Grandpa Sidney was there in the early days of professional basketball and he was there thirty-five years later, after World War II, when, having nurtured basketball through decades of rough, raw regional play, he helped conceive the National Basketball Association. By then, of course, the number of Jewish players, who had been a dominant force on the court, had begun to dwindle. After the war, Jews began clambering out of the ghettoes that have always spawned most of our hungriest and best athletes. But Sidney had always been a short, dumpy coach and front office guy-ironically, he’d never been that good at the game-and in the late 1940s he had a visionary businessman’s belief in the game that would someday give Wilt Chamberlain, Larry Bird, and Michael Jordan a forum for their special skills.
When I was a little boy, he started at last to make some real money from the game. Since he was not a materialistic man, he decided to invest some of it for my sister and me, his only grandchildren. Twenty years later, that decision put Beth through law school and me through the Jewish Theological Seminary.
Back in the 1970s, when Grandpa Sidney was in his seventies, the National Basketball Association employed him to provide a variety of services of which he was uniquely capable. Among these jobs was the annual making of the league schedule, which, in the days before computers, required Sidney to hole up in a New York City hotel room with fistfuls of airline schedules and arena calendars. Miraculously, he would emerge a week or two later, like Moses with the tablets, clutching a handwritten plan. When the first computers came along, the league took the job away from Sidney and gave it to a machine. However, the computers of the day were unable to accomplish in any amount of time what Sidney Fogelman was able to do in a week or two on a legal pad, and so they gave the job back to him until they made better computers.
Grandpa Sidney thought his only grandson-me-would make a crafty point guard, quick off the dribble and able, as they say, to see the floor. (Sidney ’s only son, my father, had disappointed him in this area by proving to be no more gifted on the court than he had been.) After Grandma died, Sidney came to live with our family and he taught me the game in endless conversations, as well as on our suburban playground, where he would stand on the sidelines in a brown double-breasted suit and stained fedora, barking intructions at my friends and me as he had once screamed himself blue in the face coaching his most famous team in the 1920s and ’30s, a team composed entirely of Philadelphia and New York Jews.
Because Sidney had the gift of making others want to please him, I devoted far more time to the game than my talent warranted, and only gave it up in high school when even my own loving parents had to admit I was no good, and Sidney himself, now in his eighties, was beginning to retire from the affairs of the world and lose the aura of biblical authority that made me practice my jump shot long after I’d given up any hope it would go in the basket with any frequency.
Grandpa Sidney held on for several more years, body slowly failing but mind terrifyingly intact. In his last years, I’m quite certain he still would have been able, if called upon, to make up the NBA schedule. Although Sidney Fogelman himself was a barely observant Jew, he was so proud a product of first-generation American Jewish culture that the formal aspects of Judaism seemed almost beside the point. He may not have attended shul with any regularity, but he understood Hebrew and spoke Yiddish and he could effortlessly drop a quote from the Bal-shem Tov into a sentence about the pick-and-roll off the high post. His spiritual gene found its way to me, and around the time I went off to college, I decided I wanted to become a rabbi.
This pleased him enormously because his own father had been a poor but religious man in Poland. He was the shammes-the caretaker-of a small synagogue, whose job it was to sweep the sanctuary after service, dust the Torah, fold the yarmulkes and the tallises. In his last two or three years, when I was at the seminary in the city, Sidney would sit with me at my parents’ kitchen table, and after a few perfunctory comments about the triangle offense or the approaching NCAA basketball tournament, we would settle into a discussion about Israel, moral relativism, destiny, or a number of other topics that I, as a future rabbi, was ravenous to explore.
It was during one of these visits toward the very end of his life that Grandpa Sidney told me the story that only now, years later, do I feel safe in relating. I can see him now across the speckled Formica expanse of kitchen table, his face deeply furrowed, his nostrils dense with thick black hairs my mother would trim for him every few weeks.
“Did I ever tell you the story about the ’37-’38 season with the Planets?” he said, referring to the Philadelphia Planets, the all-Jewish professional basketball team that he owned and coached, which won numerous Eastern League championships in that faded, sepia-toned era.
“Which story?” I asked.
“The one I’m about to tell you.”
“I have no idea whether you’ve already told me the story you’re about to tell me.”
He waved a liver-spotted hand in my direction. “What do you know?” he said. This was his favorite rebuke-“What do you know?”-as if the listener were an idiot who couldn’t be trusted to understand what Sidney was telling him. Often the phrase would be accompanied, for emphasis, by a light backhanded slap against my chest.
“It’s impossible that I told you this story before, because never before have I told it to a single soul. You, Ronnie, my favorite grandson, are the first.”
“I’m your only grandson. Why am I so lucky?”
“Because you I like,” he replied.
This was a high compliment. Sidney often said about others, including people he might have led you to believe he liked: “Him I wouldn’t give you a nickel for!” or “I wouldn’t give you a penny for the whole lot of them!” To be liked by Sidney Fogelman was a particular honor, especially in his own mind. It was really hard to say what gave him this power, the power to make you infinitely glad that he approved of you, but you accepted it because people like Sidney, as I’ve learned over the years, are what give life its shape and its deeper meanings.
“Let me hear it,” I said, plucking a Marlboro from the pack in my pocket.
“No smoking,” Sidney said with coachlike command. I put the cigarette away.
“Now, in 1937, Ronnie, I had perhaps my best group of boys ever. Every one a Jew. Which wasn’t so unusual in those clays because I’d had many Planets teams that were every one a Jew. Just like the other teams were all micks or dagos or”-he seemed to pause here in deference to some particular racial sensitivity-“Negroes. We had Gordy Metzger, Vic Fine, Ted Morris, Leon Skolnik, Bakey Gumbiner. You name it.”
On his fat fingers he counted off some of the great Jewish ballplayers of that era, not one of them taller than six foot three, names familiar to me from the Philadelphia Planets’ memorabilia he kept in a box under his bed in the spare room: programs, newspaper accounts, autographed team photos. The team jerseys were emblazoned with Stars of David. They were proud to be Jews, these immigrants’ meaty kids, and tough enough to stand up to anyone who objected.
“And Al Newberger,” Sidney went on. “God, that young man could shoot the ball. Two-handed set shots. High-arcing sons-of-bitches. They used to hit the rafters in that Union City dump the Arrows played in. But he hardly ever said a word. Even on the court he used to take his licks with a quiet smile. Then he’d give it back to the guy two quarters later when his back was turned. And, Ronnie, I’m not talking about a time when your eight-million-dollar-a-year putz whines to the ref about a tap on the chin under the basket. Back then, you’d get clocked and the ref wouldn’t even blink. No blood, no foul. Sometimes it was like a prison yard riot.