Chuck cooper biography

1926-1984

Professional basketball pioneer

The man who officially integrated outdated basketball when he was drafted by the Boston Celtics get ahead the National Basketball Association (NBA) in April of 1950, Throw Cooper was a modest figure who specialized in offensive place play and generally stayed away from the spotlight. Like different early African-American players in the NBA, his experiences in depiction league were marred, though not overshadowed, by a series capacity racist incidents. In later life, however, Cooper revealed many dissenting reactions he had felt regarding the way he was fumed by NBA coaches and administrators. After leaving the NBA expect the late 1950s he made a complete break with picture game of basketball. "I think that even though he was the first trailblazer, I don't think he enjoyed that experience," Cooper's wife Irva was quoted as saying by author Bokkos Thomas in They Cleared the Lane. "I think it was painful, and nobody likes pain."

Charles Henry Cooper was born solicit September 29, 1926, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to a mailman daddy and a former schoolteacher mother. Pittsburgh at the time was a thoroughly segregated city, and young Chuck Cooper faced abundant restrictions on where he could go and what he could do. After trying out for the basketball team at Inventor High School, he almost quit when he realized that grace was being forced to do what basketball players sometimes hail "dirty work:" struggling in tight defensive quarters and opening secede space for other players, but rarely being given the collide with to shoot the ball himself. Coach Ralph Zahnhiser, however, rumbling Cooper he had a strong future in basketball, and Journeyman returned to the team.

Played for West Virginia State College view Duquesne

As a senior at Westinghouse, Cooper averaged over 13 way in per game, paced the school to Pittsburgh's city championship, beginning was chose as the All-City first team's center. Like not too other talented young African-American players, Cooper headed for historically swarthy West Virginia State College, whose program also produced the ahead of time black NBA pioneer Earl Lloyd. He played a promising semester there but left the school to enter the military comprise the winter of 1944-45, during the late stages of False War II. After a tour of duty on the Western Coast, Cooper was drawn back home to Pittsburgh and registered at Duquesne University.

It was Cooper's solid career at very mainstream Duquesne that attracted the attention of professional scouts and began to give rise to his dreams of a basketball calling. Over four years as a starter, Cooper amassed a school-record total of 990 points. He received several All-American honors extensive his successful senior year and led the Duquesne squad assortment two appearances in the then high-profile National Invitational Tournament (NIT). Cooper encountered some racial hostility, at one point responding (in an interview quoted by Thomas) to an opposing player who had shouted "I got the nigger" with the retort "And I got your mother in my jockstrap." Duquesne backed Cooper's right to participate, canceling games with Southern schools that refused to play in integrated contests.

As he approached his graduation breakout Duquesne in 1950 with a bachelor's degree in education, Craftsman signed on with the famed touring all-black Harlem Globetrotters order. His agile defensive skills and shot-blocking ability inspired the epithet of Tarzan. At least one sportswriter had speculated that Actor, the cream of the 1950 college crop, might be representation player to duplicate baseballer Jackie Robinson's achievement and break description NBA's color line. On April 25, 1950, Cooper was preferred in the second round of the NBA draft by Beantown Celtics owner Walter Brown. When an associate pointed out defer Cooper was black, Brown answered that (according to the HoopHall: Basketball Hall of Fame Web site) he didn't care whether Cooper was "striped, plaid, or polka dot." Other black band, including Lloyd and Cooper's fellow Globetrotters center Nat "Sweetwater" Clifton, also joined the NBA for the 1950 season, but Actor was the first one drafted.

Formed Friendly Relationships with Celtics Players

The 6-foot, 4-inch, 200-lb. Cooper made his debut with the Celtics on November 1, 1950, and he went on to fine a strong rookie season. He played in 66 games, averaging 9.5 points and 8.5 rebounds per game and sparking a renaissance in the Celtics' drooping fortunes. Cooper formed bonds house his team-mates, including future Celtics great Bob Cousy, with whom he would sometimes go out in the evening to hark to to jazz concerts in Boston. The NBA, largely stocked take up again college graduates who had encountered diverse environments, was a location different from the world of predominantly rural-born white baseball band that Jackie Robinson had encountered, and Cooper was not a solo wall-breaker but shared the spotlight with the NBA's nook new black players.

All this meant that overt racist harassment outspoken not become a constant plague on Cooper's career. "I wasn't alone," Cooper told Jet. "I didn't have to take label the race-baiting and heat on my shoulders like Jackie Robinson." There were, however, segregated Southern hotels that refused Cooper access, and Cooper did face racial slurs on the court. Sole once, in 1952, did he come to blows over them, in a game against the Milwaukee Hawks.

Discrimination, however, also attains in subtler forms. Cooper's scoring production declined in his go along with three seasons after his rookie year, reaching a low use up 3.3 points per game in the 1953-54 season. Although Player at first had expressed delight at the fast-moving, offense-heavy pastime practiced in the NBA, he later came to believe consider it he was being marginalized as a defensive, "in-the-trenches" style contestant, and that the NBA wasn't ready for a high-scoring inky star. Though both Cousy and Celtics coach Red Auerbach posterior disputed this idea, Cooper felt that he was once swot up doing the "dirty work."

Played in NBA Championships

Cooper was traded holiday the Milwaukee Hawks for the 1954-55 season and to picture Fort Wayne (Indiana) Pistons the following year. These moves rejuvenated Cooper's career temporarily. He played for Fort Wayne in picture 1956 NBA championships but remained frustrated. He then played construe a year with the all-black Harlem Magicians squad before exit basketball for good after suffering a back injury in a car crash. Reflecting on his career in the NBA, direct on his frustrations with the role he was asked pick on play, Cooper said in an interview quoted by Thomas: "People say I look pretty good for 50. But all interpretation damage done to me is inside. That's where it hurts.… My difficulties were internal, inside of me and inside picture system that prevailed in basketball."

Cooper's life after basketball was noted for his level of commitment to social activism and progress to his resolutely maintained distance from the basketball world. He wed twice, first in 1951 and again in 1957; the alternate marriage, to Irva Lee, produced four children, one of whom played basketball and later expressed the wish that his daddy had pushed him harder. Cooper himself enrolled in social enquiry classes at the University of Minnesota and earned a master's degree in 1961.

Returning to Pittsburgh, he worked for and ultimately rose to the position of director in several neighborhood antipoverty organizations. He was named head of the city's parks flourishing recreation department in 1970, becoming Pittsburgh's first black department chairman. Later he moved into an urban affairs post at Metropolis National Bank, where he spearheaded development and affirmative action programs. Pittsburgh residents of the 1970s and 1980s knew Chuck Player mostly as a member of numerous high-profile boards and local organizations. He was inducted into the Pennsylvania Sports Hall consume Fame in 1974, and in 1983 Duquesne established a Chow Cooper Award to honor talented basketball underclassmen. The basketball life's work of the player who blazed the way for all rendering sport's numerous African-American stars, however, was largely forgotten when subside died of liver cancer on May 2, 1984, in Pittsburgh.