Chris Boucher is the author of the new book, “Harry “Bucky” Lew: A Biography of Basketball’s First Black Professional” The book tells the story of how Harry “Bucky” Lew leapt over pro basketball’s color wall in 1902 and continued to integrate every single role in the game over the next 25 years. He was the first Black player, coach, manager, referee, and franchise owner in otherwise white leagues. His accomplishments were well documented in the newspapers of his day, but he has largely been forgotten, despite his assist to the Dodgers in finding a home for their first Black players in the United States and the full integration of all major league sports that soon followed.

Chris is a lifelong basketball fan and resident of Lowell, Massachusetts and hadn’t heard of Bucky Lew until he started researching the history of basketball in Lowell. He was shocked to learn all that Lew had accomplished and now hopes to get him his proper due.

On this episode Mike & Chris discuss the remarkable life of Harry “Bucky” Lew, the first black professional basketball player. Lew's significant contributions to the sport include breaking color barriers as a player, coach, manager, referee, and franchise owner within predominantly white leagues from 1902 onward. The discussion highlights the historical context of Lew's achievements, emphasizing his role in advancing racial integration in professional basketball and his pivotal influence on subsequent generations of athletes. Boucher articulates the challenges Lew faced, including racial discrimination and physical confrontations during games, shedding light on a largely forgotten yet crucial chapter in basketball history. As we explore Lew's legacy, we aim to bring greater awareness to his story and the profound impact he had on the evolution of the sport.

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Get educated as you listen to this episode with Chris Boucher, author of the new book, “Harry “Bucky” Lew: A Biography of Basketball’s First Black Professional”.

Website - https://chrisboucher.net/

Buy the Book - https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/Harry-Bucky-Lew/

Email - chris@chrisboucher.net

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Lou provided that example to people so that he was something who the fans, the press and the players respected, but both as a player and a leader.

Chris Boucher is the author of the new book Harry Bucky Lou A Biography of Basketball's First Black Professional.

He was the first black player coach, manager, referee and franchise owner in otherwise white leagues.

His accomplishments were well documented in the newspapers of his day, but he has largely been forgotten despite his assist to the Brooklyn Dodgers in finding a home for their first black players in the United States and the full integration of all major league sports that soon followed.

Chris is a lifelong basketball fan and resident of Lowell, Massachusetts and hadn't heard of Bucky Lou until he started researching the history of basketball in Lowell.

He was shocked to learn all that Lou had accomplished and now hopes to get him his proper due.

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Get educated as you listen to this episode with Chris Boucher, author of the new book Harry Bucky Lou A Biography of Basketball's First Black Professional.

Hello and welcome to the Hoop Heads Podcast.

It's Mike Cleansing here without my co host Jason Sunkel tonight, but I am pleased to be joined by Chris Boucher, author of the book Harry Bucky Lou A Biography of Basketball's First Black Professional.

Chris, welcome to the Hoop Heads pod, man.

Thanks for having me, Mike.

Appreciate it.

Appreciate your interest.

Happy to be here.

Absolutely excited to have you on.

Looking forward to diving into the book.

I had a chance to read it over the past week in preparation for the podcast.

Really enjoyed it.

As I said when we first connected, had no idea who Bucky Lou was going into the reading and our conversation.

So for me, not only was it an entertaining book, but also one that, as a basketball fan, felt like it made me more educated about some of the early history of the game.

So before we dive into the nitty gritty details of the book, just share a little bit about the book itself, give us the overview and tell people where they can find it as people are tuning in here to the pod.

Sure, I could do that.

So the book is a biography of Bucky Lou.

As you mentioned, Bucky Lou is basketball's first black professional.

So both pretty stunning early accomplishments.

He wasn't done there.

He stayed in the game another 25 years.

By the time he was done, he had integrated every conceivable role in basketball, from player to coach to manager to referee and even franchise owner.

So that's kind of the high level overview of the book as far as where to get it.

The publisher is McFarland, so you can certainly get it from their website.

It's also available at other at the usual online places, wherever good books are sold, as they say.

Awesome.

All right, so before we dive into the book itself, let's go away and talk a little bit about you as an author and your background.

Just tell me a little bit about how you came to become an author and what again got you interested in in sports and in this story in particular.

Sure, I can do that.

So after my kids were a certain age and didn't need me so much, I decided to go back to school and get my master's in creative writing.

And as a part of that, I wrote part of a book, which I finished shortly thereafter.

I enjoyed that experience, so I wrote another.

As I was finishing up that one, I heard about Bucky Lou for the first time.

And as I dug into him, I learned that he had not been the subject of a book before and decided to take that on.

So my connection to Bucky Lou is that we're from the same town, basically.

From the same neighborhood.

So even though it was a lifelong Llewellyn from Lowell, Massachusetts, and that that is the same town that Bucky Lou is from.

And actually my grandparents were in the same neighborhood that he was when he was finishing up his playing career.

I had not heard of him previously.

So I wanted to look into kind of old time basketball in my own backyard after learning a little bit about it, after reading another book by Douglas Stark.

And when I looked into it, I discovered that a neat fact was that my old neighborhood had a basketball team.

But even more interesting than that, it was actually the first integrated professional basketball team in the US So I was pretty much done by that, tried to learn as much as possible about that.

That led to one book.

I tried to move on from Bucky Lou and write another one.

But because I was researching things in the same era, I kept uncovering new facts.

And so I decided to do a second book.

This one is full nonfiction with all 600 citations, which I was not.

Which I was pleased to be able to use.

And so I figured that at that point I had, you know, done what I kind of had set out to do to write the book that Bucket would have deserved.

All right, so let's start with just the process of researching the book.

Throughout the book, you obviously have lots of quotes from newspapers at the time and descriptions of games and descriptions of players being assigned to teams, players switching teams, accounts from fans, and different things, again, all from newspaper sources.

So just tell me a little bit about the research projects process for the book and how you go about.

How do you find those newspapers that are 100 plus years old and go back to those and be able to pull anything out that you can actually turn into a cohesive story like you did.

So that's a great question, because at first I didn't know.

So when I first stumbled into Bucky Liu, he had popped up in a Google search.

It probably said the typical kind of footnote treatment that he gets, that he was basketball's first black pro, and nothing else.

But I had written a book by Douglas Stark, who wrote the Ford for the.

It was actually about a Jewish team.

So I decided I wanted to look into my own neighborhood, as I had mentioned previously.

So I asked him, like, what do I do?

I wasn't sure that I'd get a response, but he actually responded immediately.

And he highlighted the fact that in my hometown in Lowell, Massachusetts, I could go to the UMass Lowell center for Lowell history, which had an archive on Bucky Lou.

So that really got me started, exposed me to the kind of the length and breadth of his career.

And from there I knew I had a lot more research to do.

So I went online.

Basically, I was fortunate in that when I developed an interest in Lou, a lot of the older newspapers in the area had been digitized.

So I was able to access them online and do keyword searches instead of kind of flipping through old newspapers or even the microfiche.

So that really helped a lot.

Especially when you consider the fact that they had a 25 year career.

So.

So, yeah, a lot of.

A lot of that online old newspapers.

There are a couple of people that were still around that had connections to him.

For example, his granddaughter still lives in the Boston area.

I was able to meet with her a couple of times, talk through things with her.

Still trying to make.

Maintain contact as we try to do more for Lou going forward.

Also, um, I was.

And I was able to speak to him.

Now.

He had not seen Lou play.

He had not seen his father play, but he remembered hearing the stories his father had raved about Lou and what a quality person and player he was and even leader of that team.

So that's really the bulk of my research.

So a lot of newspaper reading.

But it was nice to talk to a couple people that had a direct connection to him as well, to help make it real.

With all the accomplishments that you mentioned right off the top in terms of integrating the game in so many different ways, why do you think that Bucky Lou is a guy that was sort of lost to history?

Because again, before you and I connected, never heard of him.

I had no idea that he even existed.

Why do you think that he's been so overlooked in history?

Yeah, so it's a good question and it's one I could relate to because about five years ago, I had no idea who he was, even though I was a basketball fan.

So I think part of it is just the era.

I didn't know what happened in between.

I didn't wonder about what happened in between, I suppose because no one's really promoting it.

So the NBA wasn't around then.

So it's not part of their history.

So they have no reason to talk about it.

That's unlike baseball because you did have major league baseball going way back and they, and they still kind of connect to that history today.

So I think that's part of it, just the fact that it was, it's a lost era almost in basketball.

Another factor I think is once you start to look into it, you realize that basketball is somewhat different than it is today.

I mean, I think you could call it the dead ball era of basketball, similar to how baseball has its dead ball era, because the scores were, were much lower.

These teams when Lou was playing were scoring in the 20s and 30s for a lot of reasons similar to baseball.

They had crude equipment and also very challenging court conditions to play under, as well as kind of a defensive mindset by the people running, running the leagues.

So I think that those factors, like no one's necessarily promoting it and then anyone who goes in and does their own research, their first impression is not going to be necessarily positive since the scores were much lower than they are today.

So, for example, if you go in and see Bucky Liu average four points a game, at first glance, you're, if you think about today's game and, and how the scoring goes, like, wow, he didn't know how to play, he couldn't shoot.

Like, what's happening, not knowing all of those other conditions that I had mentioned that influenced that.

So I think those are the two kind of primary reasons.

Talk a little bit about the appearance of the game, right?

And when we think of the modern game, we don't think of.

Again, when I was a kid as a high school player, I remember my high school team occasionally in the headlines being described as the Cagers.

So it was the, the Mustang Cagers are playing this game.

And again, I knew at one point that the game was played inside of basically a cage.

Right.

With made out of chicken wire separating the players from the fans.

But just give people an idea because I think that's one of the things that comes through clearly in the book is the description of what the game probably looked and felt like both to the players and to the people who were watching the game being separated by that, again, cage, fence, however you want to describe it.

And just walk us through what those games probably looked and felt like to the players and the fans.

Sure.

Well, as you said, they literally played within a steel cage, so they had a fence separating the fans from the players.

I think the early kind of primary reason for that was that in Nathan Smith's original rules, when the ball went out of bounds off the court, the first player to get to it, their team retained Possession.

So when the ball went out of bounds, basically every player in the court was chasing after that.

So when you have fans in the middle of that, there's a recipe kind of for disaster.

So they decided to put a fence in between to separate them.

And that affected the game because there was now no out of bounds.

So it was like boards and hockey.

The puck hits, the board, comes back in and you keep playing.

So that was like the ball was live the whole time.

They also played on much smaller courts.

They were probably about half the size of the courts that players have today.

So you really had this mass of guys on the smaller court, a lot less room to.

To move.

Mikey Lewis said that you had hardly time to breathe, never mind to think.

So it was a lot of rapid action, balls bouncing off the fence, guys bouncing off the fence too.

It's a lot more physical game as well.

That was one of the things especially about.

Especially with regard to lose league, the New England League, because the managers thought that scoring was too high, that fans didn't want to see scoring.

They actually abolished free throws.

So there were no free throws.

So the way points were awarded after fouls was that every time your team was fouled three times, your team got one point.

So you can imagine that they weren't giving up any layups.

You could literally follow someone six times before giving them two points.

So there were no open shots to be gotten.

So it was a lot more ball control, moving the ball, players moving their feet.

And you would have to be absolutely wide open before you shot.

They also shot a lot of set shots.

So they're shooting from like waist level.

That's also hard to get off in a crowd.

I did come across.

You don't hear a lot about it, but I did come across some guys who were shooting kind of like hook shots.

It wasn't described as a hook shot.

The reporters of the day said they were kind of like flipping it over their head.

One of the challenges of reading these old newspapers is a lot of the reporters didn't really know what they were talking about because this was a new game.

It wasn't like they had played.

They were kind of experiencing it for the first time.

So.

So, yeah, it was very challenging to, to get space to get a shot off and then for that shot to be converted.

There are also no backboards in lose league as well, because again, the managers were trying to keep scores down.

They didn't want any shooting aids to help those players.

The ball was not quite the ball that players have today either.

The Players of that era described it as a lumpy pumpkin.

So it was bigger, it was handmade.

It actually had laces on the outside.

So a lot of times it kind of knuckle balled around.

It was hard to dribble or pass.

And if you shot it and the laces hit the rim, you weren't sure which direction was going to go.

And again, there was no backboard there to help the ball kind of like drop in the.

The ball was a little bigger than the one they used today and, and they actually shrunk the rims after L's first year again to keep those scores down.

So it was a, it was a challenging game, especially to score, to say the least.

Then talk a little bit about the physicality.

Yeah, so it was a very physical game, as you can imagine, given what I described about the lack of free throws.

There was also only one referee, so they could only see so much.

And a lot of times they were discovered discouraged for making a lot of calls from the players that were surrounding them as well as kind of the rowdy fans.

So it was a much more physical game.

There were fist fights, were pretty common and wasn't necessarily always a foul or always a reason for ejection.

So they did have an official rule where there was five fouls allowed for each player.

However, oftentimes the managers of each team waived it because they didn't think the fans wanted to see good players thrown off the court.

And also the teams were much smaller in those days.

Typically they only carried six guys.

So basically you had your five starters and then an emergency substitute which they didn't often like to dip into.

So for, for those reasons.

Yeah, it was certainly a much more physical game.

Tell me about the organization of the league and leagues themselves in terms of just being regional.

And obviously today.

Right.

We're, we're thinking about.

A basketball fan today thinks about a professional league as being one that covers the country that is a.

Is a much bigger entity.

The entities that Bucky Lou was playing in are much smaller.

They're regional, there's a smaller number of teams.

But just to give people a sense of kind of how those leagues were organized and how that allowed Bucky Lou to get involved and to be able to be a part of those leagues.

Sure.

So.

So basketball league certainly had a much smaller geographical footprint than they do today.

And even if you think of baseball, which was kind of the number one sport of that time, they didn't have a true national league.

I mean, Even in the 50s, I think the Celtics Were only going as Far west as St. Louis, like that was.

You couldn't call it the west coast, but that was like the westernmost team.

So.

And basketball was similar.

And then he had one starting in.

In Massachusetts at about the same time.

And so those two leagues kind of coexisted for a while.

As Lou's career advanced in the New England League, the National League failed, and.

And their players came up to the New England League.

So that's why it's described as being recognized as a major league of its day, because all the best players went there.

So even though it was mostly teams from Massachusetts and New Hampshire, they were recruiting talent from New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey as well.

And so that was kind of the circuit.

He had those two circuits.

Players took trains to jump around to their games.

That's kind of how they traveled.

One kind of neat thing was that because the games were so close, fans often traveled, too.

So on that same train ride that the players took, sometimes the manager would add a train car and, you know, 50 or so fans would come accompany the team to that.

So they added, I think, something to the atmosphere.

Also encouraged, probably gambling a little bit more as well, which we might get to, as we continue to speak.

So.

But that was the area that was the idea you had kind of like regional leagues.

They kind of stayed within a relatively short area, and they intended not to last very long.

So I think the average age of the league in those days was probably just like three or four years.

So Bucky Lou was involved in a couple of leagues that lasted about half a season.

So after, at a certain point, and I think maybe because of the physicality of the game, fans gravitated more to the college game versus the pro game.

Let's talk about Bucky Liu's entrance into the game as a player.

And what about Lowell, Massachusetts, and the racial atmosphere in that area of Massachusetts made it possible and conducive for him to be able to have the opportunity to play where obviously there were a lot of places in the country where that would not have been the case.

And then to even take it a step further, when you think about just the experience that he had, and he became pretty popular with fans based on the records and.

And the research that you did in certain places.

And obviously we can talk about some of the racial discrimination that he does face throughout the time, but just the fact that he was even able to get to the point where he could participate in the league and be on a team in that era in America was quite, again, quite a feat.

Right.

Just to even be able to participate.

So talk a little bit about what was so unique about Lowell and just the situation there racially that allowed him to have an opportunity to be able to.

To become the first player in those professional leagues.

Sure, I can do that.

So Bucky Lou turned Pro when he's 18, but prior to that he had played at the YMCA in Lowell about 4.

4 for about four years.

So he actually didn't go to high school.

His parents had a dry cleaning business in the city, and when he finished eighth grade, he went to learn the business.

So he skipped high school, but he did learn the game at the ymca, and he was able to play there in Lowell at one YMCA because it was integrated.

So it was the Jim Crow era.

So a lot of.

A lot of YMCA around the country were segregated by race.

And unfortunately, those that were available to non whites tended not to have good facilities.

So they oftentimes weren't even exposed to basketball.

But Lou was able to train and play at the Y for four years.

He also was a little fortunate in the timing.

So Lou was kind of grandfathered in.

He came to play because he always had the Y.

And so as part of his Y team, he traveled up and down kind of like the Merak River Valley.

So he also, along with that Y team, would play in Concord, Manchester, Nashua, Portsmith, New Hampshire, as well as Lowell, Lawrence, Haver, some other towns in Massachusetts.

So he was a star player at the Y.

He led them to several championships in that league.

The team got a fair amount of press because they were good, perhaps because he was part of that as well.

He was kind of an attraction.

He was a captain in at least his final year and perhaps more than that.

So he was kind of a known commodity both in bowl and outside of it.

And I think that eased his path to the pros because a lot of these same cities had teams in the early pro league, and he was kind of a known commodity.

It didn't mean that it was easy for him or that everyone was happy to see it, but at least he had that home base in Lowell where he was always already kind of established and had the support of other players, fans, and the press.

And I think that helped him on his way to turning pro, to continuing that career once he turned 18 from amateur into a professional one.

Think about some of the challenges that he eventually did face from a race standpoint as he went to different communities.

And there's a little rivalry that is talked about throughout the book that kind of.

Kind of weaves through his playing career.

But just.

Just tell us a little bit about some of those racial, again, situations that he faced that he had to kind of figure out a way to be able to navigate.

And again, what was incredible to me is that when we talk about this is that you think about when other professional sports and when we think of players as breaking the color barrier, we're talking 30, 40 years down the road from when this was happening, which makes it even more the story, even more incredible, and the fact that nobody really knows this story.

Just talk about some of the challenges that he faced from.

From that standpoint.

Sure.

So you had mentioned the physicality of the game.

So.

So Lou experienced that firsthand.

So he did have a number of injuries that were probably influenced by that.

So, for example, once he was run up against the fence, required stitches, had to leave the game.

A couple other games he left because he was hit in the eye and it closed, kicked in the stomach and had to depart.

He also suffered from chronically dislocated shoulders, basically starting in his second year as a pro and continuing on the rest of the time.

So that second year, he actually had it kind of come out of his socket three times and perhaps cost him a championship at the end of that season, too.

And that was something that he had to deal with on a recurring basis.

The one.

One thing that's interesting, though, Lou did say so.

He was interviewed in the 50s, later in life on the run up to the opening of the hall of Fame.

And he kind of compared himself to Jackie Robinson.

And he did say that while it was a rough game, he got a little extra based on who he was, but he did say that he gave it right back.

And once those players kind of recognized that, a lot of them actually became his friends, So a lot of those early kind of adversaries became allies of his later in the career.

But that wasn't always the case.

And so kind of his big nemesis was a man called Harry Huff.

And he was the best offensive player of his gay of his day.

When teams were scoring in Those days, like 20 to 30 points, he was always averaging in the teens.

So he was known as the best offensive player of the day.

So this was kind of a big deal because the other leagues in the area had closed and all of the talent came over to the New England League.

They were centered around Lou's team.

He was playing in Haverhill at that point and Huff's team, I think they were representing Natick at that point.

So these are basically like two super teams.

Most of Lou's teammates were from New York, Most of Huff's teammates were from kind of the Philadelphia, New Jersey area.

So these were the two best teams in the league.

And it was towards the mid season there was a game on the road for Huff.

So this was at Lew's current city of Haverhill.

The fans are excited because you had the two dominant teams in the league playing each other.

It looked like it was going to be a championship preview.

However, Hough led his teammates in refusing to participate in any in the basketball game while Lou was on the court.

So they actually did take the court but they wouldn't move until Lou left.

So early on the only times they actually did move was when Lou's teammates were throwing the ball at their heads and they had to dodge it.

So it almost got ugly.

The fans were really fired up.

They wanted to see Louis face Huff.

However, Lou sat down.

Kind of surprising considering the way it might have gone, I suppose.

But he may have had some inside knowledge.

So at any rate he sat down.

The game went on.

But afterwards the league had an emergency meeting.

They decided that they would remain integrated.

They find Huff and his teammates for their actions.

They said they would expel them from the league if they tried that again.

So seems to me that Lou kind of saw the bigger picture and probably speaks to his character a little bit too that he kind of removed himself from the moment, perhaps saving the Natick players from going through, from experience a riot.

Kind of seeing the bigger picture of that.

If he, you know, just bit his tongue and made me show a little bit of patience at the moment that in the longer term things would work out for him.

And they did.

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Yeah, Again, you can only imagine what that must have been like to be able to try to hold your tongue in those situations and to be able to see that bigger picture.

And it speaks to the character that he demonstrated throughout the story.

And you can tell again from the research and the different articles and just the way that things seemingly went for him throughout his career that, yes, he faced these challenges, but it seems like he always figured out a way to maneuver to his next opportunity to continue to allow himself to participate, whether as a player.

And then eventually he becomes a franchise owner as again, another new league gets started up and he wants to be involved in it.

So tell me a little bit about that process of how he got to.

How he got to be a franchise owner again in an integrated basketball league as the first African American to do so.

Sure.

So Lou hears of this, develops an interest.

So he travels down to Worcester to submit his application for a team.

Now, it's interesting because Lowell actually had two applications to that league.

One was from Bakilu and the other was from another man in the city, a white guy who actually owned the city's arena.

So this is where the, this was the biggest arena where you could have basketball games at that time.

So the two of them made their pitch and somewhat shockingly, Lou was the winner.

He was awarded the the franchise.

And so that made him, you know, that was another kind of historic step in his career that now he's a franchise owner in an integrated league.

And so he led that team about half the season.

The league did go out of business about halfway through.

I'm not sure exactly why teams stopped traveling.

It may have been part partly due to World War I.

A lot of the teams played in armories, and they may have been losing those armories as the US was kind of preparing to enter World War I.

Not 100.

Sure about that, but that is one theory that's out there.

But at any rate, he did have that experience of winning the bid and leading that team.

He did come out of retirement to play at that point.

He signed himself as the sixth man for the team, which makes sense from a business perspective.

He saved himself a few bucks.

Right.

And he actually had a good career, then ended up playing another 10 years, but good season.

Excuse me, and ended up playing another 10 years after that.

That's the story how he won the bid.

He was competing against the owner of the biggest arena and l. But it shows you how much respect the men who really knew basketball had for him that they awarded him the franchise instead of the other guy.

Absolutely.

Talk a little about his coaching, which is another area that he integrated.

He had a chance really early in his career.

So back prior to this, what we were just talking about in terms of the franchise ownership, and then he eventually goes back to what event the school eventually becomes UMass Lowell.

And then he returns again later in the 20s to come back and coach again, which gives him now his third role that.

That he's participated in in an integrated situation.

As the first African American.

Yes.

So he first coached college basketball at Lowell Textile School, as you mentioned.

It's now UMass Lowell, which plays at a Division 1 level.

Which is pretty amazing.

So he's 19 years old and he's already integrated both professional ball and.

And college ball, so that not much is known about his.

I just came across one line in a newspaper that mentioned it.

I mean, it's the very early days of basketball and even college basketball.

I mean, the references to that team's games in the papers has them playing other YMCAs and even high schools.

I think there was one other college that they played, maybe two.

They didn't play much in those days that wasn't unusual.

Like, even as Lou was finishing up his YMCA career, his Y team played MIT and Tufts and defeated them both.

So that was just what it was like in the early days of basketball.

And as he was doing that, he was also playing pro.

In his second year in the pro game, he was actually loaned out to an expansion team in Haverhill.

So he had go.

He went from playing from mole to playing in Haverhill.

And I think that ended his college coaching career at that point because.

Because of the distance previously, he was basically in the same neighborhood.

So he was living in the Pawtucketville neighborhood of Lowell.

That's where his basketball team was.

And that's where the college actually was located, too.

So.

So then when the New England League went out of business, he coached again at what was called Lowell Commercial College.

That no longer exists.

It sounds.

It was kind of a vocational school of sorts.

It taught, like, office skills for people coming out of school.

And this college of basketball is a much bigger deal at this time.

And a lot more is known about that season.

There was a lot more references in the paper to their games and who they were playing and how they did.

So then they're playing other colleges.

They played Boston College, Providence, Northeastern, New Hampshire College as well, which is now unh.

And they fared well.

So they actually swept bc, which was kind of the highlight of their season and apparently something that didn't happen often.

Apparently they consider themselves rivals of Boston College when it came to football and basketball, but didn't tend to fare very well on the playing surface with the exception of that year when they swept bc.

Mentioned it earlier, and this is something that I had no idea about again, before reading the book, was how much gambling there was related to these early pro leagues.

So you think about where we are with gambling and professional sports today.

And then we went through this long period of gambling being excised from the game completely.

Right.

And everybody being extremely worried about gambling scandal and point shaving and keeping gambling well away from all professional sports.

But you go back to these early beginnings of basketball in these pro leagues in New England, and from a lot of your research, it seems like what brought many fans to those games was the idea that they were gambling on those games.

So just talk about what you were able to find out about the influence of gambling on those early games and those early leagues.

Yeah.

So gambling was technically illegal, but no one did anything about it.

In fact, the team managers and even the papers, like, promoted it as a way to kind of add interest and excitement to the games.

And I think the fact that the leagues were regional and fans could travel around and follow their team probably led to more gambling, too, because here he had fans of both teams in the same spot, so it was easy to find someone else who was willing to put their money on their team.

Right.

So it's interesting.

There was certainly some skepticism about the influence that gambling had for example, a lot of fans were skeptical about playoffs.

So it's why there weren't really extended playoffs in those days because fans apparently considered them like just another way for the perhaps the leagues to get money.

I'm not sure.

One thing that's really interesting though is that gambling may have actually helped Lou get into his first game.

So he was playing for goal.

The game was in Marlboro, but it was one of these games where the manager had added a special train.

So fans from bowl traveled down to Marlboro.

The paper said about 50 or so fans made the trip.

So Lou was actually a substitute and his manager had actually told him not to expect to play.

It sounds like he was taking some heat from the local newspapers about the Bucky lit of the local Y star.

So he added him to the roster, maybe to placate them, but it sounds like he didn't necessarily intend to play him.

However, since there was only six players and one of the players, I guess re injured himself during the warm ups.

The the manager tried to play four against five to start the game.

Now the fans from Lowell who had made the trip freaked out based on the kind of unfairness of it.

And it seems likely that they probably had money on the game.

Like why else were they traveling down to see this?

Why were they so upset?

I don't know that that wasn't reported as a fact, but it seems kind of likely that the fact that these folks had money on the line and were very upset about it actually enforced some kind of ferret fell fairness in, in some, I guess perhaps meritocracy to that game to make sure that they wanted the fifth guy to get in that game.

They wanted the Lou to get in that game.

They probably thought they had an ace up their sleeve because they might not have expected the road fans to know anything about Bucky L or who he was.

So they seemed pretty anxious to get him in the game.

And then once he played, he played well and that was the end of the story.

He signed the contract like the next week and he was a fixture with the team the rest of the way.

It was super interesting just again to hear the different accounts of the games and the seasons and how much.

Again, the gambling was a factor, both the fans and then sometimes, right.

The managers of the two teams betting on their particular game and putting money on their own teams, which again, when you think about the way that sort of professional sports have handled gambling in the past and, and even now obviously how regulated it is.

It's funny that you Just would have the two managers like, hey, we're gonna bet X amount of dollars on this series of games or this game.

And so it's just again, speaks to a different era of American professional sports, clearly, when you go back 125 years or so.

Yeah.

So the managers would.

Would agree on some pot for the game and then they would have the newspaper hold on to it.

So the newspaper would be holding $500 and the winner of the game would get that.

One other interesting aspect of it, and I'm not promoting gambling by any means, but it is interesting, I guess, because it's so different.

There was a story about a game that went down to the wire and the timers disagreed about how much time was left.

It was like a one point game and one timer said each team had their own timer.

One timer said there was 10 seconds left, the other one said the game was up.

And the timers actually got into a fight which led to a bigger fight.

And then the referee called the game off and the paper said, called the bets off.

So I don't know what authority the referee had to call the bets off, but he did it that night.

And the newspaper, I'm sure it was fun to try to give everybody their money back.

That, I'm sure had to be a.

That had to be a good, good time figuring all that out.

So, yeah, it was just.

There's a.

There's a lot of stories that you have kind of the basic outline of putting it together.

It would be a really interesting thing to be able to go back and, and get some.

To be able to see that.

Right.

To be able to see one of those games, to see what it looked like, to talk to some of the fans and, and to really get a feel for, again, filling in some of those details that you were able to get through your research and to, to give it, to bring it to life.

Right.

To be able to talk to some of those people and hear what that was, hear what that was really like.

Because just again, from your vivid descriptions, from doing the research and reading those newspaper accounts and, and putting it all together, it makes for such an interesting story that I think most basketball fans probably didn't know that this world of early professional basketball existed, as you said.

And we kind of have records and obviously there's some.

The New York Rens and there's things that are going on in professional sports that maybe some people have heard of, but for the most part, a lot of this again, has been lost to history.

And I think by you bringing up not just the Bucky Lou story, but just the history of the game itself, I think is, again, extremely interesting to anybody who's a basketball fan to, to look back on the early years of the game and to look back at the contributions that Bucky Lou made.

Again, is that first African American to integrate really three different areas as a player, as a coach, and as a.

As a franchise owner.

It's really an incredible story.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Yeah, I mean, to me, I think it's a fascinating era.

I'd love to watch one of those games.

I mean, think about it.

Yeah, they were playing within a cage.

There was no out of bounds there, basically no stoppages.

So they had three 15 minute periods.

So they had just those two breaks and they just kept going.

Not necessarily a lot of scoring going on, but there was certainly a lot of action.

And that's, that's the way that it was described.

And then Lou's part of it to me is, is incredible too.

So the grandfather of black basketball, Edward Henderson, and the father of black basketball, Bob Douglas, hadn't even seen the game yet.

So they hadn't even seen the game yet.

And Lou had already integrated.

Integrated itself.

Pretty fascinating.

And there wasn't a flood of integration after that.

That didn't come until generation later when the Dodgers and Jackie Robinson made that happen.

But still, at least he had provided that example to people.

Right.

So that he was something who the fans, the press and the players respected, both as a player and a leader.

Absolutely.

And then you just mentioned the Jackie Robinson piece of it.

Right.

And believe it or not, audience, Bucky Lou had a indirect connection to facilitating the Dodgers bringing their African American players along by looking for a minor league city that would be accepting of those African American players coming and playing there.

So Roy Campanella, Don Newcomb, two players who eventually make it to the major leagues with the Dodgers, and Branch Rickey is looking for a place to have his minor league team play that he feels will be accepting of African American players.

So you take the story from there and lose connection to sort of indirectly contributing to Making that happen.

Sure.

So Jackie Robinson, everyone knows, signed, was signed by the Dodgers, his first season is actually in Montreal.

So he plays a season of minor league baseball in Montreal.

So the Dodgers really want to integrate their organization.

So they need more players and more teams.

And so when they're making their calls to find that other kind of integrated minor league team to feed some of these other black players into, they get a lot of rejections.

So they really struggle to find a host for that team until they reach a newspaper editor named Fred Dobins in Nashua, New Hampshire, and he assures them that their black players would be welcome there.

And you wonder, well, how would he know that?

Well, it turns out that he was a basketball star in high school and his teams played at halftime of Lou's games in the city.

So Lou was running an independent team out of that city at that time.

Fred Dobins played at halftime of his games.

And so he knew kind of what a beloved figure Lou had been and suggested to the Dodgers that their players would be as well.

So, as you mentioned, they added a couple of their players, Don Newcomb and Roy Campanella, to, To the Nashua roster.

Excuse me.

They were well received.

They were a success.

They eventually made it to the majors with Robinson.

The Dodgers, with that team, won some penance in a World Series.

And then once the rest of kind of major league sports saw the successful model that they had to put put together, they copied them.

And so that led to the full integration of major league sports.

Kind of amazing when you look at sort of the step by step connection and think about the role that Bucky Lou played in integrating the game as a player, as a coach, as a franchise owner.

And then this indirect connection, his influence, right, his popularity in being able to do something that not many African Americans were able to do at that point in our country's history, which then enabled someone else who saw that, and then that leads to what you just described with the Dodgers is kind of an incredible turn of events and just again, talks and speaks to the legacy of what Bucky Lou was able to do.

And again, it's kind of amazing to me, after having read your book and learned this story, that more people don't know the story and the history of Bucky Lou and all these contributions that he made.

So let me ask you this kind of as an overarching question in relation to the book.

What is the one thing, if there was a piece of the puzzle that when you were doing your research, that maybe you wish you could have found or a firsthand account of something that maybe you only had a, a small description to go on.

What's the one thing that if you could have found sort of that golden chip of research that you feel like would have been super interesting to find, if that question makes any sense.

It does, and I'm not trying to dodge the question, but I think I found it with the Fred Dobins connection because that makes all the difference.

Because that goes.

Because before that, Bucky Lou was just kind of a one off.

He's the footnote that he's been treated as.

Right.

But once you find that connection again, that's what separates Bucky Lou to someone who has a more lasting legacy and actually did assist the Dodgers and did have that influence on the full integration of major league sports.

And we're lucky because Dolman's wrote about it at that point in the 40s and 50s.

He's a newspaper columnist, so he's actually writing about Bucky Lou and what a beloved figure he was, which makes it really easy for us to connect the dots.

So I don't know what more there could be really, because, I mean, so you're going from the first guy to integrate basketball in all these different roles, right?

To someone who is, you know, giving Jackie Robinson that assist in the 40s, which ultimately leads pretty quickly to the full integration of major league sports.

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It is that connection, right?

It is that.

Like we talked about a minute ago, it's the one to the next, to the next to the next.

And then you get to that bigger picture of what it all of what it all Means.

And I think that that's where, again, this story is so unique in that people don't know about it.

And it sort of follows this timeline that eventually starts out very regionally, very small, with a.

Is a very niche sport that not very many people are paying attention to.

A small professional regional basketball league.

And then eventually it leads to a story that becomes part of the national consciousness and is a huge story that impacts the history of this country in so many ways.

And yet you can tie it back to Bucky Lou being a professional basketball player in an integrated league at the age of 18.

It really is something that, again, more people certainly should know and read and understand the story of Bucky Lou and his contributions that he's been able to make to the game.

Let me ask you this.

So in the course of doing the research for the book, was there a person that was the most helpful to you in writing the story?

Was there somebody that was a historian that pointed you in the direction of, hey, these are the newspapers you should be looking at?

Was it again, I know you said you talked to his granddaughter.

Was.

Who was it?

Who was the person?

If you had to point to one person that was the most helpful and making this story come to life, who was that person?

So I'm going to give you a 1A and a 1B.

So 1A is Douglas Dark, who got me started.

Right?

Like, what was happening between the invention of the game and the NBA starting.

But.

But then the one B is Lou's granddaughter.

So it was an incredible experience for me to have done all this reading about Bucky Lou.

So I kind of knew what was happening with his career.

And then to be able to sit down and look at her and talk to her, that really made it real.

Like, she looks like him.

I could imagine kind of what he was like as well.

And so that made it real, gave it that, like, physical presence.

So.

So those.

Without those two, um, it certainly wouldn't be the same.

Like, I wouldn't have gotten started in the first place.

And then it wouldn't become like a real thing to me either if it was just reading old newspapers and never meeting anyone who actually had a direct connection with him, who was a family member who remembered him, who had good memories of him and could talk about him in that way.

So, so 1A, 1B.

If that works.

It does.

It makes total sense, right?

You had somebody that kind of pointed you in the direction of the story to be able to discover it, and then somebody who had a direct connection to the story, a relative, actually, of Bucky Lou.

Those two people certainly make complete sense in terms of the importance of.

Of each of them in the creation of the story.

So I will say again, the book is very well done.

To anyone who's out there listening.

If you like basketball and you like history and you combine those two, this story is one that you probably haven't heard before.

It's told in a very unique way.

And I think, again, Chris, you did a great job of researching it and to be able to include all the different news, newspaper quotes about the game.

As you said, what's funny is to kind of read those quotes from the eyes of somebody who may have been experiencing the game for the first time themselves, trying to describe it.

And I really enjoyed all the clips that were a part of the.

Part of the book.

You've got some.

Some old photographs from newspaper of Bucky and his teams and at various ages.

I know he said that he.

One of the things that came out, the stories that he didn't like to have his photograph taken.

So a lot of times that the picture of him when he was a player was from when he was very young.

Even when he got to be a little bit older in his career, you were still using the same photo of him from when he was younger.

But there's just a lot of great information in there for.

For fans of the game and to learn about a figure that probably, again, most people, I'm guessing, who are part of our audience, Chris, don't know who he is the same way I did in the same way you didn't, going back five or six years.

And so I would highly recommend going out and picking up a copy of the book.

So before we get out, Chris, I want to give you a chance again, share how people can get in touch with you, share how they can get the book, and then after you do that, I'll jump back in and wrap things up.

Sounds good.

But first, I just want to thank you for saying that because that does mean a lot to me.

I was terrified of writing a boring book because I have done a lot of reading and not all the books were interesting to me.

Right.

So I just wanted to make sure that I did my best to tell the story and kind of to.

To make it interesting and bring it to life and it sounds like you think I was able to do that.

And so that means a lot to me.

So thank you for saying that.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And I think there's no doubt there's a lot of colorful anecdotes in there that you can, especially if you have a vivid imagination, you can picture the stories of these games being played inside a cage and fans there with their money that they've been betting on and just how that.

How that was.

And then you think about sort of the racially charged atmosphere that may or may not have been there within the confines of those gyms and dance halls and places where the games are being played, and then the physicality of it all and how different it looks from today's modern game.

I think if you read the book and you're picturing all those different things going on in your mind, it really does.

You can.

You can bring the book to life in your mind through the way that you were able to.

To report it and share it.

So, again, kudos to you.

It's very well done.

Awesome.

Thank you.

Yeah, that means a lot to me.

I do appreciate it.

But.

Yeah, and I'm sure you'll put it in the show notes, but the publisher is McFarland, so you can get it from their website.

If you have a preferred online vendor, that's fine, too.

It's, you know, nice to support local bookstores.

So if you would like to purchase it from a local bookstore, go ask them to order it and stock it.

Right.

So that would be, I think, an appropriate way to support a local bookstore if you may or may not have it in your bookstore, depending on where you are.

I think the father from Massachusetts, probably the father.

It is defined.

So ask them to stock it.

So, yeah, and the other.

The only other thing I was mentioned is my website is Chris boucher dot net.

I'm sure that'll be in the show notes as well.

But that is a way to kind of see the latest that I'm doing to try to get the word out about Buckiloo and has contact information as well, if anyone wants to get in touch.

Perfect, Chris.

We will have all that in the show notes.

So anyone who's listening to the episode, just jump on hoopheadspod.com, grab the show notes and you'll be able to get some direct links to be able to order the book and get it in your hands.

And like I said, I think if you're a person who loves the game of basketball and enjoys learning about the history of the game, you will love this book about book Bucky Lou because again, I think most people, I'm guessing same way that Chris and I maybe didn't know the story before we were introduced to it.

I'm guessing there's a lot of people that don't know his story.

And again, it's one that I found to be extremely interesting and one that I had no idea was a part of the history of the game of basketball.

So again, Chris, thank you for writing the book.

Again, I think you've done a great service not just to the human being that Bucky Lou was, but also to the game of basketball.

I think that it's just something that more people need to know that story.

So thank you for writing the book.

Really appreciate it.

Thank you for sharing a copy of it with me and anybody in our audience.

Please go out and pick up a copy and support Chris and his work.

And I think you'll be more than happy with whatever money you spend to be able to get the book in your hands and read it.

It's a story that that needs to be told.

And Chris, I'm glad that you were able to tell it.

So thanks to you and thanks to everyone out there for listening and we will catch you on our next episode.

Thanks.

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