Benny and the Nets

His name on the Queen’s register was Paul Benjamin Rudolph Newman, Arts’39, but he was Benny to family and friends.

His fellow Gaels, when he pounded the rock on the hardwood at the Queen’s gym in the early ’40s, called him “O’Toole,” an admittedly odd nickname for a Jewish kid from St. Catharines, Ont.

The Globe and Mail in 1946 called him “one of the Dominion’s greatest authorities on [basketball],” after the two St. Catharines teams he coached or managed won three national titles in two years and he had been recruited to mount Canada’s first two big-arena basketball games, a charity doubleheader at Maple Leaf Gardens.

And on June 6, 1946, in New York City, high-powered U.S. sports promoters and the owners of North America’s largest arenas called him Mr. Newman when they conferred upon him, at no cost, a 25 per cent ownership in the Toronto Huskies, one of 11 founding teams in the league that would become the National Basketball Association (NBA).

By then, Benny “O’Toole” Newman was just 26 years old.

The various sobriquets applied to young Benny Newman tell you a lot about the man. He was Benny, not “Benjamin” Newman, because he never took on airs, according to his grandson, Jordon Williams, even as he was transforming his father’s St. Catharines scrapyard business into a nationwide metal-processing corporation big enough to supply structural steel for the construction of Toronto’s SkyDome (now Rogers Centre).

Mr. Newman’s nickname from his Queen’s basketball years – O’Toole – was “known to all court fans,” according to a column in the Kingston Whig-Standard in March 1942. He earned it, the column said, for his “clowning” on the court. The reference is likely to Ollie O’Toole, a then-popular radio personality whose schtick included trading celebrity impersonations with comedian Art Carney.

Mr. Newman remained “a cut-up and a card” throughout his life, his grandson says, particularly at the big family gatherings he hosted.

But it is the Globe and Mail’s assessment of Mr. Newman as a kind of national basketball guru that most defines his early life, says Mr. Williams, who has been campaigning to get the former Golden Gael into both the Canadian Basketball Hall of Fame and the international Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass.

Benny Newman didn’t make the cut at the international hall of fame this year, his first nomination for the honour. However, NBA commissioner Adam Silver took a personal interest in Mr. Newman’s file, says his grandson, assigning someone to liaise with Mr. Williams in documenting his grandfather’s contributions to the sport.
 
The culmination of Mr. Newman’s contributions came on Nov. 1, 1946, when the first game of what would become the NBA tipped off at Maple Leaf Gardens. The Toronto Huskies – the franchise Benny Newman had helped to create and had a stake in – met the New York Knickerbockers on the same hardwood floor that Mr. Newman had paid to have built for the charity match he promoted the previous year.

The game, attended by more than 7,000 fans paying up to $2.50 a ticket, was hard fought to the end. The Knickerbockers prevailed by a single basket; the final score was 68–66. The game was the highlight of the Huskies’ underwhelming single season. The league would not embrace another Canadian team for almost half a century.

Seventy-five years to the day after that first game – Nov. 1, 2021 – the NBA kicked off its 75th anniversary season with a matchup between the Toronto Raptors and the New York Knicks at Toronto’s Scotiabank Arena. The Raps wore throwback Huskies uniforms and the game was played on a court with the original Huskies logo: a sled dog huffing steam. But in all the media hoopla attached to that 75th anniversary rematch, you’d be hard-pressed to find even the briefest mention of Benny Newman.

“He was one of the founders of the NBA,” says Mr. Williams. “He deserves to be recognized.”

Growing up in St. Catharines, Mr. Newman learned to love sport early. It gave him a community.

“In those days, the kids didn’t know and didn’t care what your nationality or religion was,” Mr. Newman told the St. Catharines Standard in 1989. “On a Sunday, I’d go to Hebrew school, the Protestants and Roman Catholics would go to their churches or Sunday schools, then we’d all meet and play hockey behind the St. Nicholas school on Church Street, or basketball at a gymnasium.”

Mr. Newman had been an all-around athlete in high school, starring in football and track at St. Catharines Collegiate, according to the Standard, but he was passionate about basketball, inspired, says his grandson, by the hardwood exploits of his older brother, Norman Newman, Arts’39.

As a young Jewish athlete in the 1930s, he may also have felt a special affinity for the game. In the sport’s early years, because of its popularity among inner-city immigrant kids, some of the biggest names in basketball were Jewish – names like Shikey Gotthoffer, Sonny Hertzberg, Nat Holman, and Red Klotz, according to Douglas Stark’s book, When Basketball was Jewish: Voices of Those Who Played the Game. Abe Saperstein, founder of the legendary Harlem Globetrotters, had already done more to promote the game than any other single person.

And in August 1936, just a month before Mr. Newman began studying at Queen’s, a basketball team of players from Windsor and Victoria called the V8s had won the silver medal in the first-ever Olympic appearance of the sport, a tournament played in Berlin in Hitler’s Germany. Among the V8s’ stars was Irving “Toots” Meretsky, a Jewish kid who had been only too happy to thumb his nose at “der Führer.”

Benny Newman came to Queen’s, according to his grandson, because it was the choice of his brother, Norman. Mr. Newman the younger arrived on campus at just 16 years old, apparently as successful in the classroom as in the gym. Because of his early admission to Queen’s, he and his older brother were able to graduate the same year.

But one degree was not enough for Mr. Newman. After graduating with a major in history, he started a second degree in biology, according to Queen’s records. The degree wouldn’t be completed, but it meant that Mr. Newman was a Golden Gael in both the ’30s and the early ’40s.

By then, Queen’s had a long history in basketball. Canada’s first-ever intercollegiate basketball game pitted Queen’s against McGill at Kingston’s YMCA gymnasium on Feb. 6, 1904. The game was played just 13 years after basketball had been invented by McGill alumnus James Naismith.

Mr. Newman, a 5’10” forward, was described in a 1942 Whig-Standard column as “a great team player, fine ball handler, consistent scorer, and all-around player.”

In the Tricolour yearbook for 1939, Mr. Newman is seated front row in the senior men’s team photo. His brother Norman, the team manager, is standing right behind him. The team went 2–13 that year, but the win–loss record doesn’t tell the whole story. The Gaels had close-fought contests against rivals McGill and the University of Toronto and held their own against highly ranked U.S. college teams during a tour south of the border.

In the 1941 Tricolour, Benny Newman is listed on the university’s intermediate men’s team. By then, his beloved big bother Norman had left campus to work at the family business in St. Catharines. Tragedy, however, was just around the corner, and it would cut short Benny Newman’s time at Queen’s.

A squib on the sports pages of The Queen’s Journal on Nov. 14, 1941, tells the story: “It was with regret the news of the death of Norman Newman, Arts’39, was learned here the other day. Although Norm was not known to many of the present student body, he will be ‘remembered as an athlete and a student.’ He played on the senior basketball team in 1937–38 and managed it in his final year. His death came after a lengthy illness. He was a brother of Ben Newman, an undergraduate from St. Catharines, Ontario.”

Benny Newman would stay on at Queen’s for another year. By then, three years into the Second World War, the university had cancelled intercollegiate sports. But Queen’s allowed its facilities to be used by the Combines, a regional basketball team composed of the university’s student athletes, including Mr. Newman, and others in the city.

Mr. Newman left Queen’s in 1943. His father needed help with his business after Norman’s death and Benny had to step up, says his grandson, Mr. Williams.

Benny Newman was not through with basketball, however. In the fall of 1943, inspired by the belief that sports make boys into better men, he created the first of two St. Catharines basketball teams that would bring the city glory.

“The first thing that had to be done was to organize a real good senior team,” Mr. Newman wrote in a retrospective for the St. Catharines Standard in 1961, “one which would give the lads something to aim at.” He padded his team, the Merritton Hayes Hellcats, with American stars and coached them to a Canadian championship in 1944.

The ensuing basketball fever in St. Catharines allowed Mr. Newman to pursue his real goal: creating a strong local minor squad. The Hellkittens won the junior national championship in 1945, the same year the Hellcats won their second senior title. “Without exception,” Mr. Newman would later recall, “those boys have gone on to be successful in many lines of business.”

Suddenly, the former Golden Gael was the most talked-about man in Canadian basketball. The Toronto Rotary Club approached him to put together a charity basketball event at Maple Leaf Gardens, the cathedral of Canadian sports. Frank Selke, acting on behalf of the Toronto Maple Leafs’ managing director, Conn Smythe, granted permission to use the Gardens, but would not spring for a hardwood floor to be laid over the ice. Undaunted, Mr. Newman paid for the new floor himself.

The doubleheader, featuring the Canadian champion Merritton Hayes Hellcats against U.S. amateur champion Phillips 66ers and the Rochester Royals taking on the Fort Wayne Pistons (now the Detroit Pistons), was a sellout.

Two weeks after the event, an impressed Mr. Selke approached Mr. Newman to represent the Maple Leafs in a meeting in New York City in which big-city arena owners and National Hockey League (NHL) team bosses would hash out the details of a new pro basketball league, the Basketball Association of America (later the NBA).

That June, 26-year-old Benny Newman found himself in the vast, ornate lobby of New York’s Commodore Hotel getting ready to negotiate with NHL legends such as Walter Brown, owner of the Boston Bruins, and James Norris, owner of the Detroit Red Wings. It didn’t faze him a bit.

“This kid had unbelievable gumption and chutzpah,” Mr. Newman’s grandson says.

With a Toronto franchise in his pocket, Mr. Newman returned home to help put together his team. The Huskies hired Ed Sadowski, a 6’5” centre from Seton Hall University, to be player-coach. The team reportedly made overtures to Jackie Robinson, then playing baseball with the Montreal Royals, but Robinson was already having talks with the Brooklyn Dodgers and decided to stay with baseball. Among the other Huskies was 6’8” George Nostrand. To promote the opening game, the Huskies offered a free ticket to anyone taller than the big man.

Benny Newman’s team made history with its first game that fall, but its fortunes soon waned. Sadowski quit after the first few games, shifting to the Boston Celtics. General manager Lew Hayman and one of the team’s major backers, Eric Craddock, had divided loyalties; they both had a piece of another Canadian sports franchise just finding its feet, the Montreal Alouettes. And when Mr. Newman’s father fell ill early in the season, the Huskies’ most avid promoter had to reluctantly pull back.

The team went 22–38 for the season, finishing in last place. The crowds in Maple Leaf Gardens dwindled and the Huskies folded after one season. And yet, Canadian interest in basketball grew exponentially in the next two decades, thanks largely to the success of the professional basketball league Benny Newman had helped create.

When a star-studded Canadian men’s basketball team takes to the floor at the Paris Olympics this summer – representing Canada’s best hope to medal in the sport since its 1936 Olympic debut – they might want to spare a thought for a stocky former Golden Gael who stirred Canadian excitement in basketball long before the Toronto Raptors were hatched.