Much has been made of Lou Montgomery’s inability to play against Southern teams during his time at Boston College—
and rightly so. It makes you wonder if similar concerns constrained the career of basketball’s first Black professional, Harry “Bucky” Lew.
Following the end of the New England League’s 1905 season, many of Lew’s teammates went on a barnstorming tour of the Midwest. The highlight of the trip was their victory over a team led by Phog Allen, which gave them the right to call themselves World Champions.
Allen’s team, the Blue Diamonds of the Kansas City Athletic Club, had claimed the title because of a recent victory over the Buffalo Germans, who had won the Olympic trials of basketball in St. Louis the year before. So when Lew’s former teammates team swept the Blue Diamonds two games to none, they claimed the unofficial crown as best in the world.
Ed Wachter, Lew’s Haverhill teammate and one of the few Hall of Famers from the earliest days of the game, organized the trip. Accompanying him were Lew’s former teammates Jimmy Williamson and Jimmy Kennedy. Ed’s brother, Lew Wachter, also joined them, as did a fifth player, Ray Snow, from Holyoke. Snow played only two games with Haverhill the previous year, while Lew played close to 50 games with Haverhill in each of the two seasons in the team’s history.
Beyond the championship, Lew missed out on another honor, the compliment James Naismith paid Wachter et al after they clinched the series: “You boys play the game of basketball as it was intended to be played, by passing the ball from one player to another until a player reaches an advantageous position to make a try for the basket.”
All that said, there was another complication besides Lew’s race—his health. During the NEL’s championship series, he dislocated his shoulder for the third time that season. Called by some the best defender in the game, he was not playing at full strength, and it was undoubtedly one of the reasons Haverhill lost the New England League title that year.
As to the extent of the injury, it was serious, with a Newburyport Daily News reporter saying after the season: “Bucky Lew will have to lay off as much as he can during the summer to get his arm and shoulder back in shape again. He will have the arm treated, as the tendons and muscles are all stretched and will not hold the bone in the socket.”
That said, Lew continued to battle dislocated shoulders over a playing career that spanned another 20 years, and as shocking as it sounds, he typically took only two weeks of recovery time before returning to action.
So we’ll never know with certainty why Lew didn’t make that Midwestern trip in 1905. But we do know that despite a lengthy, 25-year career, he never played outside New England.
~ Chris Boucher is the author of “Harry ‘Bucky’ Lew: A Biography of Basketball’s First Black Professional.”