Basketball fans in the city have the opportunity of winning three pairs of tickets to the traditional metropolitan court classic between City College and New York University, to be staged at the Garden on February 27.
All you have to do is select a first and second Jewish all-Metropolitan quintet and give your reasons for your choice. Those who write the best letters, in the opinion of The Bulletin sports board, will receive good seats for the Garden game next month. This contest will close on February 21.
LULL IN COLLEGIATE SPORTS
With the annual hiatus for midyear examinations upon them, it might be well to look back and see just what the basketball-playing colleges of the Metropolitan area that boast of Jewish stars on their quintets have done in the past two months.
There are six teams with Jewish basketeers on them in the city. The standing of these teams follows:
W. L.
N. Y. U. 11 0
C. C. N. Y. 6 4
Brooklyn 6 3
St. Johns 8 3
L. I. U. 11 1
B’klyn Pharm 7 3
N. Y. U. not only leads with the number of games won, but it also is in the van in the number of Jewish boys on the team. City College is second, Brooklyn third, St. Johns and L. I. U. are tied for fourth and Brooklyn Pharmacy is last on the list.
Watch these teams in action. See if Sid Gross is a better forward than Ben Kramer or Sam Winograd. Keep your eyes peeled for Rubenstein, Schulman, Kaplinsky Gotkin, and Terjesen. Pick the best five and win a pair of tickets to the Violet-Beaver basketball game.
ART LASKY IN FOG
Maurice Lasky and Gig Rooney, managers of Art Lasky, arrived in town the other day, coming by train, but the heavyweight boxer, Art, was down in Fort Worth, Texas, waiting for the fog to lift. Art, paired with Jimmy Braddock in the Garden’s heavyweight offering February 1, is riding the skyways from Los Angeles and finding them a trifle rough.
The managers, with nobody to manage, spent the afternoon denying that Lasky would box Maxie Baer in a ten-round exhibition bout next March in Chicago.
“I told Nate Lewis, the promoter, that Art would fight Baer ten rounds to a decision or twenty rounds no decision,” Brother Maurice declared. “Art isn’t the joke Baer wants people to believe.”
IN THE MAIL BOX
Milton Greenberg, of the Bronx, asks why there aren’t so many Jewish boxers in the amateur and preliminary ranks today as there were several years ago.
This can be answered very easily. Jewish boxers in the game are in it not so much for the prestige and glory, but for the money that can be made out of the cauliflower racket. Today, as in the last ten years, there are many Jewish lads among the top-notchers and headliners, but very few among the prelim boys. This is, we believe, due to the fact that the Jewish lads have the correct slant on the boxing game. As long as the public was willing to reward leading fighters with huge purses, the boys were willing to stand up to the gaff in the ring.
BOXING SENSE
The scarcity of Jewish fighters in the amateur and prelim ranks is due to this boxing sense. Having spoken to more than a dozen of fair-to-middling fighters who quit the ring, we are sure of it. These lads were willing to serve an apprenticeship before galleries partly filled with disinterested spectators who had come early to secure choice seats. They were willing to wait their turn in preliminaries for very little money but for necessary experience and prestige. But, if the first three or four fights disclosed that they were not good enough to climb out of this class, they were the first to recognize their shortcomings and quit while the quitting was good.
Parental objection had to do somewhat with their quitting also. However, whatever the reasons for this, we believe that the mere fact that so few Jewish boxers are in the amateur and preliminary ranks of the fight game is a healthy sign. There is nothing more pitiable than a punch-drunk fighter who refuses to quit or who cannot afford to drop out of the game.
JEWS ON BIG TEN FIVES
The Western Conference basketball season, according to a Spokesman flash, clicked into high gear last week with more Jewish players participating on their respective quintets than ever before in the history of the game. Ten Jews of Big Ten teams are either regulars or substitutes.
Sid Rosenthal is considered the outstanding man of the lot. He is a regular forward on the University of Iowa five. Speedy and shifty, Rosenthal played an instrumental part in the first three victories of his team. He is third high scorer in the Western conference league. The Iowa campus paper relates that Rosenthal is exceptionally useful to speed up Iowa’s offense against a tiring team. He is very aggressive, a swift dribbler and an excellent passer. He is a junior, and won his letter last year as a soph. He hails from Marshall High School in Chicago, where he starred in three sports. He is five feet seven and weighs 145 pounds.
OTHERS NAMED
Another Jewish boy at Iowa is Fred Schwartz, a junior forward, who has seen but little experience this season because of a slight leg injury. He hails from Dubuque. At Michigan Jack Teitlebaum is the only member of the quintet. Milt Rosenfeld and Jack Grossberg are bearing the Purple of Northwestern into the basketball wars. Stan Kaplan and Bob Weiss are two prominent members of the Chicago five. Both are guards. And of course, Mickey Kupperberg and Eddie Stelzer are the New York representatives on the Minnesota basketball tournament. Abe Mikelson is the sole Jewish player with the fighting Illini.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
