NOTABLE ARKANSANS

He was born in 1915 in Hot Springs, the son of a seamstress; there is no documentation of his father. Soon after his birth, his mother moved to Memphis and then to Chicago. It is unclear whether she took her son with her, or left him with relatives. Little is known about his childhood except, by the early 1930s, he was working for the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), probably in Chicago, as a director of summer youth sports.

He enrolled in the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where he was an accomplished athlete in multiple sports, especially basketball. While in school, he served as an assistant basketball coach and did some officiating, graduating with a degree in physical education in 1943.

After graduation, he was drafted into the Army and eventually rose to the rank of captain. In the Fifth Army he became a sports instructor, serving in Italy. He discovered many Italians thought of Black Americans no different from white Americans so, after the war, he chose to stay in Italy and was hired by the president of the newly organized Italian Basketball Federation to train all the national basketball teams. He served as head coach of the Italian men’s basketball team from 1947 to 1951, guiding the team to the London 1948 Olympics.

In his position, he traveled throughout Italy, educating players and coaches alike in, what he called, “the fundamentals of basketball.” Sandro Gamba, an Italian and American basketball halls of famer, said that after more than a decade of heel clicking and straight-arm salutes, the Italians were “taught how to move.” They called him “il professore” (the professor) and he taught them the “tiro in sospensione” — the jump shot: a new way to shoot a basketball — even in America. He immersed himself in Italian culture: loving opera, pizza and the Italian jazz scene.

In 1951, he was hired as head coach of the Turkish national basketball team, taking them to the Olympics in Helsinki, Finland, the following year. In 1953, he returned to Italy, where he coached baseball, rugby, track and basketball for the CUS Milano club. He developed innovative training methods that worked for multiple sports. Who was this Arkansan and American sports ambassador, who contracted a kidney disease and, in 1959, died on a plane while flying over the Atlantic en route to Chicago to receive a kidney transplant? Answer on