'The New York Massacre,' by Ari Sclar

Despite the reemergence of Holman’s CCNY teams in 1946 and 1947, New York basketball, and its connection to Jewish basketball, seemed to have suffered in the post-war era.  The New York and Jewish presence in the NIT declined during and immediately following the war.  Three New York City teams played in the NIT in 1943 and two teams played in 1947, but only one city school appeared in 1944, 1945, 1946, and 1948.  The declining number of schools inevitably impacted the success of New York and Jewish basketball.  Between 1945-1948, no New York school won the NIT, and only one school, NYU in 1948, even reached the championship game.[1]  In 1949, the NIT expanded its field to 12 teams in order to include more city schools.  The result brought the entire culture of New York and Jewish basketball into question.

In 1949, four New York teams received invitations to the NIT because tournament officials did not want to decide between them for the eighth, and final, spot.  New York sportswriters had argued prior to the tournament that “New York rated no representative in the tourney,” and the result seemed to prove that “none of the local quintets justified its presence on the court.”  All four New York teams, CCNY, NYU, St. John’s, and Manhattan, lost in the first round, which led the New York Times to state that, “some fans are calling it the ‘New York Massacre.’”[2]  The ‘massacre’ led commentators to conclude that New York basketball had fallen to previously unseen depths.  Louis Effrat of the New York Times blamed a peculiarity of New York basketball for local schools’ failure.  The losses “proved that what New York needs, possibly even more than a good ten-cent cigar, are good big men on its college quintets.  Whereas, invariably, visiting teams move in with elongated talent, the locals have to play with comparatively small athletes.”[3]

Much like the condemnation of the ‘Metropolitan player’ after the Stanford-LIU game in 1936, negative values were attached to the New York player.  The belief that the ‘Metropolitan’ player could not compete with taller, more athletic players had been proven unequivocally false during the late 1930s and 1940s.  The ‘massacre’ appeared to concretely illustrate that the city’s short, speedy player no longer had a place in college basketball.  Effrat did not explicitly connect the ‘small’ New York player to the ‘Jew,’ but New York basketball had long been associated with Jewish basketball and Effrat’s ‘small’ athletes conformed to the continued perception of Jewish players.  Yet, the following season, CCNY’s recovered from the ‘massacre’ in a manner which indicated that even Nat Holman had determined the basketball Jew could no longer succeed.  As Holman put together the greatest team in school history, he did so with players that bore little physical resemblance to the traditional CCNY player. 

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[1] Douchant, Inside College Basketball.

[2] “Afternoon, Night Twin Bills Today on Invitation Court Tourney Slate,” New York Times, March 14, 1949.

[3] Louis Effrat, “Loyola Conquers City College Five in Garden 62 to 47,” New York Times, March 13, 1949.