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FOREWORD I t used to be a joke, the snide answer to one of those “Thinnest Books in the World” riddles, a wisecrack so common it turned up in the 1980 movie farce Airplane! Flight attendant: Would you like something to read? Passenger: Do you have anything light? Flight attendant: How about this leaflet, “Famous Jewish Sports Legends”? Me? I never thought it was funny. Because my father was a genuine Jewish sports legend, and I grew up knowing how very talented and famous he and his teammates were. Thanks to Douglas Stark, the story of the Philadelphia SPHAS is finally available to a much wider audience, taking its proper place in the history of the game. This is neither a thin book nor a leaflet; it is a critical piece of the legend that is American basketball today. Nearly a century ago, the SPHAS were the team that helped turn professional basketball into a national mania—a feisty, hungry and, by all accounts, gifted group of athletes who, then as now, saw the sport as a way out of the urban ghetto. As the author points out, it was their “search for the American dream.” That was certainly my dad’s story. His name was Louis Sherr, and he was born in Philadelphia in 1905. By a happy coincidence, just after his parents immigrated to America from x • FOREWORD Eastern Europe, a fellow named James Naismith invented the game of basketball in Springield, Massachusetts. For my dad—a hunk of an athlete with wavy red hair atop his 6'½" frame—it was the perfect outlet for his powerful natural ability. As a first-generation Jew with little money and no access to an established sport like baseball, he was not only welcome but sought out for this new form of recreation that was igniting the interest of so many fans. From the time he was recruited to jump center at South Philadelphia High School, “Reds” Sherr was a local star. It was a time when basketball was played in a cage—with chicken wire or chain-link fencing surrounding the court to keep the ball in bounds and to speed up the pace. It was a time when you could make a few bucks a night playing ball—big money back in the 1920s—and then cool off at the dance held immediately afterward on the very same court. That’s what passed for social media a century ago. And it was a time of quick passes, two-handed set shots, and foul shots tossed underhand. Scores were low—double-digits that rarely exceeded the 40s—and as far as I can tell, my dad, often high scorer, never went beyond 25 points a game. But it was exciting and pioneering and, yes, it started in Philadelphia and was mostly Jewish. Among the myriad teams sponsored by various synagogues and other Jewish organizations, the SPHAS—named for the social club, the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association, that gave them their first uniforms— became the most successful of all. My father played for three incarnations of the team over a period of eight years, under the leadership of his high school pal Eddie Gottlieb, who would go on to found the Philadelphia Warriors. As the game grew more popular, the arenas got bigger, the cages disappeared , and fans paid up to $1 a game. The fouls got more ferocious, too, with players regularly getting pummeled and elbowed if they stood in the way of victory. And the floors got so slippery, the coaches often had to wipe them down with rosin bags so the after-game dancing could get under way in the converted ballrooms. It was still being promoted as a big party. But it was also becoming big-time. In Reds Sherr’s last two seasons with the SPHAS, they won the Eastern Basketball League Championship, an accomplishment that would, many years later, earn them a special exhibition in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts. My dad left the game in 1932, because, as he wrote to another team owner who was trying to recruit him, “there is so little money offered for playing basketball.” Some of this I know because I heard the stories when I was a child, some because I have letters and programs and a set of scrapbooks filled with blaring headlines (“REDS SHERR STARS AS SPHAS TRIUMPH”) on [3.149.26.176] Project MUSE (2024-04-26 12:06 GMT...

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