From TheFirstBasket.com:
Did you know that a Jewish kid from New York scored the first basket in the NBA?
A New York movie if ever there was one, The First Basket follows the little-known history of Jews and basketball at the beginning of the 20th century.
When Ossie Schectman, a Jewish kid from Brooklyn , made the first basket for the New York Knickerbockers back in 1946, who knew it was the precursor of today’s NBA?
Though basketball was invented by Dr. James Naismith in Springfield MA , the game spread like wildfire through turn-of-the-century New York settlement houses and proved a perfect fit for urban Jewish kids. For Jewish immigrants, especially youth, sports played an important role in helping them become American. By the 1920s, basketball had become a staple of life in American Jewish communities, and many of the top teams grew out of these neighborhoods.
The First Basket is the first comprehensive documentary to examine both the role that Jewish players had in the evolution of the game and the impact that basketball played in the assimilation of American Jews. The First Basket explores the profound influence that these Jewish pioneers had on the evolution of basketball as it grew from a game played with ash cans on tenement steps to the second most popular sport in the world.
In The First Basket, writer/producer/director David Vyorst and narrator Peter Riegert explore the little-known, yet very important, Jewish history of the game. Chock full of vivid anecdotes and distinctive characters, the film brings back famous as well as unsung basketball legends such as Red Auerbach, Red Holzman, Dolph Schayes, Red Sarachek, Barney Sedran, Eddie Gottleib, Abe Saperstein, Ossie Schectman (that above-mentioned kid from New York who scored the eponymous First Basket), Ralph Kaplowitz, Sammy Kaplan and many more. These legendary players of professional basketball became role models and heroes to generations of fans and changed the face and perception, to this very day, of Jews in all athletics.
Laemmle/Zeller Films will release The First Basket in New York on October 29th exclusively at the Village East Cinema in Los Angeles on November 14th exclusively at the Laemmle Music Hall ( Beverly Hills) and Laemmle Town Center (Encino), with more cities to be announced.
CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE FIRST BASKET TRAILER ON YAHOO MOVIES!
Ella Taylor writes for the Village Voice:
Though hardly the first testament to Jewish physicality, which is as old as Samson, David Vyorst’s clear-eyed, jaunty documentary briskly walks us through the history of American Jews in basketball, a sport many believe belongs to blacks and very tall white goyim. Along with boxing, the low-cost sport served as a major avenue of upward mobility and cultural assimilation for working-class Jewish immigrants, beginning with the Settlement House teams on the Lower East Side in the early 20th century and progressing through the professional leagues all the way to the NBA. Narrated by actor Peter Riegert, with period footage and lively testimony from sports historians and wonderful old gents in New York and Florida (including the late, irrepressibly belligerent Red Auerbach) who once played or coached, The First Basket is more than a triumphalist screw-you to those who think Jews don’t play sports. Vyorst skirts neither the anti-Semitism that attended Jewish success in basketball (one journalist blithely concluded in print that it was the ideal sport for Jewish trickery and deceit) nor the culpability of Jews and blacks in the point-shaving scandals that rocked City College and other urban universities. With success and suburbanization, Jews drifted away from this quintessentially inner-city sport, and today, Jews play pro basketball mainly in Israel, where the sport is "huge." But, as one commentator from within the tribe gleefully notes, basketball, like crime and entertainment, was one of the easiest ways for a Jew to become an American.
