简体中文
Starting next season, N.B.A. teams will begin wearing small patches advertising a sponsor. Right there on the upper left of LeBron James’s jersey will be the winged-foot logo of the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company.
Ads on uniforms are a common sight in some sports, but not in the major American professional leagues. Not everyone is enthused about the commercialization of uniforms, and there have been derisive comments about the “Philadelphia Stubhubs” or the “Sacramento Blue Diamonds.”
But this is not the first time top-level professional basketball teams in the United States have worn sponsors’ names. It isn’t even a first for Goodyear.
What would you think about a team called the Chicago Studebaker Flyers? The Toledo Jim White Chevrolets? The Anderson Duffey Packers?
The Boston Celtics will be sponsored by General Electric next season, but they follow in the footsteps of the Fort Wayne General Electrics. Then there were the Indianapolis Kautskys, named after Frank Kautsky, a wholesale grocery store owner.
The Firestone Non-Skids battled the Goodyear Wingfoots in a 1937 game at the Firestone clubhouse.
That was the reality of the National Basketball League, a Midwestern professional outfit that existed from 1937 to 1949 and eventually became part of a merger to form the N.B.A.
And yes, one of the National Basketball League clubs was the Akron Goodyear Wingfoots. Not to be confused with their crosstown rivals, in basketball and tire sales, who were actually called the Akron Firestone Non-Skids.
The Wingfoots’ history dates to 1918, as a company team playing in amateur competitions. The rivalry with Firestone was fierce, with both teams scheming to get an edge. In 1919, Firestone was looking for an athletic director, and it turned for advice to a Firestone employee, Wendell Willkie, who recommended Paul Sheeks, who would lead the team for decades. One of their players in that era was a certain Charles “Chuck” Taylor, who went on to a notable career in sneaker sales.
When the professional Midwest Basketball Conference started in 1935, the Wingfoots and Non-Skids became charter members, little knowing the league would eventually evolve into a multimillion-dollar international enterprise.
The league was deeply rooted in the Midwest and the cities and towns that often revolved around a few big local businesses. It seemed natural for a league there to consist largely of company teams. Many of the players worked in the plants in the off season, and the owners of the teams “saw this as much a civic duty as a way to gain free advertising,” wrote Murry R. Nelson in “The National Basketball League: A History, 1935–1949.”
After their playing days were over, many stayed with their companies.
A Wingfoot player, right, in 1950. At left, a team member in March 1932. One player recalled pay of $12 weekly in 1937.
In 1937, the Midwest Basketball Conference changed its name to the National Basketball League to avoid confusion with the Big Ten, which was then often referred to as the Midwest Conference. The inaugural champions of the newly named league were the Wingfoots. The Non-Skids won the next two seasons.
Basketball, invented in 1891, was still changing in the 1930s. The new league made a huge stride forward by eliminating the center jump after every time a team shot fouls, creating a more free-flowing game. (The center tip after baskets was eliminated soon afterward.)
Like many start-up leagues, its membership was volatile. Teams sprouted up, folded, and changed names. The brand of ball in the small Midwestern gyms was rough and ready, which fans seemed to appreciate.
Buddy Jeannette, a Hall of Famer with the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons, remembered playing a game in a bar, where tables had to be cleared out before the action began, according to The Official N.B.A. Encyclopedia.
No one was getting rich. Russ Ochsenhirt of the Wingfoots remembered getting $10 or $12 a week in 1937, the equivalent of maybe $200 today. That was less than his rent. “After a year I owed so much money there I had to pay them back so much every week,” he told The Akron Beacon Journal in 1996.
The Goodyear Wingfoots warming up at their home court for a game in January 1951.
Still, despite the makeshift nature of the league, it was the best professional basketball in the country. At the time, the World Professional Basketball Tournament was held annually so that teams from around the country could face off. Teams from various leagues competed, as well as barnstorming clubs like the legendary New York Rens. And N.B.L. teams won the tournament in seven of its 10 years. (To give you a sense of how different the basketball world was, the winner in 1940 was a pre-comic Harlem Globetrotters team and the final score was 31-29.)
Back then, the professional game was often overshadowed by college ball. Indeed, in 1941, a team of college all-stars beat the Oshkosh All-Stars, the champions of the N.B.L., 35-33, in front of more than 20,000 in Chicago Stadium and repeated that feat in 1942.
The N.B.L. was largely white, but not exclusively so, with a handful of black players dotting the rosters. Many of the best black players instead played for touring teams like the Rens and Globetrotters. In 1948-9, the Rens were admitted to the N.B.L. as the Dayton Rens, becoming the first all-black team to compete in a primarily white league.
The N.B.L. was the first landing place for the biggest star in basketball, the towering 6 foot 10-inch George Mikan, after he left DePaul. In 1946, Mikan signed a five-year deal at $12,000 a year with the Chicago American Gears. It was reported at the time to be the largest-ever deal for a basketball player.
The league managed to survive the Depression and World War ll, but it struggled in the late 1940s. The Gears tried to form a new league, which lasted just three weeks, then folded. Their players were drafted by other N.B.L. teams, with Mikan heading to the Minneapolis Lakers, whom he led to the title in 1948.
Goodyear Wingfoot players in November 1950.
At that time, the biggest threat to the league was starting up in the Northeast. The Basketball Association of America was formed mostly by owners of hockey teams looking to fill their arenas on off nights. The league had less-talented players than the N.B.L. but the advantage of playing in big cities like New York, Philadelphia and Boston.
Quickly enough, four N.B.L teams, including the Minneapolis Lakers, defected, and the two leagues then agreed to merge in 1949. The result was the N.B.A.
Writing in The New York Times, Arthur Daley saw the new N.B.A. as a step forward, but still had a healthy dose of skepticism. He contended that pro basketball was “slightly worse than pro football — if such a thing be possible — as a sure-fire method of throwing away money.”
The N.B.L. was the junior partner in the merger for financial reasons. Its teams played in small arenas with crowds numbering perhaps 2,000, while big-city B.A.A. teams like the Knicks could play in front of far more people.
But the N.B.L.’s talent shone through. In the first season of the N.B.A., 1949-50, Syracuse, the only N.B.L. team in the Eastern Division, won by 13 games over the Knicks of the B.A.A. The first N.B.A. title was won by the Lakers and Mikan in 1950, and the first six titles all went to former N.B.L. clubs.
Goodyear Wingfoot players at a banquet in February 1951.
Even today, the DNA of a number of N.B.L. teams survives, although none of them under the same name.
Besides the Lakers, the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons (or just Zollners) are now the Detroit Pistons. The Buffalo Bisons, later the Tri-Cities Blackhawks, made stops in Milwaukee and St. Louis before becoming the Atlanta Hawks. The Rochester Royals made their way to Cincinnati, and Kansas City, and are now the Sacramento Kings. And the Syracuse Nationals, the league’s easternmost team, became the Philadelphia 76ers.
Not the Akron Goodyear Wingfoots though. The team left the N.B.L. after 1942 and began playing in lower-level leagues, like the National Industrial Basketball League, where they faced off against the likes of the Caterpillar Diesels and the Stewart Chevrolets. Larry Brown once played for the team (and worked in the factory), and it won the A.A.U. championship twice in the 1960s. But Goodyear pulled out in 1970.
Now the Wingfoot is back on a professional basketball uniform in a faster, more athletic, richer game transformed by time.
LeBron James and Kyrie Irving are unlikely to be asked to work for 20 bucks or play on a bar floor, but they, too, will be Wingfoots.
(THE NEW YORK TIMES)
