Synopses & Reviews
Chapter OneThe Beginnings to 1918The Springfleld YMCA
The game of basketball had to be invented sooner or later. In the late 1800s the nation's athletic calendar was filled in three of the four seasons: baseball in the summer; football in the fall; and track and field in spring. A winter game was needed to keep the competitive juices flowing, and basketball was the answer.
James Naismith, a Canadian YMCA training instructor in Springfield, Massachusetts, hit upon the idea in 1891 of tossing a soccer-size ball through an elevated opening. He asked a janitor, so the story goes, for some containers that he could affix to the wall. The workman replied with peach baskets -- with the bottoms intact. Soon the bottoms were removed and the baskets refined, and the sport was on its way. No indoor game ever caught on as fast, and the YMCA spread its virtues the world over.
Naismith's fellow instructors did not like his invention because too few peoplecould play. The initial scoring system called for three points for a basket and three points for a free throw. In just five years it was changed to two points for a basket and one point for a free throw. This did not change until the introduction of the three-point basket in the 1980s. In 1897 the team size was set at five, and that too has remained. This simplicity was central to the sports early appeal.
The influential "New York Times "on May 7, 1894, merely echoed the obvious in reporting that "Basketball is about the youngest of the athletic games, but it has gained great popularity... played with more enthusiasm than any other sport in the gymnasiums in this city." Girls played, too, according to a special set of rules formulated by SendaBerenson of Smith College. Other schools and clubs quickly added it to their roster of activities.
As with the other sports, it was not long -- 1896 -- before the first professional game was played at the Masonic Temple in Trenton, New Jersey. The professional National Basketball League (NBL) was formed in 1898. In 1897 the Amateur Athletic Union began competitions, and the final seal of approval came with an introduction at the 1904 Olympic Games. This first Olympic event was won by a team composed almost entirely of members of the Buffalo (New York) German YMCA.First Black Participation
Black players began with the YMCAs and schools of the Ivy League. YMCA College Student Associations at Clafflin, Straight, Tougaloo, Spelman, Alabama A&M, and Howard Universities introduced the game, and other Colored YMCAs with gymnasiums embraced it wholeheartedly. YMCAs and YWCAs formed the first black teams and continued to be the focal point for a decade until clubs offered stronger competition.
One gentleman who helped bridge the decade 1895-1905 was Edwin B. Henderson. He attended Harvard University as this century began and returned to his native Washington, D.C., to organize local teams in the public school system. He immediately included it in his Interscholastic Athletic Association (ISAA) program formed in 1905. At the same time the first club team was organized in Brooklyn, New York, calling themselves the Smart Set Club. They built their athletic programs around basketball and track. Within a year the St. Christopher Athletic Club and the Marathone Athletic Club joined Smart Set in forming the Olympian Athletic League (OAL), which became the first black club league outside the YMCAfamily
In 1907 Smart Set won the first OAL title with the following members: Charles Scrotton, Chester Moore, Robert Lattimore, Robert Barnard, Harry Brown, Alfred Groves, George Trice, and manager George Lattimore. One year later, the OAL added the Alpha Physical Culture Club, the St. Cyprian Athletic Club, and the Jersey City YMCA to its membership. In spite of its distinct northeastern location, the OAL was a solid beginning for a sport eventually dominated by black players.
Similar clubs formed in the Washington, D.C., vicinity with Henderson's assistance, and interregional competition began on December 18, 1908, when that city's Crescent Athletic Club lost to Smart Set in "the first athletic contest between colored athletes of New York and Washington."' The success of this game was not lost on the segregated black public schools in Washington, D.C., and other cities.
Schools and clubs in Baltimore, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Wilmington (Delaware), and northern New Jersey soon had clubs of players. Philadelphia was a special case as its schools were integrated. As Henderson noted, their "colored athletes are thrown into competition with the whites."' Its clubs, however, were segregated. The Wissahickon School Club and the Stentonworth Athletic Club were the first black groups to form in that city.
With the exception of St. Louis and towns where black colleges were positioned, the sport in southern black communities was almost nonexistent before 1910. Warm weather the year round lessened the impetus for a winter game. There were no gymnasiums, equipment was poor, coaching was out of an A. G. Spaulding manual. The YMCAs had too few indoor facilities. Yet the YMCAs' outdoor playareas offered the only hope for a time.
The best YMCA squad was the Twelfth Street Branch in Washington, D.C., which was so good that when Howard University began varsity play in 1911, it inherited the YMCA team almost intact. Its members were Lewis S. Johnson, Hudson J. Oliver, Arthur L. Curtis, Henry I Nixon, J. L. Chestnut, Robert Anderson, Maurice Clifford, Edward B. Gray, and Edwin B. Henderson. They were undefeated in 1909-10 and had wins over school and club teams from Washington, D.C., to New York City. At Brooklyn's Manhattan Casino in 1910 they defeated Smart Set before 3,000 fans. In Alabama, Tuskegee's first game was also against a YMCA team from Columbus, Georgia, in 1908, which they crushed 33-0.
These YMCA teams remained central to the success of basketball among blacks. School attendance was not required for blacks in the south, and only a small minority of those between 15 and 20 years of age attended...
Synopsis
The story of the African-American athlete in basketball is one of omission to domination -- at least on the court. Ashe traces this development from the club players of the 1920s to the colleges -- including the achievements of athletes in the traditional black colleges -- and on the professional basketball players of today. The text and reference materials for this book were taken from the three-volume set,A Hard Road to Glory,and combined into this single volume.
About the Author
Arthur Ashe was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1943, and died in New York City on February 6, 1993. In his twenty-year tennis career Ashe won some of the most coveted singles championship games; Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, and the World Cup Team Finals. He was a member of the U.S. Davis Cup Team from 1963 to 1970, and in 1975, 1976, and 1978; as its captain, he led the team to victories in 1981 and 1982. He was a member of the U.S. World Cup Team from 1970 to 1976, and in 1979.
On April 16, 1980, after quadruple bypass surgury, Arthur Ashe retired from professional tennis. He became National Campaign Chairman for the American Heart Association and the only nonmedical member of the National Heart, Lung and Blood Advisory Council.
He contracted the HIV virus from a blood transfusion after a second bypass operation in 1983. Upon discovering this, Ashe exhibited his perennial quality of action without acrimony and founded the Arthur Ashe Foundation for the Defeat of AIDS, He succumbed to the disease in February 1993.
Ashe was married to professional photographer Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, the author of Viewifnders: Black Women Photographers. They lived in New York City with their daughter, Camera.