Hot Potato: How Washington and New York Gave Birth to Black Basketball and Changed America's Game Forever
A science writer for the National Institutes of Health, Kuska spent more than a decade researching this book—and it shows. Kuska’s first nonfiction volume will quench the thirst of even the most devout basketball historian. He highlights the true origins of black basketball in the hope that his version of this story becomes common knowledge among basketball players, fans and historians alike. Black basketball didn’t plant its roots, as previously believed, in the impoverished, inner-city courts of the East, Kuska says. Nor did it begin with Hall of Famers Elgin Baylor and Dave Bing in the 1950s, nor in NYC in the 1930s, when early amateur players Fat Jenkins and George Fiall ruled the blacktop. Kuska writes that black basketball arrived much earlier, in 1907, when Ed Henderson, the first black man to teach P.E. in an American public school, walked onto the courts of a segregated Washington, D.C., YMCA. And it blossomed when he vowed to start a league for African Americans. Black basketball later made a calculated move into American sports as a way to integrate students into the top white colleges in the north and overcome Jim Crow laws, segregation and racism. Kuska spices the accounting of these historical events with profiles of major players and comments on the game’s development; the result is a book that will please any serious hoops fan. 20 b&w; illustrations.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.