Frank's Place: Joe Fulks, Philly's first pro basketball hero
Though the boast will be severely tested next week, when the 76ers commence their 2016-17 season, Philadelphia is a great basketball city.
Though the boast will be severely tested next week, when the 76ers commence their 2016-17 season, Philadelphia is a great basketball city.
Even though the Eagles are a civic obsession and the Phillies aren't far removed from 257 consecutive sellouts, it's basketball that's embedded deepest in our DNA. What local figures in football or baseball, after all, are as evidently Philadelphian as Fran Dunphy, John Chaney, Phil Martelli, or Sonny Hill?
But even by our lofty standards, March 21, 1976, was an exceptional day for Philadelphia basketball.
Within a fan-choked Palestra that Sunday afternoon, one of the greatest high school teams in city history, the Gene Banks-led West Philadelphia Speedboys, captured a second straight city championship. At that same hour, on the other side of the Delaware, Bishop Eustace was winning a fourth consecutive New Jersey Parochial B title.
In Boston, less than 24 hours after the fierce NBA rivals had attracted a record crowd of 18,516 to the Spectrum, the first-place Celtics completed back-to-back spankings of the second-place 76ers. Nationally televised by CBS, the game was the busy day's most viewed event.
Meanwhile, back at the Spectrum, workers and officials scurried to get the South Philadelphia arena ready to host the following weekend's NCAA Final Four, when, with America tuned in to Philly, Rutgers, Michigan, and UCLA would challenge unbeaten Indiana.
With all that, it perhaps was not surprising that most local hoops fans missed some disturbing news out of rural Kentucky. Police there had removed the blood-soaked body of a 54-year-old man, a former basketball star, from a trailer-park bedroom.
It was an inglorious end for Philadelphia's first pro basketball hero, Joe Fulks.
Fulks was a basketball revolutionary, an athletic forward who in the game's flat-footed era had a rare weapon, a jump shot. Utilizing it to great effect, he virtually carried the Philadelphia Warriors to the 1946-47 championship. In that debut NBA season, he was the league's top scorer, his 23.2 per-game average seven points better than the runner-up's.
"Fans loved the novelty of his shot," Warriors teammate Howie Dallmar said in 1987. "Because he took the ball way back over his head, the shot was impossible to stop."
So much so that two years later, Fulks averaged 26 points a game. In one game that season, as a blizzard roared outside West Philadelphia's Arena, he scored a then-record 63 points.
But his Warriors highlight came on April 22, 1947. That night, in the fifth game of a best-of-seven series, Fulks scored 34 points and Philadelphia beat Chicago to clinch the first championship of the Basketball Association of America, soon renamed the NBA.
More than 8,200 fans squeezed into the 7,900-seat Arena for the game. Police estimated that 5,000 were turned away. Philadelphia was smitten with pro basketball, until then a quirky diversion between football and baseball seasons. And Fulks was the focus of the fans' attention.
"Fulks was the first to exploit the [jump] shot to its fullest," Robert W. Peterson wrote in his book Cages to Jump Shots. "Within a decade, it would be the primary offensive weapon in the National Basketball Association. His turnaround jumpers from the pivot captivated crowds. . . . Fulks soon became the darling of the young league."
It was a one-way romance. Whatever fame his abilities earned him, Fulks retreated from it, typically using alcohol to abet his escape.
As a boy in Kentucky, he'd developed a taste for the local moonshine. It would grow into an addiction, one that likely cut short his Hall of Fame career. Fulks, teammates said, sometimes even drank before games.
He retired in 1954. In 1971, he was named one of the greatest players of the NBA's first quarter-century. In 1978, as part of a class that included Paul Arizin, his Warriors teammate and fellow jump-shot pioneer, he was inducted into the Hall of Fame.
Fulks was working at a Kentucky prison when, on that fateful March 21, he visited his girlfriend at her trailer-park home. Drinking cheap vodka, he argued with the woman's 22-year-old son. Words escalated to weapons and at some point the younger man fetched his shotgun. The fatal double-barreled blast struck the former basketball star in the neck, severing his carotid artery.
Basketball's jump-shooting era had by then yielded in popularity to the dunk. Fulks' contributions and accomplishments were mostly forgotten.
His wire-service obituary referred to him, without much hyperbole, as "the Babe Ruth of basketball," but most newspapers, if they ran it at all, trimmed it to a few paragraphs and buried it. No one from the Warriors, long since relocated to California, attended his Kentucky funeral.
"I bet if you asked a thousand basketball fans of all ages, there might be five who had ever heard of Fulks," John Christgau, author of Origins of the Jump Shot, told the website Vice Sports. "He's a forgotten figure."
In a Philadelphia sports scene long dominated by baseball, Fulks clearly helped propel basketball's popularity. Young local players who had watched him began to be motivated by dreams of professional careers. Very quickly, Philadelphians like Arizin, Wilt Chamberlain, Tom Gola, and Guy Rodgers followed Fulks into the NBA.
Their success in turn ratcheted up the quality of basketball being played in the Philadelphia area's high schools and colleges, in its parish gyms and playgrounds.
Others, before and after, are responsible for this city's basketball reputation. But I don't think even Harvey Pollock, the numbers genius who worked with those early Warriors teams and who invented the statistic, would argue that Joe Fulks deserves an assist.
@philafitz