Dolph tells unsung story of Jewish NBA giant

Baseball Hall-of-Famers Hank Greenberg and Sandy Koufax are household names both in their sport and in the pantheon of Jewish professional athletes. But why has basketball Hall-of-Famer Dolph Schayes not achieved similar name recognition?

Noted sports historian Dolph Grundman, author of the newly published biography “Dolph Schayes and the Rise of Professional Basketball” (Syracuse University Press), blames demographics and technology.

“I think Dolph is not better known because he played in a small city before televised sport became so pervasive,” he says. Only after the “domination of the Boston Celtics in the late ’50s and the ’60s” did the popularity of basketball expand across the nation, says Grundman.

Though he may fly under the radar, Schayes occupies a special place in National Basketball Association (NBA) history. Named to the NBA All-Star team 12 times, he was known for his high-arcing jump shot (named “Sputnik” by opposing players) and lifted the Syracuse Nationals (who later became the Philadelphia 76ers) to the 1954-55 NBA championship while leading the league in minutes per game, rebounds, and points per game. He was also the NBA’s Coach of the Year in 1966 and coached the U.S. team to a gold medal in Israel’s 1977 Maccabiah Games, an event for which Schayes raised attention and money. His NBA career even extended to officiating, as he supervised the league’s referees from 1966-70.

Despite his varied and accomplished basketball resume, Schayes’s story has not been significantly documented—until now. Grundman’s book details the life and career of a son of Romanian Jewish immigrants who the author would watch on television as a teenager. The NBA star and his fan had one unique thing in common.