Slants on Sports

Hank Greenberg, the slugging first-baseman of the American League champions, met Miss Millicent Hirsch, national ranking girl’s champion, at the Maccabi dinner last week….Both promised to do something for the other…in their field…Vic Hanson, coach of the Syracuse teams, cannot tell the Singer twins apart although he has coached them for three years… Hanson claims he has nightmares at times in which Milt, the center, gets out at end, while Walt, the wingman, is in trying to pass the ball…. Benny Leonard used to be champion of Eighth street…. It was his first title…. Benny’s first purse was the winner’s share in a fifty-cent fight in the backyard of a poolroom…. He collected thirty kopecks…. Harry Newman, quarterback of the New York Giants pro football team, is the biggest eater on the team, despite the fact that he weighs only 180 pounds…. Barney Hyman, New Utrecht track mentor, promises another indoor and outdoor championship track team…. Happy Furth, former Violet track ace and member of the 1932 Olympic team, is Barney’s assistant…. Dick Fishel, former Syracuse backfield star, is now playing with the Bay Parkway’s in Brooklyn…. Yudy Cooper, the pet and pride of maestro Benny Friedman this season, made his pro debut with the Parkway’s yesterday…. The five-to-one defeat to which the Hakoah soccer team suffered at the hands of the Hatikvoh’s is causing a lot of talk around town…. Millicent Hirsch, Baroness Levi, and Barney Miller are the only three Jewish women in amateur tennis with national ranking…. Miss Charlotte Epstein, coach of the Women’s Swimming Association, believes there is only one Jewish girl in America who stands a chance of making the 1936 Olympic team…. She is Janice Lifson…. Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom dethroned Jimmy Slattery in 1930 and gave Slats a return match and won…. He has fought 223 battles in his long fistic career…?

HAVE YOU HEARD THAT… ?

Benny Leonard’s reason for not so many Jewish preliminary fighters these days is the small purses…. Irving Jaffe was taken for a Swede when he won the 5,000 metre race in Oslo…. Jack London, the great handball player, is a star soccerite on the Hatikvohs…. Dave Levine, the butcher boy from Jamaica, is one of the best exponents of the flying tackle as used in the rassling ring…. Alex Levinsky, new defense man for the Ranger’s Hockey team, played his first game for the New York sextet last week in Detroit…. Abraham Kupchik and Isaac Kashdan still head the fourteen competitors in the championship tournament at the Manhattan Chess Club…. Marvin Stern promised to run a dead heat with Milton Sandler at a benefit track performance last Winter and then won by a hair-breadth margin…. Bill Freimuth, tackle on the Minnesota eleven, is slated for all-American honors….. He is a Jewish lad weighing 220 pounds…. Eddie Kahn is a star guard on the North Carolina team…. Harry Hoffman, former intercollegiate champion and crack track man at N.Y.U., has just filed his Maccabi membership application…. ?

BASKETBALL DRIBBLES…

Nat Holman, peer of basketball coaches and rated the best player in the country, told your scribe that this year’s C.C.N.Y. quintet would be one of the best in years…. The Lavender five started practice in September and has shaped up better than the coach expected. Holman is not a crybaby of the Lou Little or Gil Dobie type. He says what he means. Little or Dobie would probably tell a sports reporter that he didn’t see any conceivable methods of producing a winning team with so little material and so few men with previous basketball experience.

Holman is building his attack around Sam Winograd, captain of this year’s quintet and an outstanding floor man. Winine has played two years on the Varsity team and captained his Frosh five in 1931. His last year earned him all-American honors as a court-star.

BRONX YOUNGSTER MAY GET BIG LEAGUE BREAK…

The Bronx builds baseball players. The latest recruit from the razzberry center of the world is going South in the Spring under an optional contract with the Giants. It’s the dream of every boy and for Sammy Red Solomon the dream has come true.

But Sammy considers himself a seasoned veteran, especially since he’s been through the mill. He stood on the hot corner of third base at thirteen and stopped all the fast ones that the Chicago Clubs could bat down to him.

This young Bronx sand-lot star with the Kiwanis Club was under optional contract with the Chicago Cubs in the very first year of his teens. He reecived wide publicity as the youngest player ever to sign and travel with a major league ball club.

And, but for a happy and clever bit of surgery last year, this might very well be one of those “I – wonder – what’s – become – of” stories.

In a sandlot game in the Bronx in the Summer of 1932, a potential Joe Medwick came careening into third and down went Red in a heap, with a compound fracture of the left leg. They said that Red would never play again but the Yankee ball club physicians fixed him perfectly.

THAT SOUTHERN TRIP HIS ONE HOPE

Red still looks like an impish, freckle-faced Huckleberry Finn ready to float down the Mississippi on some sly errand. He admits he’s played ‘hookey’ often to get in a few hours of baseball.

Sammy got further than Huck did in school though he didn’t like it any better. He would be a junior if he went back to Monroe. He made the all-city team last year at the Bronx school playing with Joe Greenberg, brother of the famous Hank. (Incidentally, Hank told us that he has everything to do to keep his brother Joe in the scholastic ranks.)

Sammy, however, admits with a wide grin that he wants to do nothing else but play baseball—well the Polo Grounds can be sure of eight customers every day— his three brothers and five sisters.

Close contact with big leaguers has been Red’s latter luck, since he went with the Cubs back in 1929 under Joe McCarthy.

He hopes he makes the grade when he goes south with the Giants next Spring.

THE SPORTING CALENDAR COLISEUM—WRESTLING TONIGHT

Dave Levin, latest Jewish sensational exponent of the flying tackle, meets Hans Schnabel, of Germany, in the feature finish attraction at the New York Coliseum tonight.

Hans Martin is paired against Tony Morelli in the semi-final. Four other time limit contests are billed to make up a very attractive card.

Si##eone de Cuizolfi, Genoese Jew, married Bi##akhanim, reigning pricess of the Taman peninsula in the Crimea in 1419.