“Basketball Jews” served as the final commentary on Jewish
basketball in the 1920s and within the ABL.
The Celtics broke up in 1928, which led to a declining interest
in the league. After the Celtics
disbanded, Nat Holman and Davey Banks played with the New York Hakoahs (Hakoah
is Hebrew for ‘strength’), but the ABL disbanded in 1931 due to financial
troubles intensified by the Depression.
The league’s ‘national’ model had failed to subdue
the provincial and local nature of traditional basketball. In 1933, promoters established a reformatted
and ‘regional’ ABL in the northeast.[1]
Within the
regional ABL, the Philadelphia Sphas returned to their all-Jewish origins and
became one of the best teams in professional basketball. They won seven ABL championships in a
thirteen year period, barnstormed in the off-season, and frequently played
non-league opponents during the season. The
team wore Hebrew letters on their uniforms and the mainstream press sometimes
mentioned the team’s Jewishness. More
often, sportswriter stated that the Sphas, “don’t need much introduction to
basket ball fans.”[2] Yet, the Sphas’ success and entrepreneurial
spirit received very little mention in annuals or nationally syndicated columns
in the Jewish press due to the regional ABL’s ‘minor’ status among professional
sport leagues.[3]
During the
interwar period, other professional basketball leagues existed in the
northeast, but the ABL’s semi-professional and often local nature maintained
the permeable boundaries between Jewish participation and spectatorship that
had encouraged the development of Jewish basketball. Young players lived in the same neighborhoods
as professional players, most of whom had other jobs even during the
season. Former professional stars such
as Barney Sedran coached in the ABL and an entire generation of Jewish players
made a relatively seamless transition from the streets to the professional
game. In the mid-1930s, Jews made up
almost fifty percent of the league, but their meager ‘salaries,’ often only
$30-40 per game, illustrated that players happily entered professional
basketball to continue playing a game they loved, not to achieve financial
stability. Jewish writers did not
celebrate any single player as they had Nat Holman during the 1920s, and unlike
Holman, Jewish professionals competed in relative anonymity in a marginal
sport.[4] Jewish players would have an even greater
impact on mainstream basketball in the 1930s, but only after college basketball
surpassed the professional game in its popularity as a national sport.
[1] On
the ABL’s rise and fall, see Peterson, Cages to Jump Shots, 84-94; Applin, “From Muscular
Christianity to the Marketplace,” 199-205. According to Albert Applin, there were actually two ‘ABL’s’,
the first disbanding in 1928 due to financial difficulties directly related to
the Celtics. Their dominance of the
competition removed spectator interest in other cities. The ‘first’ ABL folded in November 1928 and
the ‘second’ reformed immediately with some of the old ABL teams as well as teams
from the Metropolitan Basketball League.
[2] “Philadelphia SPHA Cagers Tackle Heurich Brewers Today,” Washington February 17, 1935 .
On the Sphas’ success in the ABL, see Peterson, Cages to Jump Shots, 120-123.
[3]
The author examined annuals in the American
Hebrew from 1920-1945, as well as syndicated annuals published in the American
Jewish World, 1920-1939. As a ‘minor’ sport in the 1930s and early 1940s,
professional basketball remained on the back pages of sports pages across the
country. Like some other ‘minor’ sports
of the era (such as soccer), professional basketball had not attained a level
of popularity from which it could withstand a massive economic downturn.
[4]
Levine, Ellis Island to Ebbets Field,
65-67. Levine estimated that in 1938, 45
of 91 players in the ABL were Jewish. Among the New York
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