I Miss My Jump Shot

It wasn’t much of one, truth be told. It had little range. It was erratic, as all my attempts at prime athletic achievements were. It was not as erratic as my long-iron play, and only a little more erratic than my four-parry with an epee. It was deadliest from straight-on, since I did all my early work with it in my parents’ driveway, when I wasn’t turning my ankle on the raised edges of the driveway’s asphalt. And I realize now that I did more intensive work on my jump shot for a longer period of time than I have worked on anything else in my life. It began when I abandoned my two-handed set shot, and my two-handed set shot was a weapon. If I had come up in the 1930s, I’d have been something else, boy. I learned its basics out of an old book by Nat Holman, the coach who led City College of New York to both the NCAA and NIT championships in the same year. However, on Feb. 18, 1951, three of Holman’s players—Ed Roman, Ed Warner, and Al Roth—were busted in Penn Station as they returned from a game at Temple in Philadelphia. The CCNY players were the centerpiece of the whopping point-shaving scandal that almost ruined college basketball in New York. District Attorney Frank Hogan set off one explosion after another, ranging as far as Bradley University in Illinois and, most spectacularly, as far as the University of Kentucky, where Adolph Rupp, the lordly racist coach of the Wildcats, bragged that New York bookmakers couldn’t touch his group of noble Caucasian youths. Hogan proved him wrong, arresting several members of Rupp’s most recent NCAA championship teams, including stars Alex Groza and Ralph Beard. (That Kentucky team, including Groza and Beard, had been the heart of the 1948 U.S. Olympic team in London, where it is not difficult to find bookmakers. The U.S. went 8-0, and won seven of those games by an average of 36 points per game. However, they only squeaked past Argentina, 59-57. I’ve always wondered about that game.)