Book World: Two great new basketball books set the mood for March Madness
Eighty years ago, an extraordinary collegiate basketball game took place. It’s such a shining moment, it’s madness that March 12 isn’t an annual hoops holiday. On that Sunday morning in 1944, when most folks (including local cops) were at church, the Duke University medical school team traveled across town to play the all-Black North Carolina College Eagles behind locked gym doors. “The Secret Game” – a legitimate contest with a referee and a game clock but no spectators – was the first college game in the segregated South with Black and white players on the same court. The Eagles’ fast break helped them torch Duke, 88-44, but the competitive juices were still flowing afterward, so the young men did something even more extraordinary: On a Jim Crow hardwood, at a time when Black teams weren’t even allowed in the NCAA or NIT tournaments, they split up the teams and ran it back, shirts and skins.
I’ve been a basketball junkie for more than 40 years but had never come across this incredible story until it popped up as a narrative detour in “The Real Hoosiers: Crispus Attucks High School, Oscar Robertson and the Hidden History of Hoops,” by Jack McCallum, one of two terrific new basketball books out in time to make your tourney banter that much more intelligent. “The Real Hoosiers” is the story of a dominant but unheralded high school team that played during the same placid Eisenhower days as the squad in the beloved movie “Hoosiers.” The Crispus Attucks Tigers, led by one of the best to ever do it, Oscar Robertson, won a state title in 1955, becoming the first all-Black team in Indiana – and “quite likely,” in McCallum’s estimation, the United States – to do that. (They won it again the following year.)
In 1954, Attucks lost in the state tournament to Milan High School, the rural team that inspired the fictional Hickory High in “Hoosiers.” McCallum uses that film, and the racial dynamics of its conservative “Behold, the smart, scrappy white kids!” ethos as a jumping-off point for how much more improbable the Tigers’ real-world heroics were. For starters, they didn’t have a gym. They also dealt with consistently biased officiating, racist invective from opposing fans, restaurants that wouldn’t serve them, bigoted newspaper columnists, death threats and the murder of peer Emmett Till.
McCallum makes quick work of the movie’s legacy to tell a much deeper and richer story about life under de facto legal segregation in 1950s Indiana. The “most northern state in the South,” as it’s been called, was home to the second coming of the Ku Klux Klan, which is why the book goes well beyond simply resuscitating those Crispus Attucks Tigers and giving them their just due. “The Real Hoosiers” has a real edge to it.
McCallum, now in his mid-70s, pulls all the tricks from a Hall of Fame career out of his righteous writer’s bag to show what these teenagers endured while compiling an 85-6 record in Robertson’s three varsity seasons. He jumps back and forth in time, throws in fun footnotes about figures like Cab Calloway and Kurt Vonnegut, weaves in historical antecedents and ancillary tales, offers technical basketball analysis, and breaks the fourth wall with commentary and jokes, both grandpa groaners and one-liners dripping with animus at racial injustices past and present.
Nowhere is that animus felt more than in a chapter titled “Basketball and Blood in the Same Town Square.” In 1926, 90 miles north of Indianapolis in Marion, Indiana, the town square hosted a party after the local boys beat Martinsville (whose team featured a sophomore guard named John Wooden; hold that thought) for the state title. A raucous bonfire raged all night. Four years later, a crowd of 5,000 – a quarter of Marion’s population – gathered once again for a different purpose. This time, as McCallum describes it, “They were waiting – many of them hoping – to witness their first lynching.”
On Aug. 7, 1930, Black teenagers Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, who were in jail on unsubstantiated murder and rape charges, were brutally beaten, dragged to the Marion town square, strung up on a maple tree and left hanging for nearly 12 hours. Local photographer Lawrence Beitler captured the depraved indifference of the townspeople, some of whom undoubtedly reveled in the lynching as they had the hoops championship a few years before. The infamous photo would inspire Billie Holiday’s haunting classic “Strange Fruit.”
Strictly speaking, there is no direct link between the Marion grotesquerie and what Crispus Attucks players overcame during their dominant run, but does there need to be? Political and cultural eras bleed into one another, and they certainly did for Wooden, the Hoosier farm boy who went on to claim 10 NCAA titles as a coach in the California sunshine, including seven in a row during a time of massive American upheaval. Scott Howard-Cooper captures the wild juxtaposition of the on-court discipline required to win 88 consecutive games and the swirling campus insanity of the era in “Kingdom on Fire: Kareem, Wooden, Walton, and the Turbulent Days of the UCLA Basketball Dynasty.”
Over time, after retiring in 1975, Wooden went from being renowned as a great hoops tactician to being seen as a kind of cartoon of the humble, hard-working “Hoosiers” mind-set. “Kingdom on Fire” restores the neurotic Wooden ground down by the expectations of winning and pining for simpler days, before he coached two of the best college centers of all-time, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (still Lew Alcindor when he played for Wooden) and Bill Walton. Add in Wooden’s quirks, like being scared of L.A. traffic and believing ice in water causes stomach cramps; flaws, like discouraging interracial dating as late as 1970; and a willingness to experiment on-court well into his successful career, and you have a fascinating character, not a human motivational poster.
Hagiographies are for hacks, so Howard-Cooper doesn’t tiptoe around the subject of Sam Gilbert either. Gilbert was the millionaire building contractor/UCLA benefactor who made sure that players were always flush with cash for travel, cars, dinners, drinks, discos and, allegedly, abortions. Gilbert’s illicit largesse was an open secret, motivation for players to come to UCLA, so his prime seats near the bench weren’t an accident. As time went on, Gilbert’s profile grew, but as long as UCLA kept winning, he kept bolstering, whether Coach Wooden knew what he was up to or not (I’m calling it “willful ignorance” at best). The players knew Gilbert delivered and wanted him around, even if – according to Howard-Cooper, and a surprise to me – both Kareem and Walton considered leaving UCLA.
In those years, UCLA was more of a commuter college, filled mostly with well-tanned, “What Me, Worry?” white Angelenos. Abdul-Jabbar, whose New York City high school coach calling him the N-word played a role in why he ended up on the west coast, ultimately he wanted to transfer to the University of Michigan, which had a much more robust Black student body and was fairly close to Detroit’s jazz clubs. Walton, who was a serious activist and not just the goofy Deadhead he can seem on broadcasts today, yearned to be in the anti-Vietnam War action at Cal-Berkeley, where kids were fighting in the streets every day. The two centers respected Wooden apart from UCLA itself, stayed put and got the rings, of course, but their collegiate basketball years were far more complicated than many readers might have realized.
“Kingdom of Fire,” like “The Real Hoosiers,” places readers back in more interesting times, before the stories they tell were sanded down or inflated or forgotten. While filling out the brackets this year, consider getting your hoops mind right with these two substantial histories. The teams in them might seem a very far cry from the billion-dollar Big Dance bonanza of today, but look closer. The past will be there at tip-off. Three of the giants in these books still walk among us. Walton is 71, Abdul-Jabbar is 76 and Robertson, “the Big O,” is 85, winding down a long life that early on found him dribbling and shooting on a dusty, vacant Indianapolis lot, right about the time Black and white collegiate cagers secretly stepped on a court together.
Patrick Sauer has been a freelance writer for more than 20 years for many publications, some that still exist. He also co-hosts the live online talk show “Squawkin’ Sports,” which features interviews with authors of sports books.