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Jewish World Review June 21, 2001 / 30 Sivan, 5761
http://www.jewishworldreview.com --
THE red-hot Philly basketball team has a pint-sized but flashy star
shooter and an old-school coach who’s more teacher than tough
disciplinarian. The media constantly compares the team to the biblical
David. Sounds a lot like the Philadelphia 76ers, who took on the L.A. Lakers in this year’s NBA finals?
Nope. It’s the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association team, the SPHAs
(pronounced "spas"), which dominated the sport in the 1920s and ’30s.
The flashy shooter is set-shot expert Inky Lautman and the savvy coach
is Eddie Gottlieb, who was also the owner of one of the most successful
teams in basketball history.
And David is the six-pointed star on the team’s jerseys.
Today, the only thing Jewish about the current Sixer team is coach Larry
Brown, who starred on the U.S. gold-medal team at the Maccabiah
Games in Israel in 1961 before launching his pro career. Brown was born
in Brooklyn, that "other" Jewish basketball town. But there are plenty of
parallels between the Hebrews, as the SPHAs were nicknamed, and
today’s Sixers.
Both were subject to sometimes egregious racial stereotyping.
The two newest showmen of modern basketball, Allen Iverson and Kobe
Bryant, are praised for their "athleticism" and "natural talents." Is that a
stereotype that downplays their other abilities?
Such stereotypes reflect a long tradition that goes back more than 70
years, when the game emerged from the ghettos of Philadelphia, New
York and Baltimore. Back then sportswriters used to wax about the
gaudy skills of "natural athletes." Then 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 in the 1930s, "is that the game places a premium on an alert,
scheming mind, flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smart
aleckness."
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," says 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 were more popular than both of Philadelphia’s
baseball teams, the Athletics and the Phillies.
"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.
The first intercollegiate game in the East, a 6-4 shellacking of Temple by
Haverford College, took place at the Temple gymnasium in March 1894.
Basketball had a notorious reputation back then. The rules provided for
few fouls, making the game a barely controlled melee. 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.
The best high-school graduates went on to play for one of the church
teams, until anti-Semitism heated up. In 1918, Gottlieb and some of his
former high school buddies convinced the Young Men’s Hebrew
Association to buy them uniforms, which featured as team symbols the
Magen David and the Hebrew letters samech, pey, hey and aleph to spell
"SPHA."
The SPHAs’ success attracted up-and-coming stars from Jewish ghettos
along the East Coast. But with the emergence of National Socialism in
Germany and an escalation of anti-Semitism in the United States,
basketball was sometimes a brutal experience. In the small towns in
which they played, Jewish players faced incessant racial slurs and biased
officials.
"The toughest place was Prospect Hall, the home of the Brooklyn
Visitation," Gottlieb said. "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."
At the height of their success, the SPHAs were one of the best teams in
the country, sweeping their league games and challenging teams in other
cities. By this time, the game had spread westward to Cleveland and
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
Renaissance, the premier black team.
The black players were not allowed to play in the all-white semipro
leagues that started up and failed numerous times during this era. The
encounters between the "Yids" and the "Niggers" were legendary.
According to William "Pop" Gates, the star of the Renaissance, 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. The depleted SPHAs eventually morphed
into the Philadelphia Warriors, owned by the same Eddie Gottlieb ("The
Mogul"), who coached the first champions of what became the National
Basketball Association. Gottlieb, who died in 1979, eventually sold the
team to San Francisco interests in 1962 and became the NBA’s official
schedule-maker.
The remnants of Philadelphia’s basketball tradition rest on the shoulders
of coach Brown, an adopted favorite son. Much to the delight of the
celebrity-starved NBA, Brown and Iverson have emerged as the Batman
and Robin of modern basketball, an unlikely blend of old-world tradition
and hip-hop yet hardscrabble dedication.
And while this year's NBA series has ended, watch for the Sixers, cast as David against Goliath throughout the playoffs, to be back next year for a
Hoop Dream Hebrews
By Jon Entine
Jon Entine
