IT seems unimaginable now that basketball that has created more Afro-American idols than any other was once a white preserve, so it is worth marking the first black pioneer of the NBA 75 years on.
Charles ‘Chuck’ Cooper may not have the global adulation.
Of a Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Steph Curry, Magic Johnson or Shaquille O’Neal.
But were you to ask any one of those black colossuses of sport for his contribution to the sport.
And their passage into it they would as one place him on the highest pedestal.
Because on this day back in 1950 the Pittsburgh native became the first Afro-American to play in the NBA.
Featuring in the Boston Celtics‘ 107-84 loss to the Fort Wayne Pistons.
That it was the Celtics that broke the colour barrier is a matter of great pride for Bostonians.
Because, of course, others were not always as welcoming to athletic achieving black Americans.
Best of Chuck
The towering 6ft 5ins Chuck though bore, as so many did in those days, the humiliation with heroic grace.
Not that Walter A Brown’s and Red Auerbach’s Celtics stopped there.
With Chuck going on to form a holy trinity of African-American basketball players.
With Earl Lloyd and Nat ‘Sweetwater’ Clifton, who would transform the parquet.
That the Celtics weren’t prepared to be dictated to by anyone who they would or wouldn’t play was clear when Brown hit out at the racists.
And said at the draft: ‘I don’t give a damn if he’s striped, plaid or polka dot. Boston takes Charles Cooper of Duquesne (College).’
The Holy Trinity
Even against, or perhaps because, of the maltreatment they would receive on the road they rose higher and greater.
Red’s Big Three faced discrimination in restaurants, hotels, and the very arenas in which they played.
Even when a new hotel on the exhibition circuit refused Chuck service or fans from a rival city shouted racial slurs.
Chuck would also hold court for the Harlem Globetrotters, Milwaukee/St. Louis Hawks.
And the team he faced in that historic first game 75 years ago today, Fort Wayne Pistons.
The pioneer
