LAPCHICK, Joseph Bohomiel ("Joe")

(b. 12 April 1900 in Yonkers, New York; d. 10 August 1970 in Monticello, New York), basketball player and coach of both college and professional teams who was elected to the James Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1966.

Lapchick was the son of devout Catholics Frances Kassick, a homemaker, and Joseph B. Lapchick, a Czech immigrant who was a policeman in Yonkers, the town Lapchick always considered home. Lapchick was active in sports early on and by age twelve was over six feet tall. He began playing basketball at that time for a church team called the Trinity Midgets, and although he was awkward and gangly, he worked hard at the game. As the oldest of seven children, Lapchick was forced to go to work at an early age to help support the family. After finishing grade school, he worked in a factory as a machinist's apprentice and played basketball at night and on weekends. By age fifteen he was playing on a local semiprofessional team for $5 per game, and in 1917 he began playing on professional teams, negotiating his pay of $7 to $10 on a per game basis, while still working at the factory for $15 per week.

In 1919 Lapchick quit his machinist's job to play center for Holyoke in the old Western Massachusetts League and for Schenectady in the New York State League, two of the many professional leagues in the Northeast at that time. Over the next three years, Lapchick played on the New York Wanderers, Mount Vernon in the Interborough League, Troy in the New York State League, the Visitations in the Metropolitan League, and the Armory Big Five, establishing himself as one of the top centers in the region. He had grown to six feet, five inches tall, and was now both agile and fast for a big man.

In 1923 Lapchick signed a contract with New York's Original Celtics, the finest team of the era, and was a stalwart on this amazing team until 1928, when they disbanded after the 1927–1928 season. During that time the Celtics created modern basketball as it was played at the end of the twentieth century, with their switching man-to-man defense and their great passing and footwork on offense. In the years that Lapchick was a member of the Celtics, they were the acknowledged champions of basketball, as they traveled throughout the country playing the best U.S. teams. In the 1926–1927 and 1927–1928 seasons, the Celtics were members of the newly formed American Basketball League (ABL), which was the first truly national, as opposed to regional, professional league. The Celtics dominated the ABL, winning championships both years; the team was disbanded before their dominance created financial hardship for the league.

Lapchick and a number of the former Celtics ended up on the Cleveland Rosenblums, whom Lapchick led to two more ABL championships before the league succumbed to the financial exigencies of the Great Depression. Lapchick ended his ABL career in the 1930–1931 season, the league's last year, on the Toledo Redman squad. Following the demise of the ABL, Lapchick reconstituted the New York Celtics with financing from the singer Kate Smith, retaining a few of the old players, and the team returned to "barn-storming," or travelling from town to town playing either local teams or a team that accompanied them, with payment usually guaranteed or a percentage of the gate receipts. From 1930 to 1936, Lapchick served as both a player and the coach for the new Celtics. They often played the New York Renaissance, the top African-American professional team, and the two teams sometimes toured together.

On 14 May 1931 Lapchick married Elizabeth Sarubbi; they had three children. Having a family made constant touring more tedious and he readily accepted an offer in 1936 to coach Saint John's University, then located in Brooklyn, New York, even though he had never gone to high school or college, nor had he actually been formally coached at all. Nevertheless, Lapchick was an outstanding coach and extremely popular with the players, administrators, fans, and media. Lapchick coached the Saint John's basketball team from 1937 to 1947, and then again from 1957 (when it was located in Jamaica in Queens, New York) until his mandatory retirement in 1965. As a college coach Lapchick and his teams had a record of 334–130 and won the National Invitational Tournament (NIT) four times (1943, 1944, 1959, 1965). This was at a time when the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) tournament took no more than sixteen teams, and the NIT was considered just as prestigious.

In 1947 Lapchick accepted an offer to coach the New York Knickerbockers of the National Basketball Association (NBA), and he did so until February 1955, when he resigned. During that time his Knicks teams won 326 games, lost 247, and had the best record in the Eastern Division in both the 1952–1953 and 1953–1954 seasons. The Knicks were defeated, however, in the NBA Finals for three straight years, once by the Rochester Royals and twice by the Minneapolis Lakers, led by George Mikan. Throughout his coaching career, Lapchick suffered from a variety of ailments brought about by stress at work; his stomach was often "tied up in knots"(in his words), he slept poorly, and he had two heart attacks.

After his retirement from Saint John's in 1965, Lapchick served as the sports coordinator for Kutscher's Country Club in Monticello, New York, and continued his long-time association with the G. R. Kinney Shoe Company as an athletic footwear consultant. In 1966 he was elected to the James Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. In August 1970 he suffered a third heart attack while playing golf at Kutscher's and, after a brief hospitalization, died on 10 August 1970. He is buried in Yonkers.

Lapchick was one of the first great "big men" in basketball and was certainly the most agile. He was the missing link who extended the greatness of the Original Celtics after their regular center became ineffective in 1923. Despite a lack of formal education, he displayed a keen mind that allowed him to learn Celtics basketball quickly as a player, and to coach successfully at both the college and professional levels.

The best account of Lapchick's life is in his autobiographical Fifty Years of Basketball (1968). His scrapbooks and memorabilia are at the James Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts, and at Saint John's University in Jamaica, New York. Lapchick's son Richard, the founder and director of the Center for the Study of Sport in Society at Northeastern University, details his father's playing career in the 1930s in Five Minutes to Midnight: Race and Sport in the 1990s (1991). Also see Al Hirshberg, Basketball's Greatest Teams (1966); Leonard Koppett, Twenty-four Seconds to Shoot (1968); Sandy Padwe, Basketball's Hall of Fame (1970); Leonard Koppett, The Essence of the Game Is Deception (1973); Neil D. Isaacs, All the Moves (1975); and Murry Nelson, The Originals: The New York Celtics Invent Modern Basketball (1999). An obituary is in the New York Times (11 Aug. 1970).

Murry R. Nelson