CCNY makes history in 1950, by Ari Sclar

In 1950, the CCNY team included a class of sophomores that sportswriters considered the best recruiting class in school history.  Jewish starters, 6’3” sophomore guard Al ‘Fats’ Roth, 6’6” sophomore center Ed Roman, and 6’4” senior forward Irwin Dambrot played alongside two African-American starters, sophomores 6’3” guard Floyd Layne and 6’4” forward Ed Warner.  Basketball historian Neil Isaacs described the team as “taller than a typical Holman squad and more versatile.”  The team played well early in the year, rose to a No. 7 ranking in the Associated Press (AP) poll, and finished the season with a record of 17-5.  The team went undefeated against Metropolitan opponents and earned an invitation to the NIT.[1]  Many believed the team would again lose in the first round.  Instead, over an 18 day span, CCNY achieved one of the greatest feats in college basketball history.

On March 12, 1950, CCNY defeated San Francisco, the twelfth ranked team in the country, in the first round of the NIT.  The team then triumphed over the two-time defending NCAA champion, No. 3 Kentucky by a score of 89-50.  CCNY defeated No. 6 Duquesne in the semifinals before beating No. 1 Bradley in the championship game.  CCNY then played in the NCAA tournament, which began four days after the NIT final.  CCNY proceeded to defeat No. 2 Ohio State and No. 5 North Carolina State to set up a rematch with Bradley in the final.  The game began with Holman absent due to a 103 degree temperature and became a thrilling affair that came down to the final seconds.  With a one point lead, CCNY’s ‘super sub’ Norm Mager stole the ball from Bradley’s star Gene Melchiorre and scored a final basket to complete CCNY’s 71-68 victory.[2]

CCNY became the only school in basketball history to win both the NIT and NCAA tournaments in the same season, considered the ‘Grand Slam.’  After winning both tournaments, the school cancelled classes and parades honored the team.  Sport magazine named Holman its “Man of the Year.”  According to historian Edward Shapiro, Holman also “received invitations to speak at Congregation Rodeph Shalom and the Ramaz School, an Orthodox day school” in Manhattan.  New York newspapers hailed the coach and the players, who the New York Herald Tribune called “our boys.”  When asked about his players’ “exceptional gifts,” however, Holman downplayed their talent and “insisted that the 14 players – all of them products of a teeming city’s public schools – were essentially ‘just a group of intelligent boys in excellent physical condition.’”[3]

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[1] Isaacs, All the Moves, 95.

[2] On the CCNY championships, see Isaacs, All the Moves, 97-100; Bjarkman, Hoopla, 63-68; Stanley Cohen, The Game They Played (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1977).  Many believed Mechiorre was fouled, which was not called because the game was held in New York City.

[3] See Edward Shapiro, “The Shame of the City: CCNY Basketball, 1950-51,” in Kugelmass, Jews, Sports, and the Rites of Citizenship,  181-183. “Basketball: Bradley Weardown,” Newsweek, April 10, 1950.  Levine, Ellis Island to Ebbet’s Field, 78-81.  In the early twentieth century, it became common to hail the coaches for their ability to turn players, including those not considered athletics, into winning teams.  See Overman, The Influence of the Protestant Ethic on Sport and Recreation, 166-169.

'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.

CCNY locked out from 1946 tournaments

In 1946, CCNY returned to their previous level of success and entered its final regular season game with a record of 13-4.  Few sportswriters or fans gave CCNY a chance against the No. 1 ranked NYU team, which had a record of 18-1 and had won 13 consecutive games.  The build-up to the game reminded many writers of the 1934 CCNY-NYU game and “fans started camping out in front of the ticket booths” four hours before tickets went on sale at 9:00am.  The ticket demand led to nine arrests for “ticket speculation” and the temporary suspension of ticket sales at 9:20am because the “line had become so long and so out of hand.”  Eventually, “ten mounted policemen and a detail of foot police restored order.”  By 3pm, “16,000 tickets” had been sold.[1]

In a surprising upset, CCNY defeated NYU by a score of 49-44 and set off a wave of celebration.  According to the New York Times, “within fifteen minutes after the game ended, a band of about 1,000 C.C.N.Y. rooters massed near the Garden” and paraded through the streets with “a ‘casket’ painted in black and covered with NYU pennants and lettering.”  When the “marchers” reached Broadway, they “started a huge snake dance which caused a traffic tie-up and created an uproar as motorists sounded their horns in an effort to break through.”  The parade entered Times Square and “then headed for the Hudson [River] to dispose of the casket.”[2]

The intense celebration reflected the belief among CCNY students and fans that the victory would result in an invitation to the NIT.  Considering the school’s absence from post-season tournaments since 1942, many hoped this would revitalize the basketball program.  Yet, the day after CCNY’s victory, the NIT announced that Rhode Island State and not City College would be the tournament’s final entrant.  Students, furious with the decision, “assailed the tournament committee for what they termed publicity ‘exploitation’ in creating the impression that City would receive a berth if it defeated N.Y.U.”[3]  Students condemned Garden promoters and NIT officials for using the promise of a tournament berth to increase fan interest, and thus profit, in the CCNY-NYU contest.  Letters of protest to Ned Irish stated that the tournament committee should have named Rhode Island State before the game.  The ticket demand for the game, the celebration following the CCNY victory, and the angry response to the team’s exclusion from the tournament indicated the popularity of CCNY within New York basketball and the intense passions involved in college basketball at Madison Square Garden.

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[1] “Basketball Fans Stage Ticket Rush.” New York Times, March 6, 1946.

[2] “Times Square Parade Marks C.C.N.Y. Victory,” New York Times, March 8, 1946.

[3] “C.C.N.Y. Protests Choice of R.I. State,” New York Times, March 9, 1946.

CCNY, representing 'Jewish' basketball, by Ari Sclar

During the 1946 season, Jewish players had considerable success in New York college basketball.  Jews made up six of the top eight scorers in the Metropolitan district, and seven of the ten players named All-Metropolitan.  They also remained well represented at the predominantly ‘Jewish’ schools of CCNY, NYU, LIU, and St. John’s, although not as extensively as the previous decade.  CCNY and NYU each had four Jewish starters at different times during the season, St. John’s had three starters, and LIU had two Jewish starters as well as 5’8” Jackie Goldsmith, who came off the bench to lead the Metropolitan district in scoring.[1]  These teams continued to headline the double-headers at Madison Square Garden and receive attention from the national press.  Yet, CCNY, the school that continued to represent Jewish basketball in the minds of American Jews, had minimal success as the basketball culture changed between 1938 and 1945.

In the 1930s, Nat Holman served as the ‘face’ of both New York and Jewish basketball.  His professional experience led the mainstream press to praise his ‘scientific’ coaching and his authorship of books such as Scientific Basketball (1922) and Winning Basketball (1932) solidified his reputation as a basketball expert and led to commercial and promotional opportunities.  As early as 1936, he had a ten-minute radio program on WNYC and in 1934, Time explained his unique place in college basketball: “in his spare time, he studies sculpture.”[2]  Historian Peter Levine illustrated that the Jewish press often portrayed Holman as a link between the immigrant past and the native-born future.  He served as the sole representative of basketball in the 1938-39 edition of Who’s Who in American Jewry.[3]

Holman could not have represented Jewish basketball by himself.  The preponderance of Jews on CCNY team, which Levine estimated at 83% of all players during Holman’s tenure, meant the school continued to represent the broader success of Jewish basketball.  In addition, CCNY’s reputation for intellectual debate, radical thought, and tough academic admissions encouraged the general belief that Holman could not recruit star players.[4]  Fans believed Holman’s teams “played five-man basketball,” since “talent receives no special consideration” at the school.  In fact, “it is miraculous that out of the paucity of material, Holman could weld a unit able to compete at all in intercollegiate basketball.”[5]  The perception of Holman’s teams reinforced the Progressive idea that teamwork and intelligence could overcome physical ability.  Although no successful sport program existed without talent, press reports concentrated on Holman’s ability to “mold” individuals into a competitive team since “outstanding individual stars are missing, and perhaps Holman would have it that way.  His contention is that basketball is essentially a team game.”[6]

In the early years of the national tournaments, Holman refused to acquiesce to the changing structure of college basketball.  Convinced that basketball remained a “small man’s game,” Holman continued to produce teams that represented this ideology.  Prior to the 1938-39 season, analysts declared that CCNY would have a poor season because the team, “sets an all-time high for low stature, even at City College, where a six-footer is as rare.”  In December 1938, CCNY had a surprising victory over the “tall firs” of Oregon, the eventual NCAA champion that year, which the New York press celebrated as “a great start in the New York vs. Rest of the World rivalry.”  This win only provided brief success as the team struggled during the rest of the season and then finished with a record of 8-8 in 1939-1940.  CCNY earned a spot in the NIT the next two seasons, finishing in third place in 1941, but the school had a losing record in 1943 and did not play in either postseason tournament between 1943 and 1946.[7]

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[1] On scoring, see “Individual Scoring,” New York Times, March 11, 1946.  Also see “All-Met,” New York Times, March 10, 1946.

[2] On Holman’s commercial activities, see his file at the Edward and Gena Hickox Library at the Basketball Hall of Fame, Springfield, MA. Also see the Nat Holman Papers, the City College of New York Archives, New York; “Hakoah Meets Bruins Tonight in Cage Tussle,” Chicago Tribune, December 26, 1928.  “Basketball: Mid-season Report,” Time, February 19, 1934.

[3] Levine, Ellis Island to Ebbets Field, 56-59. Nat Holman in John Simons, ed., Who’s Who in American Jewry: A Biograhical Dictionary of Living Jews of the United States and Canada (New York: National News Association Inc., 1939).  See Nat Holman, Scientific Basketball (New York: Incra Pub. Co., 1922); Nat Holman, Winning Basketball (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1932); Nat Holman, Holman on Basketball (New York: Crown Publishers, 1950). 

[4] According to historian Sherry Gorelick, less than one percent of the children of Jewish immigrants reached college and even fewer graduated in the first decade of the twentieth century.  Even the celebrated and difficult entrance requirements into City College that caused many people to call CCNY the “Harvard of the Proletariat” only took effect in the late 1930s and before that decade, graduating classes generally numbered in the hundreds.  See Shirley Gorelick, City College and the Jewish Poor: Education in New York, 1880-1924 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1981), 3. Also see Steinberg, The Ethnic Myth, 128-138.  Joel Perlmann explained that in 1908, well below five percent of the Russian Jewish children in the city graduated from high school.  See Joel Perlmann, Ethnic Differences: Schooling and Social Structure among the Irish, Italians, Jews, and Blacks in an American City, 1880-1935 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 123.

[5] “Readers’ Right,” New York Post, March 12, 1936.

[6] “Holman Stresses Form at CCNY,” New York Post, December 2, 1931.

[7] Quote on ‘small man’s game’ and ‘low stature,’ from “Pessimists Ruled Out as Holman’s Beavers Prepare for Opener,” New York Evening Post, December 1, 1938; “Fury and Finesse Lead to Same Results when Beavers and Redmen Take to Court,” New York Evening Post, December 19, 1938. In the final game of the 1939 season, CCNY defeated previously undefeated (and No. 1) NYU team to finish 8-8.  CCNY also had three straight losing seasons in the mid-1940s.

Jewish success in the early tournaments, by Ari Sclar

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Jewish players had more of a presence in the NIT than in the NCAA tournament.  The NCAA divided the country into eight geographic districts (four in the west and four in the east), and included only one team from each district.  The NCAA’s regional seeding minimized the number of Jews who would appear in that tournament.  Relatively few Jews played at top Midwestern or Western colleges and only two Jewish players appeared in the NCAA tournament between 1939-1942.  A New York City team did not qualify for the NCAA until 1943 or play in the championship game until 1945.  In contrast, the NIT had no geographic limitations and invited the best teams in the country.  It also included New York teams because of commercial concerns.  The MBWA recognized the appeal of local teams and two city teams played in each NIT from 1938-1942.[1]

The high number of New York schools contributed to the success of Jewish basketball in the early years of the NIT.  Eastern teams with a prominent Jewish presence won five of the first seven tournaments.  Temple captured the first tournament championship, LIU won in 1939 and 1941, and St. John’s became the first team to win back-to-back titles in 1943 and 1944.  Yet, even as New York schools had this success, the power of college basketball briefly shifted away from the east in the mid-1940s.

World War II altered the structure of college basketball and its postseason tournaments.  The war forced many schools to cancel their programs while others played freshmen to field complete teams.  In 1943, the NCAA tournament joined the NIT at Madison Square Garden, which increased the Garden’s importance within college basketball.  Following both of St. John’s’ NIT victories, the team lost to the NCAA champion (Wyoming in 1943 and Utah in 1944) in Red Cross benefit games, which legitimized the NCAA tournament and provided western schools with national exposure.[2]  In the minds of coaches, fans, sportswriters and players, however, the NIT remained the more prestigious tournament for the remainder of the decade.  Jewish basketball thus retained its prominent presence in mainstream basketball.

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[1] On tournaments and results, see Mike Douchant, with special guest Jim Nantz, Inside College Basketball, Rev. ed. (New York: Visible Ink Press, 1997).  The two Jewish players were Harry Platt of Brown University (1939) and Moe Becker of Duquesne (1940).  In 1941, the NIT expanded from six to eight teams.

[2] On the Garden, see Applin, “From Muscular Christianity to the Marketplace,” 246-247. “West Meets East and Trims It In Year-End Basketball Spurt,” Newsweek, January 8, 1940.  After the University of Southern California ended LIU’s 42 game winning streak, Clair Bee declared “the balance of basketball power for 1940 lies west of the Mississippi.”

Post-season tournaments are born, by Ari Sclar

An increase in frenetic activity on the court served as a byproduct of the abolition of the center jump.  Supporters of the center jump had claimed it positively slowed down the game so that players would not overexert themselves.  According to Time, the results of the rule change during the first year led some “physicians and coaches” to become concerned that the pace placed “too great a strain on players’ hearts.”  Most commentators and coaches, however, welcomed the change since the elimination of the jump: “speeds up the game, adds about seven minutes of playing time…[and] results in more spectacular tries for basketball and larger scores.”[1]

The increase in scoring surpassed all expectations as teams and players adjusted to the new rules.  Whereas scores in the early 1930s had often been in the teens and twenties, some teams scored in the sixties during the early 1940s.  By the end of the decade, scores exploded into the seventies, eighties, and even nineties.  Spectators witnessed evenly matched teams score at incredible paces and individual players became stars for scoring more than 20 points in a game. Specialization began to differentiate between positions as “playmakers” became point guards and coaches designed offenses around individual players’ ability to score.  In March 1947, Harry Boykoff scored 54 points, which then set a record at Madison Square Garden, in a 71-52 St. John’s victory over rival St. Francis.[2]  The increased scoring also attracted spectators and intensified the commercialism of college basketball.  Garden promoter Ned Irish and the Metropolitan Basketball Writers Association (MBWA) took immediate advantage of this change, and at the end of the 1938 season, they organized a postseason tournament to crown a national champion.

Described as the “Rose Bowl of Basketball,” the National Invitational Tournament (NIT) invited six teams (NYU, LIU, Temple, Bradley, Oklahoma A&M, and Colorado) to Madison Square Garden in March 1938.  Some basketball fans declared the NIT “will prove nothing” due to the absence of Stanford, Notre Dame, and teams from the powerful Big Ten, which did not participate in post-season games.  Others asserted that bids to NYU and LIU after mediocre seasons only illustrated that the “writers are playing stooges to enrich the coffers of Ned Irish.”  The tournament championship game received wide media attention as Temple, with All-American Mike (Meyer) Bloom leading the way, defeated Colorado and its star, future Supreme Court Justice Byron ‘Whizzer’ White, 60-38 by playing “a brand of basketball that never has been surpassed in Madison Square Garden.”[3]  The NIT attracted fewer customers than regular season games, but its success led the NCAA to form its own postseason national tournament in 1939.

The post-season tournaments encouraged the ongoing growth and standardization of college basketball.  Stanford coach John Bunn stated the Garden provided a “benefit” to all participants since “Western teams could learn about ball-handling from their Eastern opponents while…invading teams could teach the local fives a little about shooting.”  As more cities promoted double-headers, eastern teams sometimes traveled west and commentators declared that “basketball’s provincialism is gone and the game is much healthier for it.”  In 1940, Newsweek stated that basketball was “watched annually by more paying customers than any other sport, 90,000,000 in a single season.”[4]  That same year, the first televised college basketball game took place, although basketball would not take full advantage of the new medium until the 1950s.  Following the 1941 season, during which Nat Holman served as president of the National Association of Basketball Coaches (NABC), the organization’s Coaching Committee voted to standardize the size of the ball, floor, backboards, lighting, and other equipment.  Standard equipment, inter-regional double-headers, and national tournaments, helped college basketball surpass all but college football and major league baseball in national popularity by World War II.[5]

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[1] “Sport: In New Orleans,” Time, February 7, 1938; “Sport: Point a Minute,” Time, January 24, 1938. In 1909, Luther Gulick stated he opposed the ‘cage’ game “because of the excessive strain upon the heart produced by the continuous playing.” See Luther Gulick, “Proposed Changes in Basket Ball,” American Physical Education Review 14, no. 8 (October 1909): 509.

[2] Bjarkman, Hoopla, 47. Scoring records fell at incredible paces during the 1940s.  In March 1945, NYU scored 85 points in a game against Temple and Bowling Green scored 97 points at the Garden in 1948.  Boykoff scored a Garden record 45 points in 1943.  That scoring mark was broken by Mikan in 1945.  For Boykoff’s 1947 mark, see “St. Francis Beaten By Redmen,” New York Times, March 12, 1947.  St. John’s coach Joe Lapchick called Dutch Garfinkel a “playmaker” in relation to his ability to produce scoring opportunities for his teammates.  See “West’s Brand of Basketball Finds Favor of Lapchick,” New York Evening Post, December 13, 1938.

[3] “Readers’ Right,” New York Evening Post, March 4, 1938 and March 7, 1938. The Post was not part of the committee which organized the tournament and received 34 letters in protest of the first NIT. NYU and LIU played for the first time ever. On the final, see New York Times, March 17, 1938.

[4] “Activities on Basketball Courts,” New York Times, January 4, 1938.  “West Meets East and Trims It in Year-End Basketball Spurt,” Newsweek, January 8, 1940.  The NCAA formed its own tournament because it determined that it needed to control college basketball.  See Applin, “From Muscular Christianity to the Marketplace,” 170-171.

[5] For information on Holman’s tenure as NABC president, see Nat Holman papers, City College of New York Archives, New York.  On the NABC vote to standardize the game, see “Uniform Basketball and Coaches Pushed by Coaches’ Committee,” New York Times, March 25, 1941. On basketball’s growth and general attendance figures, see “Sports,” Newsweek, April 14, 1944. According to the article, Garden attendance was 249,728 at double-headers and 115,000 at the national tournaments.