March Madness
During the late 1950s, Cleo Hill and Al Attles waged a friendly battle on Newark’s basketball courts. They had no idea they’d pioneer a new era in the NBA or play pivotal roles in Black Magic, a new ESPN documentary.
By David Chmiel | February 20, 2008
The late-winter chill may be easing, but basketball fanatics care only about a round-the-clock succession of televised games as colleges big and small compete for national championships. Coaches, players, and supporters live and die with every 40-minute passion play, knowing that each game could be the season’s last. Ask most of them about the greatest contests in history, and they’ll recount their team’s most lasting victory or devastating loss.
Virtually no one points to the college basketball game played more than 60 years ago in an empty YMCA in Durham, North Carolina. Or that it was played at 11 am on a Sunday, while everyone else was in church, to protect the identities and safety of the all-white Duke team and the all-black North Carolina Central squad. The players had never faced opponents who didn’t look like themselves. In the end, Duke got walloped. Neither the winners nor the losers were allowed to tell a soul.
A decade after that secret game in North Carolina, two Newark players, Al Attles of Weequahaic High School and Cleo Hill of Southside, made local headlines for their stellar play. But in those days black players weren’t scouted by colleges, they didn’t play in summer showcase camps run by sneaker conglomerates, and they never considered skipping college to join the National Basketball Association. Still, there was an outlet for good black basketball players from the northeast—attending schools in the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association, a conference of historically black colleges and universities, most of which were situated between Maryland and Tennessee.
“My father went to Morgan State, but growing up in Newark, we only heard about local schools,” says Attles. “Back then, Seton Hall was our school. I wanted to play at St. John’s, but that didn’t work out. So I heard about an opportunity at North Carolina A&T. I didn’t consider the context of the situation. I had never been south of Philadelphia.” When Attles was a senior, a group of A&T students had staged the first sit-in, at a Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, to protest the store’s refusal to serve African-Americans. Their arrests triggered sit-ins throughout the south.
“It was a confusing time,” Attles says. “Athletes were told by student organizers not to participate in the sit-ins because they were afraid we wouldn’t be able to tolerate the physical and verbal abuse in a truly non-confrontational way.”
Nearly 50 years after witnessing the birth of America’s civil-rights movement, Attles and Hill are thoughtful, genteel men who have seen much and betray little anger at what they and their peers endured. They figure prominently in Black Magic, a four-hour documentary that will air March 16 and 17 on ESPN, which partnered with co-producers Dan Klores and former New York Knicks guard Earl Monroe, a Winston-Salem State star in the mid-1960s. The all-sports network will show the first part of the film immediately after it covers the selection of the 65 teams that will compete for the 2008 NCAA Division I-A basketball championship—a part of Americana, if you can affix that quaint term to the yearly event worth roughly $1 billion in ad revenue, merchandise, illegal betting, and earnings of potential NBA stars.
The film traces the civil-rights movement through the experiences of players at the CIAA schools and through integration in college and the NBA. Offering perspective against the historical backdrop of America in an era of change, the film shows Attles and Hill taking two different paths to success.
“When I headed south, I changed my whole outlook,” Attles says. “I had been a lazy student. But I promised myself I would graduate in four years. I majored in physical education and history and made the honor roll. To this day, the trophy I am most proud of is the smallest in my house. As a senior, I had the highest GPA of all the school’s athletes, a 3.3. It’s what I worked the hardest for.”
Attles understands the urge for young players today to jump to the NBA quickly. “How do you tell LeBron James not to go pro right away?” he asks. “Those can’t-miss players get huge paydays and can study full-time when they retire. Michael Jordan and many other players got their degrees after they finished playing. But it’s the guys like me, the majority of good college players for whom there is no guarantee about a career, who need to be serious about their educations.”
While the odds against being drafted by the pros are astronomical, making the NBA was tougher in 1960. With only nine teams, and only ten players per squad, job opportunities were nearly nil. “I found out that I got drafted by the Philadelphia Warriors when I read the paper the day after the picks were made,” Attles says. “I had gotten a teaching job at Robert Treat Junior High in Newark. But I went to training camp. I figured I’d be there for a week, come back to school, and play in the old Eastern League on weekends—the money wasn’t great in the NBA back then—but the league was changing. With the 24-second clock, with Boston’s fast-breaking team dominating, teams needed to keep pace. No team had more than four black players, because some owners didn’t think white fans would appreciate the new game. I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time. With a black star in Wilt Chamberlain, we had the luxury of playing the new game and we had a supportive owner in Eddie Gottlieb. Of course, he wasn’t always so supportive, but he realized his mistake and allowed us to change with the times.”
Cleo Hill wasn’t so lucky. “I could shoot from all over the court,” Hill says. “Hook shots from the corners, either hand, jump shots, fast breaks, dribbling with both hands. It was all completely natural to me.” Black Magic’s recovered clips of Hill’s Winston-Salem days prove him to be a spinning, scoring precursor to Earl Monroe, who would rewrite Hill’s records at Winston-Salem. “It was an exciting time, because our team, and the CIAA in general, brought the fastbreak style of basketball,” says Hill, who averaged more than 23 points a game during his career.” Before we knew it, we were playing before standing-room-only crowds. White people even started coming to the games. But it was still kind of a novelty.”
During the late 1950s, Cleo Hill and Al Attles waged a friendly battle on Newark’s basketball courts. They had no idea they’d pioneer a new era in the NBA or play pivotal roles in Black Magic, a new ESPN documentary.
By David Chmiel | February 20, 2008
The late-winter chill may be easing, but basketball fanatics care only about a round-the-clock succession of televised games as colleges big and small compete for national championships. Coaches, players, and supporters live and die with every 40-minute passion play, knowing that each game could be the season’s last. Ask most of them about the greatest contests in history, and they’ll recount their team’s most lasting victory or devastating loss.
Virtually no one points to the college basketball game played more than 60 years ago in an empty YMCA in Durham, North Carolina. Or that it was played at 11 am on a Sunday, while everyone else was in church, to protect the identities and safety of the all-white Duke team and the all-black North Carolina Central squad. The players had never faced opponents who didn’t look like themselves. In the end, Duke got walloped. Neither the winners nor the losers were allowed to tell a soul.
A decade after that secret game in North Carolina, two Newark players, Al Attles of Weequahaic High School and Cleo Hill of Southside, made local headlines for their stellar play. But in those days black players weren’t scouted by colleges, they didn’t play in summer showcase camps run by sneaker conglomerates, and they never considered skipping college to join the National Basketball Association. Still, there was an outlet for good black basketball players from the northeast—attending schools in the Central Intercollegiate Athletic Association, a conference of historically black colleges and universities, most of which were situated between Maryland and Tennessee.
“My father went to Morgan State, but growing up in Newark, we only heard about local schools,” says Attles. “Back then, Seton Hall was our school. I wanted to play at St. John’s, but that didn’t work out. So I heard about an opportunity at North Carolina A&T. I didn’t consider the context of the situation. I had never been south of Philadelphia.” When Attles was a senior, a group of A&T students had staged the first sit-in, at a Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro, to protest the store’s refusal to serve African-Americans. Their arrests triggered sit-ins throughout the south.
“It was a confusing time,” Attles says. “Athletes were told by student organizers not to participate in the sit-ins because they were afraid we wouldn’t be able to tolerate the physical and verbal abuse in a truly non-confrontational way.”
Nearly 50 years after witnessing the birth of America’s civil-rights movement, Attles and Hill are thoughtful, genteel men who have seen much and betray little anger at what they and their peers endured. They figure prominently in Black Magic, a four-hour documentary that will air March 16 and 17 on ESPN, which partnered with co-producers Dan Klores and former New York Knicks guard Earl Monroe, a Winston-Salem State star in the mid-1960s. The all-sports network will show the first part of the film immediately after it covers the selection of the 65 teams that will compete for the 2008 NCAA Division I-A basketball championship—a part of Americana, if you can affix that quaint term to the yearly event worth roughly $1 billion in ad revenue, merchandise, illegal betting, and earnings of potential NBA stars.
The film traces the civil-rights movement through the experiences of players at the CIAA schools and through integration in college and the NBA. Offering perspective against the historical backdrop of America in an era of change, the film shows Attles and Hill taking two different paths to success.
“When I headed south, I changed my whole outlook,” Attles says. “I had been a lazy student. But I promised myself I would graduate in four years. I majored in physical education and history and made the honor roll. To this day, the trophy I am most proud of is the smallest in my house. As a senior, I had the highest GPA of all the school’s athletes, a 3.3. It’s what I worked the hardest for.”
Attles understands the urge for young players today to jump to the NBA quickly. “How do you tell LeBron James not to go pro right away?” he asks. “Those can’t-miss players get huge paydays and can study full-time when they retire. Michael Jordan and many other players got their degrees after they finished playing. But it’s the guys like me, the majority of good college players for whom there is no guarantee about a career, who need to be serious about their educations.”
While the odds against being drafted by the pros are astronomical, making the NBA was tougher in 1960. With only nine teams, and only ten players per squad, job opportunities were nearly nil. “I found out that I got drafted by the Philadelphia Warriors when I read the paper the day after the picks were made,” Attles says. “I had gotten a teaching job at Robert Treat Junior High in Newark. But I went to training camp. I figured I’d be there for a week, come back to school, and play in the old Eastern League on weekends—the money wasn’t great in the NBA back then—but the league was changing. With the 24-second clock, with Boston’s fast-breaking team dominating, teams needed to keep pace. No team had more than four black players, because some owners didn’t think white fans would appreciate the new game. I was lucky to be in the right place at the right time. With a black star in Wilt Chamberlain, we had the luxury of playing the new game and we had a supportive owner in Eddie Gottlieb. Of course, he wasn’t always so supportive, but he realized his mistake and allowed us to change with the times.”
Cleo Hill wasn’t so lucky. “I could shoot from all over the court,” Hill says. “Hook shots from the corners, either hand, jump shots, fast breaks, dribbling with both hands. It was all completely natural to me.” Black Magic’s recovered clips of Hill’s Winston-Salem days prove him to be a spinning, scoring precursor to Earl Monroe, who would rewrite Hill’s records at Winston-Salem. “It was an exciting time, because our team, and the CIAA in general, brought the fastbreak style of basketball,” says Hill, who averaged more than 23 points a game during his career.” Before we knew it, we were playing before standing-room-only crowds. White people even started coming to the games. But it was still kind of a novelty.”