‘He made people’s wildest dreams come true:’ The remarkable life of hoops pioneer Bob Douglas

‘He made people’s wildest dreams come true:’ The remarkable life of hoops pioneer Bob Douglas

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Fifty years ago, the Basketball Hall of Fame inducted its first African-American member, a man who made Harlem the center of the basketball world thanks to a team that changed the way the game was played, and did so while beating any opponent that crossed its path.

For years, Joe Lapchick would hear the same thing, time after time, in room after room. Lapchick’s adult life had been devoted to basketball — playing it, teaching it, promoting it — until he retired as St. John’s coach in 1965. Often, as soon as they would see him, even if it was across a crowded room, someone would say, “That’s Joe Lapchick. He played for the Original Celtics, which was the greatest basketball team ever.”

And as long as he was within earshot, this would draw the old man’s attention. He would walk over, shake hands, smile and offer a clarification.

“We were the greatest white basketball team,” he would say. “The greatest team of all was the New York Rens.”

The New York Rens haven’t played a basketball game in 74 years. There are no surviving members of their greatest teams to tell stories anymore about the team, composed entirely of men of color. The man in whose imagination they were born died in 1979, seven years after his pioneering spirit was honored, at last, with a slot in the Basketball Hall of Fame. It turned out he was a pioneer in Springfield, too, same as he was in Harlem. We will get to that soon enough.

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