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STAN ISAACS Out of Left Field |
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This Stanford basketball immortal still watches his old team on TV
By STAN ISAACS
of TheColumnists.com
AS THE long-days-and-nights-journey-into-weekends NCAA basketball tournament tips off this week, Stanford is one of the heavy favorites. And at this moment when the Cardinal is a college basketball powerhouse anew, Hank Luisetti, a great blast from the past, is of note again because Stanford people recently repaired the vandalized statue of Luisetti that stands outside Stanford's Maples Gym.
Stanford and Luisetti wake
up some glorious echoes. What the Baltimore Colts-New York Giants
1958 "greatest game ever played" was to pro football,
Stanford's 45-31 victory over LIU in 1936 was to college basketball.
What Red Grange was to college football, Hank Luisetti was to
college basketball.
Stanford came into Madison Square Garden on Dec. 30,1936, and
snapped LIU's 43-game winning streak before a full house. Historians
recognize that this was the game that launched college basketball
as a big-time national sports entity. It was the game that saw
Luisetti unveil to the east his running one-hand shot, dazzling
with all-around play. He scored 15 of his team's 45 points in
the face of skepticism about anybody shooting with one hand.
Though others out west shot one-handed, it was Luisetti who popularized
the shot and revolutionized the sport. Kids all over the country
started to shoot one-handed just as, many years later, they all
took to the jump shot that changed the sport.
Luisetti, 84, is the greatest living athletic immortal of the
1930s. He lives quietly in Foster City, only a few miles up the
road from Stanford's Palo Alto campus. He explained that he started
shooting one-handed as a six-year old on the playground in San
Francisco named after Helen Wills, the tennis immortal.
"In those days the basketball had ridges on it," he
said. "It didn't bounce cleanly as it does now, so we had
to learn all the basics to control the ball. I was a little scrawny
and when I would try to shoot two-handed, it was easy for others
to block the shot. So I shot one-handed and I kept shooting that
way."
CCNY coach Nat Holman was one of the doubters about Luisetti
before the Stanford-LIU game. Holman taught the two-hand set
shot and the driving lay-up. He said, "They will have to
show me plenty to convince me that a shot predicated on a prayer
is smart basketball. I'll quit coaching if I have to teach one-handed
shots to win."
After Stanford defeated LIU and the next year beat City and LIU
in a return trip to the Garden, Holman called him, "an amazing
shooter, a phenomenal dribbler and an awfully clever passer."
Born Angelo Enrico Luisetti, he became Hank because, "Kids
would call me 'Angel' and I didn't like that. So I came up with
'Hank' out of the blue and that became it."
Luisetti was a 6 foot 2 ½ inch forward. He made All America
his three years on the varsity and was named Player of the Year
his last two seasons. He was far ahead of his time. When the
Associated Press conducted a poll on the game's great players
of the first half of the 20th century, Luisetti came in second
to George Mikan though most of the voters had never seen him.
For all his achievements, he said his greatest satisfaction was
meeting Dr. James Naismith. "We stopped off in Kansas one
trip and I had dinner with him. It was quite a thrill to meet
the man who invented the game. He said he didn't like basketball
anymore because they had eliminated the center jump."
He recalled the long train trip across country in 1936 in which Stanford won every game.
"The train would stop
frequently to take on water and coal," he said. "We
would get off the train and run up and down, pass the ball around.
People would look at us as if we were crazy."
Phil Zonne, a Stanford teammate, says of Luisetti, "I was
lucky to play with him. He made you look good. Without a doubt
he was the Michael Jordan of his day."
Zonne went on to become
an artist and sculptor. In the 1970s, Stanford trustee Rudy Munzer
commissioned the Luisetti statue and Zonne fashioned it, working
without a fee. "I worked from photos," he said. "We
thought about his coming down to Los Angeles to sit for me but
we both decided it would be best for me to do him as he looked
in his prime."
Two years ago, in an act of idiocy, the left arm was broken off
the bronze statue. This being on the eve of the traditional Big
Game between Stanford and California, the vandalism was thought
to be the work of some overenthusiastic Cal freshmen, but none
of the culprits was found.
Bob Oakford, another Stanford teammate, recently inspired a reparation
of the statue. The foundry that cast the original statue was
located, the arm was fashioned and attached to the bronze. It
has Luisetti shooting one-handed with the ball 12 feet in the
air.
"Naturally, I am pleased about that," Luisetti said.
He is retired now, satisfied that he had a fine career even if
there were no lucrative pro ranks for him to go on to in his
day. After graduation, he played AAU with the AAU champion Phillips
Oilers, served three years in the Navy and led a St. Mary's Pre
Flight School team to several victories. Spinal meningitis ended
his playing days. He went on to coach a Chevrolet dealership
team to an AAU championship. He was in the automobile and then
the travel business before retiring.
"I had a heart bypass about 10 years ago," he said
and watches games only on television now. "I prefer that
because the excitement of the crowd is too much for me."
He likes Stanford's chances in the NCAA. "They have talent,
a good coach. They pass to the open man. I think I could play
in today's game although I wouldn't get as many tip-ins with
all the seven-footers around. I would have liked to play pro
ball, but it wasn't to be. Life goes on. I did play a basketball
player in a movie--a terrible movie--with Betty Grable and got
$10,000 for it."
A poster of the eminently forgettable movie, "Campus Confessions,"
is on display at the Stanford Sports Hall of Fame.
As the NCAA tournament progresses, it would be fitting if the
Palo Alto people made a bow along the way to the man who put
Stanford basketball on the map.
© 2001 by Stan Isaacs. The drawing is from IMSI's Master/Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. East, San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA.
You can comment on this column or contact Stan Isaacs with an email to: talkback@thecolumnists.com
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