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Happy 60th Celebrating the debut of the behind-the-back dribble
We interrupt this tournament for a brief history lesson. While drinking in the first week of the NCAAs, watching Indiana State's Michael Menser, Southern Utah's Frederick House or Iowa State's Jamaal Tinsley, odds are you saw some clever guard go behind his back. And you probably didn't think anything of it. Well, today we should. For today is the 60th anniversary of the introduction of the behind-the-back dribble. Bob Cousy is often given credit for pioneering the maneuver at Holy Cross. But the Cooz was only 13 on March 19, 1941, and he wouldn't go behind his back for another seven years. Bob Davies unveiled the move in the quarterfinals of the 1941 National Invitation Tournament in the old Madison Square Garden. He was loose on a fast break. Rhode Island State's Stanley (Stutz) Modzelewski stood in his path. Without breaking stride, "the fancy Dan from Seton Hall," as Davies was then known, sent the ball around his own backside in order to continue unmolested past Modzelewski for a layup. (If you had to invent a name for the first foil for the first behind-the-back dribble, you couldn't do much better than Stanley Modzelewski.) Afterward, a sportswriter asked Long Island University coach Clair Bee, whose Blackbirds were next up for Seton Hall, how he proposed to stop Davies. "Handcuffs," Bee said. As Pulitzer-winning sports columnist Arthur Daley wrote in The New York Times the next day, "He was a blond artist who made the ball obey him." In the semifinals, Davies twice tried to go behind-the-back. But the Blackbirds' Sol (Butch) Schwartz limited Davies to a single field goal, and the Pirates' star fouled out of LIU's 49-26 victory. Longtime New York City hoops maven Joe Goldstein recently tracked down Schwartz, now 81 and living in Pompano Beach, Fla., and asked him about that long-ago game and the behind-the-back dribble. "He tried it on me twice," said Schwartz. "Both times I took the ball away from him." Goldstein also spoke with Davies shortly before his death in 1990. Davies told Goldstein that he came up with the move in practice at John Harris High School in Harrisburg, Pa., after watching former Stanford great Hank Luisetti try out the maneuver in Campus Confessions, the 1938 movie in which he starred with Betty Grable. Davies is said to have used it in game action as a high school senior. In that NIT semifinal, Bee ordered his players to send a stream of chatter at the Harrisburg Houdini: "Shoot, Bobby! Dribble, Bobby!" Mid-century trash talk, if you will. The New York writers, who by now had adopted Davies as their own, ripped Bee for his tactics. Yet Davies defended Bee, later writing the coach a letter in which he assured him he bore no grudge. Impressed by Davies' graciousness as much as his talent, Bee wound up granting him a kind of immortality. Polite, handsome and a four-sport athlete in high school, Davies became the the model for the too-good-to-be-true protagonist of Bee's Chip Hilton sports books. So today we're not only celebrating the 60th anniversary of a great basketball moment. We're celebrating a literary moment, too. Sports Illustrated senior writer Alexander Wolff is author of Big Game, Small World: A Basketball Adventure, which will be published in January 2002 by Warner Books. Send comments to thehooplife@aol.com.
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