conkling, who had a reputation for intimidating low-post players such as Guttero. The teams divided the first two games on Friday and Saturday night. Conkling would gaze up at Guttero soaring above the rim. During the course of the hard-fought series, referees issued stern warnings to both Conkling and Guttero about holding and bumping each other. Finally the Trojans squeaked out the rubber match with a last-second 30-foot set shot by Ernest Holbrook to take the championship.

Hupp remembered a critical moment in that final game when he fumbled the ball and Barry signaled for Jerry Gracin (known as the Mad Hungarian) to replace him. Just as Gracin was about to report at the scorer’s table, Hupp spun around his man and drove in for a lay-up. When Gracin saw the play, he simply returned to the Trojan bench and sat down without a signal from Barry.

To win the Pacific Conference title as the visitor was an accomplishment attesting to the strength and depth of the 1935 USC team. With Guttero graduating, Hupp would have to move over to center for the 1936 season. Gracin, the graceful and dynamic junior forward and team lothario, would have to take over some of the scoring burden. Without doubt, Barry was sorry to see Guttero go, but with the throw-in rule having replaced the center jump rule, he would not feel the loss as acutely as he might have.

Barry, Bunn, Price, and UCLA’s head coach Caddy Works were unanimous in their belief that the new rule, along with the earlier backcourt 10 second rule, would have the most dramatic impact in terms of speeding up the game in the 1930s. The throw-in rule, universally used today, called for the team just scored upon to inbound the ball under the basket they were defending.

Barry went on record saying that the new rule would add four minutes of action to the game. Bunn maintained that the rule would add eight minutes of action. In New York, Long Island University Coach Claire Bee insisted playing under the rule would give players heart failure, and he wanted no part of it.

If Barry seemed to time his support of the new rule with the departure of Guttero, who won virtually every tap, Bunn seemed to have timed his support to meet the arrival of a youngster from the San Francisco high school system, Angelo Luisetti. The new rule would, for the second straight year, be in effect only in games played by the California schools for the 1936 season. The rest of the country, including the northern division, which had not adopted the rule, would play using the center-jump. Under the new rule, the advantage once provided by players such as Guttero would be reduced to the ability to rebound or tip in missed shots. Overnight, the stage had been set for radical change.

One-handed Shot

James Naismith, inventor of basketball, looked up and beheld the exotic, Mediterranean face of Stanford’s most notorious laughing boy, 20-year old Hank Luisetti, who was warmly shaking his hand. It was December 21, 1936, 45 years after Naismith’s historic experiment with a ball and a peach basket. Luisetti and his Stanford University teammates, having just toured the Kansas University campus, were having lunch at a Lawrence hotel with Dr. Naismith (by this time a Kansas University professor emeritus). Still on the first leg of their trip east, the boys carried on lively conversations with one another, hung out with alumni and reporters, and as if the reality of their current basketball mission eastward were not a concern, went merrily about enjoying the holiday season of a lifetime.

In reality, the Stanford team was traveling to New York to play undefeated and apparently unbeatable Long Island University, and had stopped briefly at Lawrence to meet Naismith and Kansas coach Phog Allen. Naismith was completely charmed by the experience. These sun-kissed, gregarious Californians seemed taller, handsomer, and more amiable than any group of young men he had ever met.

Among those in line were the