This Season, Give Black League Basketball

Thanksgiving looms at the back end of the week, and we all know what that means. Yes, Santa will soon be marching past Times Square with his Macy's cohorts to open the floodgates of another Christmas shopping season.

But this year needn't be so bad. Why not take the frenzy and stress out of shopping for that basketball fan on your list and get him or her the newest in BLB designs from Eric Williams Apparel?

Join the Toronto Raptors forward as he captures past glories of Black League Basketball. Celebrate the rich heritage of the game's founding fathers that flourished during those formative years before the advent of our modern-day National Basketball Association.

Yes, it's the Negro Basketball League, the Mecca of professional basketball in the 1920s and 1930s.

Each leather jacket in this commemorative line is emblazoned with the logos of all twelve franchises — six eastern division teams sported on the left sleeve, six western teams on the right. Slip on one of these bad boys and journey into the past. Cheer the teams your great-grandfather enjoyed in his youth.

Before there ever was a Minneapolis Lakers or a Fort Wayne Pistons or a St. Louis Hawks, the Negro Basketball League was there. In cities like Cleveland and Washington and Detroit, it was there. In poverty-stricken neighborhoods like West Philly and Harlem and Roxbury, it was there.

During the difficult days of Prohibition, the stock market crash, and the Spanish Civil War, they offered our ancestors an escape from the harsh realities of everyday life.

In the Nation's Capital, as a country mourned the loss of Warren G. Harding, its 29th President, anticipation of the upcoming Washington Reps season offered residents their only distraction from grief.

After Al Capone executed seven hoodlums one St. Valentine's Day morning, fearful neighborhoods could at least take stock in knowing the Chicago SouthSiders were hosting the Detroit Engineers later that evening. And there were always seats available.

That fateful day when the Hindenburg went down and claimed 36 lives in the process, the playoff run of the Camden Earls surely consoled those afflicted residents of Central Jersey.

Like baseball's Negro Leagues — the alma mater of superstars Josh Gibson and Satchel Paige — the Negro Basketball League produced some of the greatest players of its day. Among the rolls that would shape the game for years to come were pioneers with such colorful names as James "Windmill" Jones and Lenny "Three Fingers" Willis, the godfather of the no-look pass.

Given the plight of African-Americans in this dark part of our nation's past, one can only shudder at the prospects of how the latter acquired his nickname.

What? You don't recall the Camden Earls or old Three Fingers? Apparently, you are not alone, ye of little faith.

It seems some of basketball's greatest scholars, such as Matt Zeysing of the Basketball Hall of Fame, Claude Johnson of the Association of Professional Basketball Researchers, and Susan Rayl, a Ph.D. who teaches sports history in the State University of New York system, are having some misgivings as well.

Their search for this elusive Negro Basketball League can be likened to an episode from CBS's Cold Case, albeit with a slightly longer subtitle: "65 Years, 7 Months, 12 Hours Missing". During interviews given to the Toronto Star's Jim Byers, who help cast light on Eric Williams' endeavors, each expert goes so far as to imply the league never existed.

"There's never been a black African-American or Negro Basketball League," Dr. Rayl recently confided to Byers.

Preposterous!

Just because no one can find it does not mean it never was. In this regard, the Negro Basketball League is a bit like Santa Claus. None of us has seen him – excepting on his Thanksgiving morning march, and even then it may be merely a Macy's employee incognito - but we nonetheless believe.

Besides, we have as Certificate of Authenticity the words of Mr. Williams himself.

"Those logos had to come from somewhere," the fashion mogul points out. "Those leagues and those logos, to me they sound like they exist. The story sounds good to me so I'm rolling with it."

Williams, of course, raises a valid point. It's not like computers on millions of desktops across the country could simply produce these things from some inserted magical disc.

As in baseball, efforts of grassroots movements like the Negro Basketball League were eventually successful in breaking through the color barrier. Within a decade after Eric says his league disbanded, Earl Lloyd became the Jackie Robinson of basketball when he entered a Washington Capitols game on Halloween night, 1950.

Somewhere in a crowded bar among costumed patrons that evening, a tall lanky pitcher by the name of Satchell Paige sat around a transistor radio listening to that Capitols broadcast. A man next to him with two missing fingers lifted a heavy mug to his lips and muttered how it should have been him.

It is for the memories of men like Three Fingers Willis, whose career shall not be in vain, that Eric Williams now toils.

Granted, there is a consumer cost involved. Leather is not as inexpensive as it was in 1940, nor are desktop publishing kits and those iron-on sheets you buy at Staples.

This Christmas, Eric's teammates will be blessed. The Raptors forward has promised an authentic Detroit Engineers BLB jacket to Detroit native Jalen Rose. Charlie Villanueva, the rookie from Queens, will be the proud wearer of a Harlem Knights edition. Being from New England, a Roxbury Patriots jacket is atop my own list.

For those of you who persist in your unbelief, Santa will be bringing you coal.

As for me and Eric, we believe.