"Famous Jewish Sports Legends" (1946)

A short spiel on a surprisingly Jewish Final Four.

This is Throwbacks, a newsletter by me, Michael Weinreb, about sports, history, culture and politics, and everything in-between.

If you like what you read, please click the button below, join the mailing list for FREE and please share, on social media or through e-mail or however you feel comfortable sharing.

And if you’ve been reading for a while, please consider a paid subscription to unlock certain posts and help keep this thing going—you’ll also get full access to the historical archive of over 200 articles. (Click here and you’ll get 20 percent off either a monthly or annual subscription for the first year.

(If your subscription is up for renewal, just shoot me an email and I’ll figure out a way to get you that discount, as well. If you cannot afford a subscription and would like one, send me an email and I’ll comp you one, no questions asked.)

---

I.

On the first day of November in 1946, the New York Knickerbockers took to the floor of a hockey arena in Toronto and tipped off the first game of a new league called the Basketball Association of America, which would eventually become known as the National Basketball Association. Shortly afterward, a Knicks player named Ossie Schechtman weaved through several Toronto Huskies players and made a layup, thereby scoring the first points in NBA history.

Schechtman’s parents had immigrated from Russia and settled in Brooklyn, where he went on to play for legendary coach Clair Bee at Long Island University. Schechtman, like many of Bee’s players at LIU, was also Jewish. In fact, of the starters on the floor for the Knicks that day, three of them were Jewish, and two more were on the bench as reserves. They were the sons of butchers and truck drivers who had played their college ball in a city that packed Madison Square Garden to watch their games. There was no real money in professional basketball at that point, and most of the Jewish players—after enduring antisemitic chants while on the road during that first season—soon left to take on more stable careers, including Ossie Schechtman, who went to work in the garment industry. And then in 1950, the gambling scandal centered at CCNY—a team that won a title with three Jewish and two Black starters—collapsed the foundation of New York City basketball.

The End of the Innocence (1950)

But for a short time in New York City—home to America’s largest Jewish population—Jews formed the heart of The City Game. For a moment, those two subcultures merged. And 75 years later, it appears to have happened again.

---

II.

If there is a single joke that defines my childhood, it is probably this one, from Airplane!…

As the renowned writer and columnist Bob Kravitz points out on his

Musings of an Old Sportswriter

Substack, that joke was a bit of an exaggeration. Over the years, we had Sandy Koufax and Mark Spitz; even now, we have Abby Meyers and Alex Bregman and Max Fried. But as Kravitz goes on to note, those of us who grew up Jewish in America have a curious relationship with sports. It often feels like we’re on the outside looking in, which perhaps is why—as Reggie Jackson once asked Kravitz in an unguarded moment—so many of us wound up becoming sportswriters. And it’s also why we tend to notice when Jews have a moment in sports, as they will this weekend at the Final Four, when three out of four coaches who take the floor with their teams will be Jewish.

This is an incredibly weird and statistically remote confluence, given that there aren’t many Jewish college basketball coaches at all these days, and given that only two Jewish coaches have ever won a national championship: Larry Brown in 1988 and Nat Holman, the coach at CCNY, in 1950, whose name offers an innate connection to the era when New York basketball was a Jewish sport. There is no good way to explain why this is happening now, and I’m not even sure if it really means anything in the grand scheme of things. But as Kravitz writes, there is something that feels oddly triumphant about it, even for those us who haven’t set foot in a temple in years. There is a cultural connection that