In 1933, while covering a basketball game at Manhattan College as a junior sports reporter for the New York World-Telegram, he found the doors to the small gym shut. He was forced to climb through a window, and in the process tore a hole in his suit pants. This convinced him that college basketball games needed larger venues, and the following year he persuaded the directors of Madison Square Garden to grant him the concession for college basketball by promising them a percentage of the gate, with a minimum of $4,000 a game. He didn’t have to put up a cent of his own money; it was the middle of the Depression and on many nights the Garden was dark.

Basketball games rarely ran longer than ninety minutes, which did not strike most spectators as a satisfying return on their dollar, and so Irish came up with the idea of offering doubleheaders: four teams playing two games back-to-back for the price of one ticket. His first event, with a highlight game between New York University and Notre Dame, easily exceeded the $4,000 target, and Irish himself, who had been making forty-eight dollars a week at the World-Telegram, personally took home $1,100. By the end of the year, Irish had arranged eight doubleheaders that overall had drawn 99,528 paying fans. The idea caught on throughout the east, with dozens of college teams traveling a circuit of big-city arenas, and Irish soon was named executive vice president of Madison Square Garden, where he still owned the basketball concession. The hustling young newshound had been transformed into a haughty, calculating executive; it was said of him that he could move the Empire State Building if he thought there was a loose buck under it.

The meeting Irish organized at the Hotel Commodore took place nine months after the Japanese surrender aboard the U.S.S. Missouri officially ended World War II. Veterans were streaming home—245,000 a month from the navy alone—in search of work and diversion. At the time, baseball was the sport that mesmerized Americans. Stadium crowds had more than doubled since the beginning of World War II; the Yankees were drawing more than two million home spectators a season. But Ned Irish had made college basketball a large draw, and Max Kase, sports editor of the Journal-American, the largest afternoon newspaper in New York, had become convinced that professional basketball could prove just as successful. Kase had talked to the owners of several large arenas about starting a professional league. The Depression and the war had created a long stretch of lean years for the arena owners. With the war over, attendance was rising, but the no-strike agreements made by labor unions during the war were also over, and strikes were breaking out around the country; just the previous month, Harry Truman had signed an executive order seizing the railroads when a strike by rail workers threatened to cripple the country. The unions that had contracts with the arenas were demanding substantial raises, and Max Kase had argued that a professional basketball league could provide a new source of revenue to the arena owners without incurring a substantial new investment.

The country’s first pro league, the American Basketball League, had been started in 1925, during the first great American sports explosion, with teams such as the New York Gothams and the Original Celtics, but it folded in the early years of the Depression. In 1937 the National Basketball League was formed, primarily in the Midwest, where companies such as Firestone and Goodyear and General Electric sponsored teams in their hometowns of Akron and Fort Wayne. The league, organized by promoters, limped along for years, but it lacked facilities and sports editors generally ignored it, and as a result it never developed much of a following.

The men meeting at the Hotel Commodore, by contrast, were arena owners, with connections to sports editors due to the hockey teams most of them owned and the horse shows, bicycle races, and boxing matches they booked. Their arenas were much larger than the ones in which the National Basketball League played, and since they were in bigger cities than the cities that were home to the NBL teams, they had the opportunity of drawing larger crowds. It seemed all upside. Max Kase had hoped to start the New York franchise himself and rent out Madison Square Garden, but Irish informed him that the Garden Corporation would need to own the team, and Kase had to be satisfied with a cash payment of several thousand dollars for his efforts to found the league. At the meeting, the owners drew up bylaws and established rules for the Basketball Association of America (BAA), named a commissioner, and created charter franchises in eleven cities.

 

When Red Auerbach read about the formation of the BAA, he thought it might actually work. The audience was there. After all, really good college players attracted passionate followings. But once they graduated there was no real league for them and so they vanished. Pro basketball for the previous twenty-odd years had been pretty lame, in Auerbach’s view, but that was because it had been handled badly: bush teams playing in bush towns in a bush league. Handled correctly, it had genuine potential.

Auerbach’s wife had just had a baby, but he was, at twenty-eight, still young. He could play it safe and remain a high school coach for the rest of his life, or he could take a gamble, try to get in on this new league at its launch, and see where—and how far—it would take him. Auerbach’s father, who’d left Minsk at the age of thirteen and arrived in New York unable to speak English, was a man who understood that it was impossible to get ahead in the world without taking a chance, and so was his son.