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Overview
Through in-depth interviews with players, their families, coaches, teammates, and league officials, Ron Thomas tells the largely untold story of what basketball was really like for the first black NBA players, including recent Hall of Fame inductee Earl Lloyd, early superstars such as Maurice Stokes and Bill Russell, and the league's first black coaches. They Cleared the Lane is both informative and entertaining, full of anecdotes and little-known history. Not all the stories have happy endings, but this unfortunate truth only emphasizes how much we have gained from the accomplishments of these pioneer athletes.
Ron Thomas is director of the Morehouse College Journalism and Sports Program.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780803294547 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | UNP - Bison Books |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2004 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
About the Author
Ron Thomas is director of the Morehouse College Journalism and Sports Program.
Read an Excerpt
They Cleared the Lane
The NBA's Black PioneersBy Ron Thomas
University of Nebraska Press
Copyright © 2002 University of Nebraska PressAll right reserved.
Chapter One
One Step at a Time
Earl Lloyd, a middle-aged educator from Detroit, was walking through Detroit Metro Airport in the early 1980s when he spotted a cluster of tall, trim young men, towering over the other travelers at up to seven feet tall. They weren't difficult to identify as a group of pro basketball players, even if one failed to notice the team insignia that adorned their gym bags. There was something else characteristic of the group: most of the young men were black. Their height, color, age, and lanky appearance all added up to distinguish them as a basketball team, and since Lloyd had been a longtime follower of the National Basketball Association (NBA), he recognized many of their faces.
The temptation to gawk, perhaps even the inclination to search for a piece of paper on which an autograph could be scrawled, probably crossed the minds of many of the other people who noticed the players. Not Lloyd's. His thoughts did not turn to adulation. Instead they turned to a forgotten history that few can appreciate with his depth of understanding.
"It's really funny," Lloyd said. "I was walking through an airport one day and here come the Indiana Pacers, all these young black kids. I just spoke to them-'How you doing?'-and they don't have any idea who I am. Not that they necessarily should know."
The man those playersacknowledged with barely more than a nod was the first black athlete to play in an NBA game. Lloyd, who by then was in his fifties, feels no bitterness or resentment that they didn't recognize him. "How would they know who I was?" asked Lloyd, who had a respectable but unspectacular nine-year NBA career. Yet there is an important point to be made: "It's just ironic," Lloyd said, "that here's the past passing by the present and the future and they both know nothing about each other."
Neither those Indiana Pacers nor most sports followers understand that the door to integrating the NBA wasn't burst open by a flood of black players. Instead it was nudged open, inch by inch, by a trickle of players throughout the first twenty years of the league's existence.
That trickle began on October 31, Halloween night, 1950, in Rochester, New York, when six-foot-six Earl Lloyd played his first NBA game. It was, to his recollection, an uneventful evening in terms of what occurred immediately before, during, and after the forty-eight minutes of play between Lloyd's Washington Capitols and the Rochester Royals. Lloyd was listed as a guard in that game, his pro debut, and he played a commendable though not starring role by scoring six points and grabbing a game-high ten rebounds in Rochester's 78.70 victory.
The Northeast had long seen a smattering of black college and professional players, and Lloyd's appearance attracted so little attention the Rochester Democrat & Chronicle reporter George Beahon didn't even mention him in the game story. Beahon did mention Lloyd in a second story about a press conference held earlier that day, but the reference amounted to only the following: "The Caps, incidentally, launch their home campaign tonight against the Indianapolis Olympians. Among other rookies, [coach Bones] McKinney has Earl Lloyd, rugged Negro guard, who appears to be a 'find.' He was a draft choice from West Virginia State."
The Rochester Times-Union's Al C. Weber noted only that after Rochester took a 43.29 halftime lead, "Bones McKinney, the Caps' new coach, injected big Earl Lloyd, Negro star of West Virginia State into the lineup and he took most of the rebounds."
Yet Lloyd knows that those forty-eight minutes dramatically changed the face of the NBA, and eventually pro basketball worldwide, forever. When Lloyd stepped onto the court that Halloween night he ended the four-year period of what could be called the original WNBA-the White National Basketball Association. He took the league to a higher level merely by adding brown to its all-white palette of skin color.
The next evening Chuck Cooper, the former Duquesne University star forward who six months earlier had become the first black player drafted by the NBA, debuted with the Boston Celtics in their season opener in Fort Wayne, Indiana. It was a momentous day in Celtics history and not just because Cooper's presence foretold the arrival of future black Boston Hall of Famers Bill Russell, K. C. Jones, and Sam Jones. It also was a turning point for the franchise because head coach Red Auerbach, ball handling phenomenon Bob Cousy, and high-scoring center "Easy" Ed Macauley participated in their first games as Celtics as well. Over the next twenty years they were directly and indirectly responsible for winning eleven of the Celtics championship banners that hang from the rafters of the FleetCenter in Boston.
On November 4 in a game against the Tri-Cities Blackhawks, Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton took the court for the first time as the New York Knickerbockers' new six-foot-eight center. On May 24 of that year (1950) he had become the first black player with star quality to sign with an NBA team as a result of his previous exploits as a member of the famed black touring basketball teams, the New York Renaissance and the Harlem Globetrotters.
In midseason, on December 3 Hank DeZonie, another former member of the Rens and the Globetrotters, completed the foursome of black NBA groundbreakers when he played for Tri-Cities, a franchise from Davenport, Iowa, and Moline and Rock Island, Illinois. DeZonie's NBA career lasted only five games before he quit in disgust over the off-court racial discrimination he faced. Yet in those pioneering days just getting into five games was beyond what nearly every other black player would achieve.
Fifty years ago the debuts of those four players left a barely perceptible imprint on the NBA, the sports press, and America's sports fans. Clifton and Cooper were valuable but unspectacular additions to their teams. Lloyd played only seven games before he was drafted again-this time by the U.S. Army-to serve during the Korean War. DeZonie collected Tri-Cities paychecks for less than a month.
Besides, Jackie Robinson had initiated the big integration splash-actually an integration tidal wave-when he broke major league baseball's blatant color barrier in 1947. Compared to Robinson the NBA's pioneers didn't cause even a mild ripple on the calmest of lakes, or so it seemed. But the result a half-century later was an astounding change: a league in which by the year 2000 about 80 percent of the players and 90 percent of the stars are black; a twenty-nine-team NBA with franchises in the United States and Canada and thirty-seven players from twenty-five countries outside the United States; a financial bonanza that from 1976 to 2000 saw the players' salaries soar from an average of $130,000 to $3.2 million, the highest among all professional athletes in America; a television attraction that first paid the league $39,000 from the Dumont Television Network for a thirteen-game schedule in 1953-54 but most recently coaxed $2.64 billion out of NBC and the TNT-TBS cable networks for four seasons ending in 2002; and worldwide exposure in which the 2000 All-Star Game was televised in 205 countries in forty-two languages, reaching a global audience of 750 million households.
Lloyd, Cooper, Clifton, and DeZonie, and the sprinkling of other black players who followed them until Bill Russell became the first black NBA head coach in 1966, can proudly point to an exemplary lineage. But they were only the midway point of the play-for-pay black player story, which dates all the way back to Harry "Bucky" Lew in 1902. William Himmelman's comprehensive research found that seventy-three black players participated in predominantly white professional basketball leagues before 1950, including those who played in the Chicago tournament that crowned basketball's acknowledged World Championship team from 1939 to 1948.
"It's a very impressive, long list," said Himmelman of Nostalgia Sports Research, "and having talked to many in the past, I know how proud they were of it and how upset they were that everyone looks at Cooper and Lloyd as the Jackie Robinsons. They were more the Pumpsie Greens, who was the last of the major league baseball players to integrate a team."
It all began with Bucky Lew, whose account of his first game with his hometown Lowell, Massachusetts, team, the Pawtucketville Athletic Club in the New England Basketball League, was described in a newspaper article by Gerry Finn that appeared in the Springfield [Massachusetts] Union on April 2, 1958. A team representing the town of Marlborough was the opponent when that game was played on November 7, 1902 and Lew was a mere eighteen years old.
"I can almost see the faces of those Marlborough players when I got into that game," said Lew, who was seventy-four when the article was published. "Our Lowell team had been getting players from New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and some of the local papers put the pressure on by demanding that they give this little Negro from around the corner a chance to play. Well, at first the team just ignored the publicity. But a series of injuries forced the manager to take me on for the Marlborough game. I made the sixth player that night and he said all I had to do was sit on the bench for my five bucks pay. There was no such thing as fouling out in those days so he figured he'd be safe all around.
"It just so happens that one of the Lowell players got himself injured and had to leave the game. At first this manager refused to put me in. He let them play us five on four but the fans got real mad and almost started a riot, screaming to let me play. That did it. I went in there and you know ... all those things you read about Jackie Robinson, the abuse, the name-calling, extra effort to put him down ... they're all true. I got the same treatment and even worse. Basketball was a rough game then. I took the bumps, the elbows in the gut, knees here and everything else that went with it. But I gave it right back. It was rough but worth it. Once they knew I could take it, I had it made. Some of those same boys who gave the hardest licks turned out to be among my best friends in the years that followed."
Finn wrote that five-foot-eight Lew, who previously had played ball at the Lowell YMCA, completed the season with the Lowell team, then played two years for Haverhill, where he gained a reputation for defense and hitting long-range set shots. Doing the latter was quite a challenge, for the style of basketball that Lew described was antiquated compared to today's game. For instance, there were no bank shots because there was nothing to bank a shot on.
"The finest players in the country were in that league just before it disbanded and I always wound up playing our opponent's best shooter," Lew said. "I like to throw from outside but wasn't much around the basket.
"Of course, we had no backboards in those days and everything had to go in clean. Naturally, there was no rebounding and after a shot there was a brawl to get the ball. There were no out-of-bounds markers. We had a fence around the court with nets hanging from the ceilings. The ball was always in play and you were guarded from the moment you touched it. Hardly had time to breathe, let alone think about what you were going to do with the ball."
Especially if Lew was guarding you. Himmelman, an expert on the first fifty years of pro basketball, said that during Lew's era the forwards were a team's principal scorers. Centers were needed mostly to rebound and take the center jump after every basket, while two other players specialized in "guarding" the opponent's forwards (which is how the position came to be named "guard"). "Generally the teams would groom people to be defensive specialists, and that's what Bucky Lew was," Himmelman said. "They weren't asked to score; they were just asked to shut down opposing forwards. And he was one of the best at that. He was one of the best ten defensive players of that first era, but not one of the best overall players." That distinction was reserved for high scorers such as Ed Wachter, Harry Hough, and Joe Fogerty.
The New England League changed its name to the New England Association and disbanded after the 1905 season. For the next twenty years Lew barnstormed around New England with teams he organized, and in 1926 when he played his final game in St. John's, Vermont, he was forty-two years old.
The majority of pro basketball leagues were located in Massachusetts, New York, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Camden, New Jersey. Most of them played their games after players got off from their daytime jobs and travel was difficult then so teams didn't venture far or often from their homebases. Teams would travel into other areas for a week or two each year, especially if another team had a well-known player. When teams traveled to Massachusetts and played Lew's team, a strange but typical form of racism often occurred. "Teams would go up and play there and nobody ever voiced an objection to playing against him as a black player until they played him and he would shut down their best player," Himmelman said. "Then all of a sudden, they would say we don't want to play against a Negro player. They just used that tactic to get him off the court for the next game. It was like using race as a scapegoat-type excuse."
Between the time of Bucky Lew's first game and 1950, a smattering of black players participated in predominantly white pro leagues. In 1907 Frank "Ditto" Wilson played with the Fort Plain, New York, team in the minor Mohawk Valley League, and in 1935 Hank Williams played center for the Buffalo Bisons in the Midwest Basketball Conference's first season.
The pace of integration was agonizingly slow, however, and few black players had the opportunity to earn a living from pro basketball until Bob Douglas, a resident of New York City who had emigrated from the British West Indies in about 1902, founded the New York Renaissance traveling pro basketball team-the Renaissance Big Five-in 1923. Three years later Abe Saperstein organized the Harlem Globetrotters, another all-black traveling team. For the next three decades one of those two teams was the primary route to a pro basketball career for black players. But the route was extremely narrow because the Rens and Globetrotters carried only about eight players apiece. "The only way blacks had to go, so the ballplayers were tremendous at that time-the sixteen best in the country," said John Isaacs, who played on the Rens from 1936 to 1940 and in the 1942-43 season.
In 1963 the Rens were named to the Basketball Hall of Fame as a team. Only their archrivals, the Original Celtics, and the Buffalo Germans received the same honor. The Rens' selection was well-deserved, for despite traveling and playing throughout America when the harsh effect of segregation was common and often legal, they compiled a 2,318-381 record before the team folded in 1949.
The Rens were named after the Renaissance Casino Ballroom in Harlem, where they played their first game on November 3, 1923, a 28-22 victory over a white team called the Collegiate Five. The ballroom was owned by William Roach, who allowed the dance floor to double as a basketball court to accommodate Douglas's team. It was far from an ideal site for basketball, preceding the era of the beautiful, tailor-made arenas of today's game.
"It was rectangular, but more box-like," said former Rens star Pop Gates, arguably the best player of his day. "They set up a basketball post on each end of the floor. The floor was very slippery and they outlined the sidelines and foul lines. It wasn't a big floor. It was far from being a regular basketball floor. Other than high schools or armories, they had very few places to play at, except the Negro college. It was a well-decorated area-chandeliers, a bandstand. All the big [dance bands] played the Renaissance-Fatha Hines, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, Chick Webb's band. They had the dancing before the ball game. People would pay and [dance] prior to the game, at halftime, and after the game."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from They Cleared the Lane by Ron Thomas Copyright © 2002 by University of Nebraska Press. Excerpted by permission.
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