The SPHAS: The Life and Times of Basketball's Greatest Jewish Team

12. Losing Home Court

12 LOSING HOME COURT At that point, I realized what it was, and I said to myself that the war is over and I am still alive. Thank God. —Captain Ralph Kaplowitz, interview by the author O n August 15, 1945, Philadelphians awoke and grabbed a copy of the Philadelphia Inquirer. The banner headline in six-inch capital letters read “PEACE.” For the first time since Pearl Harbor, the United States was no longer at war. President Harry Truman, in office less than five months, dropped two atomic bombs on Japan on August 6 and 9, 1945. World War II had finally ended. Philadelphia, like most American cities, went wild with jubilation. City Hall was a mob scene of joy, relief, and utter happiness. Confetti flew, horns were heard everywhere, and people danced in the streets. Rationing was over. Meat, canned goods, and gas soon reappeared. With victory declared, soldiers were eager to return home and resume their careers. One soldier more than ready to return to the basketball court was Ralph Kaplowitz. Five years of enlistment and conflict in the Pacific theater had left Kaplowitz with a desire to resume his once-promising basketball career, which had been cut short just prior to his senior year of college. Tired of war and with an infant daughter and young wife at home, Kaplowitz longed to get on with his life. As a child growing up on New York’s East Side, Kaplowitz expressed little interest in playing basketball. His older brother, Danny, who later became a star at LIU under head coach Clair Bee, always needed an extra player to even out the teams with the neighborhood kids, so he brought Ralph Kaplowitz, a standout at New York University, joined the Philadelphia SPHAS for the second half of the 1945–1946 season and helped lead the team to the finals against the Baltimore Bullets. (From the New York University Archives, Photographic Collection.) lOSING HOME COuRT • 183 along his younger brother. “He wanted someone to keep him company. He forced me to go with him to the schoolyard,” Kaplowitz remembered decades later. “I did not want to play. I did not want to do anything. He stuck his finger in my ear and dragged me to the schoolyard and forced me to play with him.”1 Soon enough, though, he found basketball to his liking and no longer needed Danny to encourage him. Kaplowitz played at the Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA) on Fordham Road in the Bronx after school and on the weekends. It was three-on-three games mostly, and then fiveon -five, and the winning team played until it lost. Kaplowitz played all day long. “The game of basketball was about friendships in the schoolyards. It was more social than anything,” Kaplowitz reminisced decades later. “It was a bunch of kids playing a game.” After winning the Public School Athletic League (PSAL) championship with Creston Junior High School, Kaplowitz enrolled at DeWitt Clinton High School and made the team on which his brother starred. “Because of my brother, the coach of the team was willing to look at me. I made the team at DeWitt Clinton, and we had a pretty nice team.”2 In high school, he “developed his great set-shot, which very seldom missed its target,” and grew as a team player.3 By his senior year, he was an integral member of the team that won the Bronx PSAL championship and advanced to the city championship against Seward Park High School, whose center, Butch Schwartz, was later Kaplowitz’s teammate with the SPHAS. In attendance that night was NYU coach Howard Cann, who offered Kaplowitz a scholarship to play for the Violets. Cann viewed Kaplowitz , at 6'2" and 175 pounds, as the next great guard for his squad, one who would eventually replace team captain Bobby Lewis. As “one of the most promising prospects to enter New York University,” Kaplowitz joined the freshman squad in 1938–1939.4 He quickly became the “sparkplug of his freshman team,” scoring 86 points before hurting his knee, as the team finished with an impressive 14–3 record.5 On the varsity the following year, “the lone sophomore to break into the regular lineup was lanky Ralph Kaplowitz, who promises to be one of the finest basketball players in the Metropolitan area before he graduates.”6 Kaplowitz scored 183 points, second on the team...