Hall of Famer Dolph Schayes dies at 87 after bout with cancer
Hall of Famer Dolph Schayes, one of the greatest players of the early days of the NBA, died Thursday morning after a six-month battle with cancer, according to his son, longtime NBA player Danny Schayes. He was 87 years old.
“Dolph Schayes was one of the most influential figures in NBA history,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said in a statement Thursday afternoon. “He helped grow the NBA from its earliest days, emerging as one of the game’s first stars and displaying the kind of passion for competition and commitment to excellence that has come to define our league.”
Born and bred in the Bronx, Schayes starred for New York University’s basketball team in the mid-to-late 1940s, helping lead NYU — then a Division I program — to the finals of the 1945 NCAA tournament as a 16-year-old freshman. After developing into an All-American and graduating in 1948, the sought-after 6-foot-8 power forward/center was drafted by both the New York Knickerbockers of the Basketball Association of America, and the Tri-City Blackhawks of the National Basketball League, who then sold his rights to the Syracuse Nationals.
That left the New York City kid with a choice to make, one he recounted back in 2000 in a chat with Dave Anderson of the New York Times:
“I was the Knicks’ first-round choice, but that year their boss, Ned Irish, had the N.B.A. institute what amounted to a salary cap — $100,000 for the team, $5,000 for a rookie,” Schayes recalled. “That’s all the Knicks could offer me, but Syracuse, which then was in the rival National Basketball League before the merger, offered me $7,500.
“Irish couldn’t give me more than $5,000 because he would be busting the salary cap that had been his idea, but since I had an engineering degree at N.Y.U., the Knicks told me they’d get me a job with the Port Authority in the off-season as an extra salary. But nobody told me what the job was. For all I knew, I’d be taking tolls at a bridge.”
“Don’t forget that at the time, $5,000 was pretty good money,” he added. “That came out to $100 a week and I remember telling my mother when I graduated, ‘If I can make $100 a week the rest of my life, I’ll be happy.'” And when I took the Nats’ $7,500, I told her, ‘I’ll just play one year.’ But that one year turned into 16 years.”
That $7,500 offer wasn’t freely given, as Schayes once told Sean Kirst of the Syracuse Post-Standard: “When I asked for [$7,500] in my rookie year, tears came from [Nationals owner Danny Biasone’s] eyes and he said, ‘Where the hell would I get that?”‘ Waterworks or no, Biasone found it, and Schayes quickly became the centerpiece of the Nationals’ attack.
He also quickly fell in love with his newfound home, and reportedly never regretted his decision to move from the city up to Central New York. From Dan Barry of the New York Times, earlier this year:
No opponent wanted to come to Syracuse, Schayes recalls earlier this day, his huge hands making small a glass of cabernet at a modest reception for the Nats at the Crowne Plaza hotel. The winter weather was unwelcoming, he says, but gracious when compared with the fans, whose pride in their blue-collar, shot-and-a-beer city — pride in not being Boston or New York — was expressed in roars and taunts and thrown fists.
“Rabid,” Schayes says fondly. “Possessive.”
From Kirst of the Post-Standard, back in 2010:
At 82, Schayes and his wife Naomi remain in Syracuse. They are such a gracious and cheerful part of the civic tapestry that it is easy to take them for granted.
“I liked it here and felt comfortable here and it was just a wonderful fit,” Schayes said. […]
“From my point of view, this was just a wonderful place, and everyone on the street would pat you on the back and say hello, and we had an owner who preached teamwork and loyalty,” he said. Schayes has often said the Nats were built in the image of their Upstate audience: They were a fierce, dogged and emotional group, much like the spectators who turned out for their games.
Those fans got their money’s worth when they showed up to watch Schayes, who won NBL Rookie of the Year honors in 1949.
The next season, the BAA and NBL merged into the NBA — a merger that some credit, at least in part, to Biasone beating out the Knicks for Schayes’ services — he averaged 17 points, a league-leading 16.4 rebounds and 3.8 assists per game in his second season in Syracuse, earning a spot in the NBA’s first All-Star game and beginning a streak of 12 straight All-Star selections.
He bedeviled defenders with the kind of inside-out game still in vogue among big men today, equally capable of knocking down deep attempts (then taken as two-handed set shots, natch) or blowing past an overly aggressive opponent with fearless drives to the rim. From Curtis Harris of the great site Pro Hoops History:
[…] Schayes was a titan of his era and a well-rounded titan at that. He helped lay the groundwork for big men who could shoot outside, rebound in the interior, and pass with ease. Schayes’ actual method of shooting, a set shot, may be archaic but his long-distance employment of it remains the important lesson and accomplishment. He could always sucker out bigger men to defend him on the long-range bombs, which would open up avenues for his terrific passing and capable driving.
He was a cagey offensive player, one whom Celtics great Frank Ramsey once credited with originating, or at least mastering, the “bump and shoot” technique in which a ball-handler “starts in good position but then creates the foul deliberately by bumping before he shoots,” tricking the ref into blowing his whistle because “the defensive man must have fouled — on the theory that nobody would be looking for trouble if he is set for a shot.” And if you fouled him, he was a good bet to make you pay at the stripe, leading the NBA in free-throw percentage three times — making him the only player in league history to have both a rebounding title and a free-throw-shooting crown, according to Basketball-Reference.com — and finishing his sterling career with an 84.9 percent mark at the line.
Schayes was a canny passer, averaging 3.1 assists per game over the course of a 15-year NBA career and logging the NBA’s first-ever triple-double — 18 points, 22 rebounds, 13 assists — back in 1951. He was tough and resourceful, playing in 706 consecutive games before being sidelined with a broken jawbone on Dec. 26, 1961, and famously playing nearly an entire season early in his career with a broken right arm in a cast and continuing to thrive by shooting with his left hand.
He was also a fierce competitor who wasn’t to be trifled with, as evidenced by his response to some extra-physical defensive work by the rival Celtics during the first round of the 1983 playoffs. From a 1979 look-back by Marc Onigman of Sports Illustrated:
The heated rivalry centered around Boston’s Bob Cousy and Syracuse’s Paul Seymour. [Celtics coach Red] Auerbach recalls that Seymour always “played it rough” with Cousy despite the coach’s loud protests. “I warned everybody — Syracuse, the league, the press — if Seymour kept it up, we would just have to ‘do unto others,’ ” says Auerbach. […]
[…] on March 21, 1953, when the Celtics and the Nationals met in crowded Boston Garden, Syracuse quickly ran off to an 8-0 lead, but Boston went in front 22-21 at the end of the first quarter when Cousy threw in a 30-footer at the buzzer. Seymour, as expected, had been all over Cousy, so Auerbach put burly Bob Brannum into the lineup to do the same unto Syracuse’s big gun, Dolph Schayes. At 3:47 of the second period, Round 1 began. After mutual elbowing and shoving, Schayes and Brannum squared off and threw enough punches to get whistled out of the game. When Boston policemen charged onto the court to break up the brawl, Round 2 began. Syracuse’s Billy Gabor took exception to police interference and mixed it up with the cops.
The Nats had their fair share of postseason wars with the Celtics, Knicks and Philadelphia Warriors; when they made it out of the rough-and-tumble East, they were stopped short of the ultimate prize by the Minneapolis Lakers. Syracuse finally got over the top in 1955, though, besting the Fort Wayne Pistons in a seven-game slugfest for the first and only NBA championship in both Nationals franchise history and Schayes’ career.
He remained a stalwart performer throughout the team’s tenure in Syracuse, averaging 19 points and 12.3 rebounds per game over the course of 12 seasons before new ownership elected to move the team to Philadelphia and rebrand as the 76ers. At age 35, Schayes suited up as the Sixers’ player-coach, but chose to hang up his high-tops for good following the season, after averaging 5.6 points and 4.6 rebounds in 14.6 minutes per game in 24 appearances. Five decades later, he still ranks 10th all-time in free-throws made, 16th in per-game rebounding average, 26th in total rebounds, 30th in career Player Efficiency Rating, and 58th in total points, with 18,438.
Schayes stayed on as the 76ers’ coach for two more seasons, leading a Philly squad fueled by Wilt Chamberlain and Hal Greer to a 55-25 record and a playoff berth in 1966, earning Coach of the Year honors in the process. He was replaced after the season by Alex Hannum, who went on to lead the Sixers to a 68-13 record and the first championship since the move. Schayes would later briefly coach the Buffalo Braves, rolling up a 22-61 record in parts of two seasons before moving off the bench, and would serve as the league’s supervisor of officiating. He was named to the NBA’s 25th Anniversary Team in 1970, inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1972, and tabbed as one of the NBA’s 50 Greatest Players in 1996.
The rarefied air of basketball glory that Schayes reached was a heck of a long way from the playgrounds of the Bronx, and he earned every inch of his journey’s distance with a combination of natural talent, disciplined work — “He was completely tenacious, and he worked as hard as anyone ever could have,” the great Bill Russell once said — and the type of determination that responds to a broken right hand by calling for a cast and the ball, and not necessarily in that order.
“The real secret to my success was I could shoot with either hand,” Schayes told SLAM’s Alan Paul back in 2011. “Ironically, I became ambidextrous as a result of breaking my right hand. I kept on playing with a cast and had no choice but to rely on my left, which changed everything. Every clinic I’ve ever done, I tell the kids, “Go left, young man.” Tie your right hand behind your back, cover it with a newspaper—do anything to immobilize it. Learn to use your weak hand and deny your man his strong hand and you can go far in this game.”
– – – – – – –
Dan Devine is an editor for Ball Don’t Lie on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
Stay connected with Ball Don’t Lie on Twitter @YahooBDL, “Like” BDL on Facebook and follow Dunks Don’t Lie on Tumblr for year-round NBA talk, jokes and more.
