Jewish basketball's impact on college basketball - part 1

Jewishbasketball helped produce the “rise” of college basketball.  During the 1930s, Jewish players turned CCNY, NYU, St. John’s, and Long Island University (LIU) into nationally-known programs.  A significant Jewish presence existed at the Garden as players with names such as Goldman, Klein, Rubenstein, Pincus, and Rosen headlined the double-headers.  The mainstream press rarely commented directly on the Jewish presence in New York basketball, although Newsweek declared in December 1935 that basketball was “a sport at which Jews excel.” Newsweek did not attach any explicit meaning to this statement, but it served as a powerful piece of information and a potential source of pride for American Jews.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, New York became increasingly important to Jewishbasketball.  In particular, Jews began to play at St. John’s, a Catholic school, in addition to their continued presence at NYU and CCNY.  In 1928, a column in Minneapolis’s American Jewish World provided a fairly detailed account of Jewish basketball and commented on a loss by CCNY’s “all-Jewish team” to St. John’s, “a Catholic college, [that] had three Jews on its team.”  The column did not include the score (33-24), but stated that the three St. John’s players had “accounted for fifteen of the [team’s] points.”  The AJW also contextualized the game by explaining it was “the first big basketball game of the season between two first class teams” largely unknown outside of New York.

This St. John’s team, which would become the focus of the 1931 scandal, represented the growth of Jewish basketball within New York City’s basketball culture.  The AJW actually undercounted the number of Jews on the St. John’s team.  Nicknamed the ‘Wonder Five,’ the team consisted of four Jewish starters, the fifth being Polish, from the New York area.  The victory over CCNY occurred at the start of a remarkable three year run in which the team compiled a 67-4 record against both powerful programs like CCNY and ‘minor’ teams like the Albany Law School.  Prior to the 1931 scandal, New York sportswriters hailed them as the greatest college team ever.  Despite such praise, however, the Wonder Five’s prominence remained a local affair, even as the mainstream press began to play a pivotal role in promoting New York college basketball.

In the late 1920s, the New York press increased its coverage of the sport.  Sportswriters and coaches named annual All-Metropolitan teams that unofficially rewarded the best players in the city.  Often the only contact between teams and fans, sportswriters constructed a historical narrative of city basketball in which participants challenged legends and continued traditions.  Writers included pre-season forecasts, statistical analysis, and individual scoring totals alongside box scores, critical columns, and detailed descriptions of games.  Columnists debated strategies, coaching acumen, and players’ abilities.  Box scores and description of games provided information to readers about schools that played before relatively small crowds.  For instance, only 1,300 people attended the 1928 St. John’s-CCNY game.

The Depression provided the foundation for the remarkable growth of New York college basketball.  The economic downturn had a negative impact on most sports by 1931.  Baseball attendance declined, professional leagues such as the ABL and the American Soccer League (ASL) shut down, and college football teams often had difficulty filling the large stadiums built during the architectural boom of the 1920s. In contrast, the Wonder Five headlined a triple-header fundraiser for the city’s unemployment relief fund.  In January 1931, 15,000 spectators filled Madison Square Garden for a ‘Carnival’ that raised over $20,000.  Similar events occurred the following two years, which illustrated that basketball fans wanted first-hand exposure to local teams like the ‘Wonder Five.’