When the team hit the road, Kautsky plastered posters displaying Wooden’s picture in advance of the games. “My dad always said [Wooden] could stop on a dime and give you five cents change,” recalled Kautsky’s son, Don. Kautsky signed up other prominent players, including Stretch Murphy, Branch McCracken, and Frank Baird, who had starred at Butler, but Wooden was the main attraction. Baird recalled a night when the Kautskys walked into a gymnasium in Pittsburgh packed with fans hoping to catch a glimpse of the India Rubber Man. “The first thing they asked us when we entered the court was, ‘Which one was John Wooden?’” Baird said. “I don’t know that John had ever played in Pittsburgh before, but he was certainly a drawing card there.” Those fans would go home disappointed, as Wooden’s teaching duties had kept him back in Dayton that night.
In that respect, Wooden was typical. “We played usually on Saturdays and Sundays because all the players, you see, were teaching or working somewhere else,” Wooden told the author Todd Gould. “We had a loosely knit league. There were no commissioners, and each team got their own officials.” The players also had to bring their own gear and provide for their transportation. “Sometimes I drove all night, went home, got a shower, put on a clean shirt, and went right to school,” Wooden said. “I often worked on my lesson plans as I traveled. I don’t think my teaching suffered because of it, but it wasn’t easy.”
Always on the hunt for prime competition, Kautsky linked up in 1932 with a businessman in Akron, Ohio, who worked for the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company. Together they set up a circuit featuring the best teams from their respective states. They called themselves the National Basketball League. One game drew more than four thousand fans, who saw Wooden score 21 points in a 1-point loss, but there were not enough such nights to sustain their efforts. The NBL disbanded after just one year.
Kautsky was unbowed. He could see that Indiana basketball fans were willing to embrace his product if he gave them something compelling to watch. So he continued to scavenge for opponents. The most popular draws were the three titans from the East Coast: the Original Celtics, the Harlem Globetrotters, and the best of them all, the Harlem Renaissance, who were known more commonly as the Rens. During the 1932–33 season, the Rens won 120 games and lost 8. Kautsky invited them to Indiana several times that season. It was not unusual for high school teams in Indiana to have black players, but the notion of entire teams comprised only of blacks was new to this part of the country. Whatever their attitudes on race, the people in Indiana loved entertaining, team-oriented basketball. Many of the games featuring the Rens drew upward of fifteen thousand fans into Butler Fieldhouse.
The first time Wooden faced off against the Rens in the Fieldhouse, he was held to just 7 points in a 34–28 loss. As a fan of the game himself, he was spellbound by the Rens’ talent, their grace, and most of all, their exquisite teamwork. He often said it was the best team he ever saw. “I’d have to be careful I didn’t stop playing and start watching them,” Wooden confessed.
The next day’s
Indianapolis News
paid similar tribute. “Great! That sums up the marvelous passing, ball handling, teamwork and basket scoring ability of the New York Renaissance colored quintet, which Sunday afternoon defeated the Kautskys 34–28 in one of the greatest, if not the greatest, exhibitions of basketball ever seen in this city,” the story read. “Even Johnny Wooden’s clever dribbling was lost as [Rens guard] Clarence Jenkins policed the Kautsky star throughout the contest.”
The Kautskys weren’t too shabby themselves. They prevailed over the Rens in a rematch later that season, and they also defeated the Celtics 37–29 at the Armory in downtown Indianapolis before another standing-room-only crowd. The
Indianapolis News
boasted that Wooden and the local boys had given the Celtics a “neat lesson in basketball,” but the game was marred by an ugly fight between Kautsky guard Clarence “Big Chris” Christopher and the Celtics’ Nat Hickey. The
News
reported that “Hickey tried to put Chris in the bleachers” but that Christopher was “smiling. After all, Chris takes it all in good fun. The fans expect him to be rough.”
The scene was all too common. Pro basketball at the time was far different than the game Wooden had played at Purdue. The fans who attended college games were usually middle- and upper-class folks, graduates of the colleges that were playing or local citizens eager to take in the purity of competition. Pro ball, however, attracted a less-educated, blue-collar fan who wanted to feel a little civic pride. Those fans liked their basketball rough, and the teams obliged them. One of the more prominent barnstorming squads of the 1930s was an all-Jewish team from Philadelphia run by a man named Eddie Gottlieb, who promised “a fight in every game, guaranteed.” Butler Fieldhouse was always filled whenever Gottlieb’s team came to play against Kautsky’s.
Wooden was never a fan of excessive roughness—like Piggy Lambert, he believed that basketball should be a finesse game—but he was never one to back down from a fight, either. One confrontation turned comical. Wooden had been playing against the Celtics when he was tripped by their center Joe Lapchick, the best big man of his era. (He would go on to coach for many years for St. John’s University and the New York Knicks.) “I went down hard and I came up fightin’ mad,” Wooden said. “I went after him but I couldn’t get him.… He had his long arms out and he had me by the shirt and I was swinging wildly but I’m not getting anywhere. It finally got funny and we both laughed.”
Wooden’s decision to move from Dayton to South Bend Central in the fall of 1934 lengthened his commute to Indianapolis, but since he was not the school’s head basketball coach in his first year, he was able to make it to most of the games. “Wooden used to be gone two or three days a week,” Ed Powers said. “He taught his classes, but he would leave at least a couple days a week, maybe three times, at two thirty in the afternoon when the next to last class would be over. He would go to Fort Wayne or Hammond or Indianapolis and he played ball. Then he could come back that night and the next morning he would be teaching.”
With Wooden spearheading Kautsky’s fire wagon, the team averaged nearly 40 points per game during the 1934–35 season, leading the local press to nickname them the “speed merchants.” In one game against the Celtics, they scored 63 points. They were so well received that in November 1935 Kautsky reached out to his erstwhile partner from Akron to form yet another new league, the Midwest Basketball Conference. Their most popular events were doubleheaders at the Armory that also featured the Rens or the Celtics. Wooden was the league’s leading scorer during the 1934–35 season, but the highlight was his incredible streak of 134 consecutive free throws. When he sank the one hundredth—underhanded, naturally—Kautsky came out of the stands and handed him a crisp $100 bill. “I was pretty excited, but my wife was really excited. She came down out of the stands and grabbed that $100 rather quickly,” Wooden quipped. The Kautskys ended the 1934–35 season with a 9–3 record, but they faltered in the league championship game, where they lost to a less-heralded team from Chicago.
* * *
The Midwest Basketball Conference gained a foothold that would last several years. As the games continued to draw respectable crowds, the league wasn’t just building on the popularity of professional basketball. It was helping to change the way the game was played.
The main dilemma basketball faced at the college, professional, and international levels was the prevalence of delay tactics that were bringing games to a standstill. In an effort to speed things up, the NCAA’s rules committee added a center line in 1932 and required that the offensive team bring the ball past that line within ten seconds. The Midwest Basketball Conference took a more dramatic step in 1935 when, following a trend that was overtaking professional basketball, it decided to give the home team the option of eliminating the center jump after made free throws. Three years later, both the league and the NCAA eliminated the center jump altogether (except at the start of each half or quarter), a move that had already been made in international play. This was arguably the most significant rule change the sport ever adopted, before or since.
The center jump had long been a contentious issue among basketball’s cognoscenti. The strongest voice opposing its elimination belonged to James Naismith, but by this time, his influence was on the wane. Naismith had been appointed as an original member of NCAA’s rules committee when it was formed in 1909, but he disengaged from the sport he invented while traveling abroad for several years following World War I. In 1924, Naismith returned to the States and was named honorary chairman of the rules committee for life, but as the title suggests, that was mostly a symbolic position.
Naismith viewed the center jump as akin to a kickoff in football. He worried that its elimination would allow too much scoring, and the fans would grow bored. “One of the reasons I am sorry to see the center jump relegated to a subordinate place is that it takes from the game one of the large elements of suspense—something desirable in any sport,” Naismith wrote in his memoir. “Which, do you think, appeals to the spectator the more: the actual dropping of the ball through the basket, or the suspense—the seconds when one wonders if the ball is going in?”
Wooden’s only disappointment was that Naismith hadn’t lost the argument sooner. “I’d have loved to play [more years] without the center jump,” he said. “I would have been a far more effective player because my strength was my speed and quickness.”
Despite his diminishing influence, Naismith remained a revered figure around the world. His pinnacle came in the summer of 1936, when he traveled to Berlin, Germany, to see basketball played in the Olympic Games for the very first time. Upon returning to the States, Naismith resumed his duties as athletic director and professor emeritus at the University of Kansas, where he had coached the basketball team from 1898 to 1907. When Wooden traveled to Kansas for a coaching clinic, he had the pleasure of shaking hands with the man who invented basketball. “He was a very gentle, nice person. I liked him,” Wooden said. “It was a brief meeting—a moment in time.” By the time Naismith died in 1939 of a brain hemorrhage at the age of seventy-eight, an estimated 20 million people around the world were playing his game.
* * *
Wooden played as many games as he could, but he never fully embraced life as a professional athlete. Besides the taxing commutes and rough play, the enterprise lacked competitive integrity. That was evident one night in Detroit, where the Kautskys had held a double-digit lead throughout the second half, only to wonder why the game was not ending. The players checked with the official timer (there was no scoreboard), who informed them that there were still two minutes remaining. So they played some more and checked with the timer, who once again reported that there were two minutes left. “We finally got the idea, so we went back to the center jump, and each time they’d throw the ball up, we’d stand and not move,” Wooden recalled with a chuckle. “When they made the basket that put them ahead, why, the game was over.”
Toward the end of the 1936–37 season, Wooden was invited to play an exhibition game against the Celtics for a new team based in the town of Whiting. The team’s owner was a flamboyant young automobile dealer named Ed Ciesar, and though the team lost by 20 points, Ciesar got Wooden to agree to a one-year contract. “It was big news when Wooden signed. I remember the newspapers making a big splash of it,” said Joe Sotak, another player on that squad. For the 1937–38 season, Kautsky and the other owners decided to change their name back to the National Basketball League (even though all the teams were located in the Midwest) and eliminated the center jump after every made basket. Ciesar had stocked his team with celebrity players like Wooden, and he called them the All-Americans. Their most exciting game that year came against league-leading Oshkosh. The contest was held in a brand-new, six-thousand-seat, $600,000 civic center in Hammond. With the All-Americans trailing by 2 points, Wooden banked in a layup in the final seconds to send the game into overtime. Then he sealed the win with a steal and a free throw in double overtime.
Ciesar was a good businessman, but he was no Frank Kautsky when it came to dealing with players. Wooden found that out after he and a teammate drove through a nasty blizzard to make it to a game in Pittsburgh. It was a scary trip, with their car spinning full circle several times, but they made it there by halftime. When Ciesar handed out checks to the players later that night, Wooden and his friend noticed that they were being paid half the usual amount. When Wooden asked why, Ciesar said it was because they had only played one half. Wooden protested that they had risked their lives just to make it to the arena, but Ciesar wouldn’t budge.
Though they were supposed to play a game the following afternoon, Wooden told Ciesar that he and his buddy were going back to Indiana. “He was very upset,” Wooden recalled. “He told us that we couldn’t just go home. We had another game to play. I protested that if he was going to treat us this way, we were leaving. He eventually gave us our money, but he raised an awful fuss. We agreed to play the next game, but we quit right after that.” Wooden finished out the season with the Kautskys, but all those years of diving to the floor were taking their toll. He gave up playing for good in 1939.
The National Basketball League went unchallenged until after World War II, when the Basketball Association of America was launched on the East Coast. After several years of cannibalizing each other in the hunt for the best players, the NBL and BAA decided to merge in 1949 to create a comprehensive pro league, the National Basketball Association. Wooden never played a game in the new league, but he had no regrets about quitting when he did. He had a good family, a good job, lots of good memories. Wooden had done much to push high school and college basketball to new heights. The pros would have to ascend without him.