Frank's Place: The man who ushered in postseason college basketball

Not much is known of the meeting that gave birth to postseason college basketball, but cigar smoke surely choked the air.

Several crusty New York sportswriters, encouraged by a colleague's financial windfall, were eager to make a few extra bucks as promoters. From the ashes of their smoky session arose the concept that is now an American sporting phenomenon.

They decided that when the 1937-38 regular season ended, six worthy teams from around the country would be invited to play in a mini-tournament at Madison Square Garden. They named it, most unimaginatively for that era of hyperbolic sportswriting, the National Invitation Tournament.

The brains behind these brainstorming writers was Ned Irish, a hustler who as a University of Pennsylvania undergraduate had been a correspondent for 10 New York and Philadelphia newspapers.

It was Irish who, in 1934 while working full-time for the New York World Telegram, persuaded Garden officials to let him stage a college basketball doubleheader there.

Those Dec. 29 games - between Notre Dame and NYU, and St. John's and Westminster - drew 16,180 fans. Overnight, the college game became a big-time sport, the Garden its showcase, and Irish its undisputed power broker.

As the NCAA tournament convenes in Philadelphia again for this weekend's East Regional, it's worth noting that the sport's inaugural postseason event, that 1938 NIT, had a distinct Philly flavor.

It was conceived and promoted by a Penn graduate, and its champion was Jimmy Usilton's Temple Owls, who routed Colorado in the final.

The New York event proved so successful that a year later some of the coaches whose teams had been snubbed decided to create their own postseason invitational. And so, fittingly, with a Palestra doubleheader in March 1939, the NCAA tournament was born.

Irish's roles in growing college basketball and devising the concept that would one day be its grandest spectacle are noted on his Hall of Fame plaque in Springfield, Mass.

But this nearly forgotten figure did much more - so much more, in fact, that his Hall biography concludes by calling him, with considerable justification, "The Father of Big-Time Basketball."

Irish, who graduated from Penn with a business degree in 1928, also was one of the founders of the Basketball Association of America in 1946, the fledgling professional league that three years later morphed into the NBA.

He created and for a quarter-century nurtured the New York Knicks, hiring the coach, Red Holzman, who at last brought glory to what had been a forlorn franchise.

Yet, when Irish died in 1982, there was no flowery praise in the obituary that appeared in his adopted hometown's most influential newspaper. Instead, the New York Times informed its readers that Irish had been "arrogant, aloof, and unable to accept criticism."

Decades earlier, when sportswriter Roger Kahn wrote a scathing profile of him for Sports Illustrated, he quoted a longtime Irish acquaintance.

"Ned is really a hell of a nice guy," the man told Kahn. "The trouble is he's afraid somebody might find out."

Kahn revealed how Irish, even after he was a wealthy and powerful man, would sometimes hide in remote Garden seating areas.

His devotion to the world's most famous arena was so intense, Kahn wrote, "that he has hidden in distant reaches, waiting to spring when he catches an usher moving a $2 customer to a $3 seat in exchange for a 50 cent tip."

Criticism rarely concerned the blustery Irishman.

"I don't care what they say about me," he once said, "as long as they buy tickets."

He was born in 1905 in Lake George, N.Y., already operating in fourth gear. His father, who ran the boat rental concession there, died when he was 3. His mother, a nurse, would soon move with her son to Brooklyn.

According to the Times obituary, by the time he graduated from high school in 1924, Irish was earning $100 a week selling sodas, coaching his school's swim team, and covering high school sports for several New York papers.

At Penn, he wrote for the Daily Pennsylvanian and edited the school's monthly literary magazine. While a student there, he also was a correspondent for six newspapers in New York, four in Philadelphia.

Following graduation, he was hired as a sportswriter by the World Telegram. But that job wasn't enough to sate his energy. In 1930, Irish became the public relations man for the NFL's New York Giants. That same year he began operating the pro football league's information office, a position he manned until 1940.

It was in 1934, having grown enamored of the sport, when Irish approached Garden executives about promoting a college doubleheader.

"I didn't have to put up a cent," he recounted. "Don't forget it was the Depression, and the Garden was dark a lot of nights. The only guarantee the Garden wanted was that its percentage of the gate would average the cost of renting the building, which at the time was $4,000 a night. If I didn't meet it, my option would not be renewed."

He more than met it and continued to do so for another few decades. Averaging crowds of 18,196 in 1946, his doubleheaders filled the Garden several times a season and, with the NIT, during the postseason as well.

Irish also saw the appeal of intersectional matchups. Those became easier to schedule when Philadelphia's Convention Hall put on doubleheaders of its own, a two-game swing providing more incentive for teams from the South or West to travel east.

As his power expanded, Irish could dictate terms to schools lucky enough to have earned his invitation. Some colleges that played in sold-out Garden doubleheaders reported receiving as little as $500.

"My terms or go back to your gyms," Irish, according to Kahn, told any athletic director who complained.

He ran the Knicks until 1974, when he retired to Florida. He died there of a heart attack eight years later.

This man who'd won such fame and fortune but few friends was cremated without a funeral.

"His success," Kahn wrote, " [was] a chilling, isolating thing."

ffitzpatrick@phillynews.com

@philafitz