Wartime Basketball: The Emergence of a National Sport during World War II by Douglas Stark (review)

The context for World War II in American history is well documented. Indeed, this era is recent enough that many historical accounts include blends of recovered archives and stakeholder interviews. Such context seems to be assumed in Douglas Stark's Wartime Basketball: The Emergence of a National Sport during World War II. For as detailed and thorough as this manuscript is regarding the games, leagues, and tournaments of professional basketball during the war, the author provides little context.

Instead, Stark augments the assumed contextual understanding with intermittent accounts of the ways in which the war interrupted the lives of certain elite basketball players. New York University's Ralph Kaplowitz served five years in the Army's Air Corp in the middle of his basketball career. Stanford star Hank Luisetti interrupted his postcollegiate career to join the Navy where he contracted spinal meningitis, ending his playing days prematurely. And Long Island University star Si Lobello died in his first day of combat in Europe. Stark weaves these personal stories into his prose nicely while sticking to an otherwise basketball-centric narrative.

A thorough and robust description of how James Naismith created basketball comprises the book's introduction before Stark leaps ahead fifty years to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor at the beginning of the 1941–42 basketball season. The author's five detailed chapters then take the reader through the four basketball seasons during the war and the first postwar season.

Each chapter chronologically reports on scores and games in the three most prominent fixtures of professional basketball at the time: the National Basketball League, the American Basketball League, and the World Professional Basketball Tournament. While each of these basketball entities went through distinct changes in the 1940s, Stark describes the ten-year history of this end-of-season tournament as having three distinct phases: all black teams won three of the first five tournaments from 1939–43, the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons of the National Basketball League won the next three from 1944–46, and the tournament's last two instantiations were essentially coming-out parties for future NBA Hall of Famer George Mikan who dominated the tournaments in 1947 and 1948 for the Chicago American Gears. The games played in these leagues and tournaments were physical and dirty, and the travel was brutal, with overnight train rides and compact schedules. Professional basketball was no easy job.

With exhaustive game result details during these years, Stark argues that this inauspicious period of time may have provided the greatest amount of progress toward a fully national game with cohesiveness and increased public attention. Basketball, the author argues, became a national game while professionals played in front of a few thousand paying spectators a night during a time when American citizens needed a diversion from the gruesome reality of war. "During the decade after World War II, the game grew," Stark remarks, "and that growth was directly related to the (sic) how the game had developed during World War II. The war years had a profound and lasting impact on basketball" (309).