The Slam Dunk Debuts on Broadway

When teams from all over the country began spilling into New York for the Olympic basketball trials at Madison Square Garden in March 1936, the locals were awed by the sheer and unprecedented size of the vaunted McPherson Oilers. Also known as the Globe Refiners, the Kansas-based AAU club featured no less than four players over 6’5” tall. In addition, the team boasted a furious pressing defense. According to hoop historian Carson Cunningham, two of the Oilers’ big men—the 6’8 center Joe Fortenberry and the 6’9” forward Willard Schmidt—were also “among the earliest to popularize the slam dunk.”

The McPherson squad had advanced to the Olympic trials by winning that year’s AAU (American Athletic Union) championship in Denver. Together with another AAU representative, one YMCA squad and six collegiate teams competed in the tourney, which was held (rather than simply inviting the best individual players) for the sake of covering the United States’ expenses at the upcoming Berlin Games. Although the Union raised the banner of amateurism, many of its top clubs and their players were driven by a profit motive. During that era, major companies would sponsor AAU teams for tax and advertising purposes, especially getting the firm’s name into the sports section of the local papers. These incentives kindled fierce competition between the premier squads over the best talent. Although the cagers technically did not receive money for playing the game, many of them had jobs at the sponsoring company. Frank “Frankenstein” Lubin, a center for Universal Pictures—the sponsored team that ultimately won the qualifying tournament—remarked that the Philips 66ers, the top AAU club of the 1940s, “traveled around so much that I wonder whether any of them did any work.” (As an aside, Lubin is also considered the ‘godfather’ of Lithuanian basketball.)

At any rate, Fortenberry had already established himself as one of the top big men in the country. Owing to his gift for rejecting shots (goaltending was still permissible) and scoring downlow, the farm boy from Amarillo had earned All-America honors at neighboring West Texas State Teachers College. As alluded to earlier, he also had an unfamiliar weapon in his arsenal.

Before the trials in Gotham, there wasn’t even a commonplace word for the slam. At the Oiler’s preliminary workout at the West Side YMCA, the New York Times’ correspondent, Arthur J. Daley, was astonished by the innovative move that McPherson’s frontcourt was deploying. The writer made a valiant effort to explain this marvel to his readers: Fortenberry and Schmidt “did not use an ordinary curling toss. Not those giants. They left the floor, reached up and pitched the ball downward into the hoop, much like a cafeteria customer dunking a roll in coffee.” In so doing, Daley coined the term “dunk.”

That said, it would take more than a few years until the maneuver became standard fare. Moreover, even the towering Oilers usually limited the dunk to pre-game warmups. John Isaacs, who played for the New York Rens (a dominant all-black club), the Harlem Globetrotters, and a clutch of other professional teams—barnstorming or otherwise—confirms that the shot was a rarity back in his playing days, approximately 1935 to 1951: “We all could jump high enough, but we never envisioned doing anything like dunking the ball. All we wanted was the basket.” Even in the early years of the NBA, the slam was hardly a run-of-the-mill occurrence, particularly during the course of a game.

According to Slater Martin, the Hall-of-Fame playmaker for the Minneapolis Lakers, “[Bill] Russell was the first player to dunk regularly. There was no finger pointing or talking like you see today. We didn’t consider the dunk a skilled shot. If you could jump high, then you could throw the ball through the rim. So what?” Quite a few of Martin’s contemporaries also viewed the slam as a blatant provocation that was liable to trigger retribution. In any event, Naismith’s game would have to wait for the arrival of Wilt Chamberlain before the slam was truly thrust into the spotlight.

Though the styles, unwritten codes, and attitudes that informed the different phases of basketball’s evolution certainly had a huge impact on the dunk’s popularity, any phenomenon would be hard-pressed to take off without an accepted name. With the terminology set by virtue of Daley’s apt metaphor, it was only a matter of time before high-flying cagers like the Big Dipper, Julius Erving, and David Thompson, among others, brought the slam dunk into the mainstream and beyond.

In closing, six of the McPherson Globe Refiners would make the 1936 Olympic team’s 14-man roster by dint of their second-place finish at the trials. Behind the leadership of its captain and top scorer Joe Fortenberry, Team USA would strike gold at the Berlin Games – the first Olympics at which basketball was a full-medal sport. While the qualifying tournament marked the dunk’s debut before the public at large, over two decades were to pass until the shot became a mainstay of basketball offenses and a veritable fan favorite.