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The Forgotten Basketball Pioneer Who Made Stephen Curry Possible
How a college team and its innovative star player from the 1930s explain the NBA in 2017
By Ben Cohen / WALL STREET JOURNAL
May 25, 2017
Walter Vincenti is 100 years old and the winner of NASA’s lifetime achievement honor for aeronautical engineering. He’s seen some things. One of the most remarkable things he’s seen was a basketball game that featured a glimpse of Stephen Curry—half a century before Stephen Curry was born.
Vincenti was the student manager of Stanford’s basketball team in 1936 when it traveled across the country by train, stopped to meet James Naismith along the way and finally arrived several days later. He never forgot what happened next.
“We made a trip to New York, played in Madison Square Garden and revolutionized the game,” Vincenti said.
The sold-out crowd on Dec. 30, 1936 didn’t believe anyone could beat the team Stanford had come to play, Long Island University, which hadn’t lost in years. As soon as the game began, though, thousands of fans realized the basketball they were watching was different from the basketball they were used to watching.
This long-forgotten game turned out to be an unexpected bellwether for the modern NBA. To understand why basketball looks the way it does today—when the best teams shoot far away from the basket and pass like the ball has cooties—it helps to understand how it looked a long, long time ago.
Stanford played unlike any other team of its era because it had a player named Hank Luisetti. Naismith was basketball’s inventor, but Luisetti was its innovator. In the age of the set shot and hook shot, Luisetti popularized a better idea: the jump shot.
It was as if Luisetti were playing another sport altogether. “He was unusual in his day,” Vincenti said. “But people soon began to imitate him, and basketball became a more wide-open game.”
He was such a revelation that Luisetti was discussed with the same breathless wonder that basketball fans reserve for someone else now.
“He was the spitting image of another young man named Stephen Curry,” Richards Lyon, a contemporary of Luisetti’s at Stanford, wrote in an email to The Wall Street Journal before he died last year.
Curry is 6-foot-3, 190 pounds; Luisetti was 6-foot-3, 185 pounds. Curry overhauled his mechanics as an undersized high-schooler so he could shoot without getting blocked; Luisetti experimented while playing with older kids from a young age so he could shoot without getting blocked. Curry scored the most points of his life at Madison Square Garden; Luisetti had the most important game of his life at the original Madison Square Garden.
But first Luisetti and his Stanford teammates had to get there. They boarded a train that rumbled across the country until it reached Kansas City, where Stanford coach John Bunn introduced them to the man who invented their sport: James Naismith himself. “It was quite a thrill,” Vincenti said.
The people in Kansas were nicer than the people in New York. Stanford’s players didn’t get any special recognition before the biggest game of the college-basketball season. Instead they got skepticism.
Madison Square Garden was packed with more than 17,000 fans who’d heard about Stanford’s peculiar style of play and its star who shot with one hand. But they didn’t understand why that mattered, and they didn’t think it was enough to beat No. 1-ranked Long Island. They needed to see it for themselves.
A basketball fan’s knowledge back then came from his local newspaper columnists, and New York’s sportswriters caught their own train to see Stanford days before their game against Long Island. The stories they filed might seem familiar to anyone who’s read about the Warriors lately.
Golden State wants to play with joy. Stanford’s players were dubbed “The Laughing Boys.” The Warriors at their best are a sight to behold. “It is really a grand team to watch,” one reporter wrote of Stanford. Curry and Klay Thompson are transcendent shooters. “Hank Luisetti and [Art] Stoefen have shots that can only be stopped by carefully placing a lid on the top of the basket,” he wrote. Golden State’s stars are dangerous because they can do everything on a basketball court. “Every regular is a crack player who can score, pass and run,” this article said. “No mere commonplace defense can halt them.”
The relationship between basketball then and basketball now is like the relationship between goldfish the fish and goldfish the food. They have the same name, but they’re nothing alike.
Luisetti and his teammates brought color to a sport that had been stuck in black and white. Stanford’s players moved off the ball. They played off each other. They made the game faster and more fluid—and that made it fun. They put on such a show that fans who came to root for Long Island left only after giving Stanford a standing ovation. And they were especially astounded by Luisetti’s audacity.
“Some of his shots would have been deemed foolhardy if attempted by another player,” one reporter wrote after watching him.
Stanford beating Long Island, 45-31, was one giant leap for basketball. New York’s players and coaches initially said the one-handed shot would ruin the sport. They eventually realized Luisetti was right and East Coast teams needed to play more like this one team from the West Coast. They risked extinction if they didn’t adapt.
But the bizarre thing about the first game that resembled modern basketball is that almost nobody remembers it.
Luisetti has a statue on Stanford’s campus, and the school lists him alongside Google’s founders among its most innovative alumni. “He’s certainly known here,” said Stanford basketball radio analyst John Platz, who wrote a book on the first 100 years of the school’s basketball team. “Why isn’t he more revered?”
Even people in NBA front offices aren’t familiar with the person who made their teams possible. Luisetti, who died in 2002, played so long ago that everyone with memories of seeing him play is at least 90 years old now. There aren’t many of them left.
Vincenti is one of them. He went to work for NASA when it was known as NACA—the “S” for space was still aspirational—and later founded a Stanford program in science and technology. He doesn’t watch much basketball anymore.
But he’s aware of how much the game has been transformed—and who’s partly responsible. The Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers wouldn’t play the way they do if it weren’t for the 1936 Stanford team. The same might be said of them, Vincenti said, simply because of the number of threes they shoot now. “No one ever thought of doing anything
like that,” he said.
How a college team and its innovative star player from the 1930s explain the NBA in 2017
By Ben Cohen / WALL STREET JOURNAL
May 25, 2017
Walter Vincenti is 100 years old and the winner of NASA’s lifetime achievement honor for aeronautical engineering. He’s seen some things. One of the most remarkable things he’s seen was a basketball game that featured a glimpse of Stephen Curry—half a century before Stephen Curry was born.
Vincenti was the student manager of Stanford’s basketball team in 1936 when it traveled across the country by train, stopped to meet James Naismith along the way and finally arrived several days later. He never forgot what happened next.
“We made a trip to New York, played in Madison Square Garden and revolutionized the game,” Vincenti said.
The sold-out crowd on Dec. 30, 1936 didn’t believe anyone could beat the team Stanford had come to play, Long Island University, which hadn’t lost in years. As soon as the game began, though, thousands of fans realized the basketball they were watching was different from the basketball they were used to watching.
This long-forgotten game turned out to be an unexpected bellwether for the modern NBA. To understand why basketball looks the way it does today—when the best teams shoot far away from the basket and pass like the ball has cooties—it helps to understand how it looked a long, long time ago.
Stanford played unlike any other team of its era because it had a player named Hank Luisetti. Naismith was basketball’s inventor, but Luisetti was its innovator. In the age of the set shot and hook shot, Luisetti popularized a better idea: the jump shot.
It was as if Luisetti were playing another sport altogether. “He was unusual in his day,” Vincenti said. “But people soon began to imitate him, and basketball became a more wide-open game.”
He was such a revelation that Luisetti was discussed with the same breathless wonder that basketball fans reserve for someone else now.
“He was the spitting image of another young man named Stephen Curry,” Richards Lyon, a contemporary of Luisetti’s at Stanford, wrote in an email to The Wall Street Journal before he died last year.
Curry is 6-foot-3, 190 pounds; Luisetti was 6-foot-3, 185 pounds. Curry overhauled his mechanics as an undersized high-schooler so he could shoot without getting blocked; Luisetti experimented while playing with older kids from a young age so he could shoot without getting blocked. Curry scored the most points of his life at Madison Square Garden; Luisetti had the most important game of his life at the original Madison Square Garden.
But first Luisetti and his Stanford teammates had to get there. They boarded a train that rumbled across the country until it reached Kansas City, where Stanford coach John Bunn introduced them to the man who invented their sport: James Naismith himself. “It was quite a thrill,” Vincenti said.
The people in Kansas were nicer than the people in New York. Stanford’s players didn’t get any special recognition before the biggest game of the college-basketball season. Instead they got skepticism.
Madison Square Garden was packed with more than 17,000 fans who’d heard about Stanford’s peculiar style of play and its star who shot with one hand. But they didn’t understand why that mattered, and they didn’t think it was enough to beat No. 1-ranked Long Island. They needed to see it for themselves.
A basketball fan’s knowledge back then came from his local newspaper columnists, and New York’s sportswriters caught their own train to see Stanford days before their game against Long Island. The stories they filed might seem familiar to anyone who’s read about the Warriors lately.
Golden State wants to play with joy. Stanford’s players were dubbed “The Laughing Boys.” The Warriors at their best are a sight to behold. “It is really a grand team to watch,” one reporter wrote of Stanford. Curry and Klay Thompson are transcendent shooters. “Hank Luisetti and [Art] Stoefen have shots that can only be stopped by carefully placing a lid on the top of the basket,” he wrote. Golden State’s stars are dangerous because they can do everything on a basketball court. “Every regular is a crack player who can score, pass and run,” this article said. “No mere commonplace defense can halt them.”
The relationship between basketball then and basketball now is like the relationship between goldfish the fish and goldfish the food. They have the same name, but they’re nothing alike.
Luisetti and his teammates brought color to a sport that had been stuck in black and white. Stanford’s players moved off the ball. They played off each other. They made the game faster and more fluid—and that made it fun. They put on such a show that fans who came to root for Long Island left only after giving Stanford a standing ovation. And they were especially astounded by Luisetti’s audacity.
“Some of his shots would have been deemed foolhardy if attempted by another player,” one reporter wrote after watching him.
Stanford beating Long Island, 45-31, was one giant leap for basketball. New York’s players and coaches initially said the one-handed shot would ruin the sport. They eventually realized Luisetti was right and East Coast teams needed to play more like this one team from the West Coast. They risked extinction if they didn’t adapt.
But the bizarre thing about the first game that resembled modern basketball is that almost nobody remembers it.
Luisetti has a statue on Stanford’s campus, and the school lists him alongside Google’s founders among its most innovative alumni. “He’s certainly known here,” said Stanford basketball radio analyst John Platz, who wrote a book on the first 100 years of the school’s basketball team. “Why isn’t he more revered?”
Even people in NBA front offices aren’t familiar with the person who made their teams possible. Luisetti, who died in 2002, played so long ago that everyone with memories of seeing him play is at least 90 years old now. There aren’t many of them left.
Vincenti is one of them. He went to work for NASA when it was known as NACA—the “S” for space was still aspirational—and later founded a Stanford program in science and technology. He doesn’t watch much basketball anymore.
But he’s aware of how much the game has been transformed—and who’s partly responsible. The Warriors and Cleveland Cavaliers wouldn’t play the way they do if it weren’t for the 1936 Stanford team. The same might be said of them, Vincenti said, simply because of the number of threes they shoot now. “No one ever thought of doing anything
like that,” he said.