Birth of the Jump Shot
HOW ONE MAN, AND ONE SHOT, CHANGED THE GAME OF BASKETBALL FOREVER
BY BRAD BOTKIN
/ February 13, 2015
CBSSports.com
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On the night of Dec. 30, 1942, a little 5-foot-10 Wyoming farm kid named Kenny Sailors dribbled up the floor at Madison Square Garden. Somewhere near the top of the key, he stopped, squared his hips and shoulders, and elevated. Suspended in the air, his legs hung loose beneath him. His elbow formed a perfect 90-degree angle. The ball rested atop his palm like a waiter's tray.
"He jumped up higher than all the defenders, and he shot it one-handed," Rose recalls. "We'd never seen anything like it. We all looked at each other like, ‘What was that?'"
What it was, history has come to show, was a glimpse into the future -- a firsthand look at a shot so bold in its imagination, so revolutionary in its impact, that it would one day inspire comparisons to the wheel, the airplane, the computer.
"That was the shot," as current Wyoming coach Larry Shyatt puts it, "that changed everything."
***
If you've never heard of Kenny Sailors, you're not alone. Chances are, you're also not from Wyoming, particularly Laramie, where Sailors, the man most widely credited as the inventor of the modern jump shot, is something of a folk hero. At 94 years old, he doesn't get out as often, or as easily, as he did a few years ago, but when he does he still happily poses for pictures around town. Still shakes a lot of hands when he's out to lunch. His No. 4 jersey, the one he wore when leading little ol' Wyoming on an improbable, Hoosiers-esque run to the 1943 national championship, is the only one hanging in the school's Arena-Auditorium rafters. As we speak, plans to erect a 22-foot statue of Sailors, which will stand in the arena's entrance, are underway."That's really going to be something," Sailors told CBSSports.com, shyly chuckling at the surreal thought of a statue being erected in his honor. "I guess it's quite a story. I've come to understand that more over the years."
There's no doubt that Kenny's story is an especially romantic one -- country boy on the farm, playing on a dirt court, shooting on an old iron rim that his brother Bud had nailed to a windmill. If it were a movie you would put an American flag waving in the background and cue the music, the setting perfectly classic in a tiny, unincorporated Wyoming town called Hillsdale. As best as Sailors can remember, it was 1934 when he took that first jumper. He was 13 years old, and as the saying goes, it was indeed necessity, if not outright desperation, that eventually gave birth to his grand invention.
"My brother Bud was five years older than me and he was 6-foot-5," Sailors said. "I was only about 5-8 at the time, and I couldn't even get a shot off over him, let alone make a basket. He'd swat it back in my face every time."
Kenny laughs as he thinks of Bud laughing all those years back, telling his little brother he should "find another sport," that he was too small for a big man's game.
"So one day, finally, I guess the good Lord just put it in my head that if I jumped up higher than [Bud], and if he didn't time everything just right and jump up with me, he couldn't block my shot," Sailors continued. "So that's what I did. I ran right up to him and jumped straight out of the dribble, and I shot it one-handed, because I found that I could get more height that way. I remember the first time I did it, Bud said to me, 'Kenny, that's a pretty good shot. You ought to try to develop that.' So from that point forward, that's pretty much what I did. I worked on that shot every chance I got."
With no model to emulate, Sailors spent most of his time serving as his own guinea pig, working out the kinks of an experimental action. There were so many moving parts -- the two-foot takeoff, the squaring of the shoulders, the shooting elbow rising tightly against his ribs to a high, soft release. But for Sailors, the biggest problem came after the shot.
"I couldn't stop my momentum from going forward, carrying me right into the defender," Sailors said. "I was always getting called for charges."
Needless to say, he figured it out. He had blossomed into a natural athlete, all-state in both football and basketball, state champ in the long jump and the mile. In the fall of 1940, Sailors opted to take his game, along with this so-called jump shot, to the University of Wyoming to play for legendary coach Everett Shelton -- who, as it happened, neither encouraged nor discouraged Kenny's shot.
Kenny Sailors' jersey hangs alone in Wyoming's Arena-Auditorium rafters. (Getty Images)It was a good decision on Shelton's part. The Cowboys became a force in relatively short order, and from the start it was clear that Sailors, a shooting and dribbling ace, was a player ahead of his time, old newsreel footage depicting a wiry little man operating on fast-forward while everyone else played to the paint-drying pace of the day. As sportswriter Chester "Red" Nelson put it on March 19, 1943, in his article for the Rocky Mountain News: "His dribble is a sight to behold. He can leap with a mighty spring and get off that dazzling one-handed shot. Master Kenneth Sailors is one of the handiest hardwood artists ever to trod the boards."
There are countless passages like this from over the years, quote after stately quote touting the gamut of Sailors' game, opposing coaches and players marveling at his "wizard" jump shot, "needle-threading" passes and "virtuoso" hands, Bill Roeder of the New York World-Telegram anointing him "the most adroit dribbler in basketball annals." It seems there was nothing the guy couldn't do with a basketball, a lofty assertion perhaps most validated by the observations of Ernest Mehl. Mehl covered AAU tournaments for years, which in those days showcased the premier players in the country, and Sailors, he said, was the best player he ever saw.
"Listen, Kenny is one of the kindest men you'll ever meet. There's truly not a bad word you could say about him," said former Wyoming coach Jim Brandenburg, who led the Cowboys to a Sweet 16 appearance in 1987. "But let me tell you, there was another side to him. That man was a competitor. He'd rip your throat out to win."
The more people you talk to, the more it seems that this assessment, above all others, cuts closest to the core of who Kenny Sailors is -- half sweet soul, half old-fashioned tough guy. This is a man, after all, who lived through the Depression. This is a Marine who fought in World War II and came out a captain. This is an athlete who, in a day and age when it was almost sacrilege to challenge tradition, dared to be different, consistently withstanding the pressure to conform that could've easily crushed his innovative spirit.
"Like any pioneer, Kenny got a lot of pushback," says Bill Schrage. "But he never wavered. When people told him that silly jump shot of his would never work, he kept at it. He believed in what he was doing. I like to say if he had been born a hundred years earlier, he would've been great leading a covered wagon on the Oregon Trail.
"He never would've turned back."
Schrage, who retired to Wyoming after a career in international affairs, might very well know more about Kenny's life than Kenny does. The two became friends in 2004, and since that time Schrage has poured over Kenny's story, tirelessly researching and documenting nearly a century's worth of information. We're talking family trees, military records, old newspaper clippings, box scores, stats, awards, photos, quotes -- and it's all meticulously catalogued, every source cited, every story confirmed two, three, four different ways.
All of this is to say, when Schrage tells you something about Kenny, you can believe it.
He won't tell you Kenny was the first modern jump shooter.
But he'll certainly tell you who can tell you.
Meet Jerry Krause, research chairman of the National Association of Basketball Coaches, and John Christgau, author of The Origins of the Jump Shot -- both of whom have worked this case to its last shred of evidence. All told, Krause and Christgau have devoted nearly 15 years of combined research to finding the original modern jump shooter, with the operative word being modern.
"That's the key. I wanted proof that a guy gathered, went straight up off two feet, facing the basket, and shot one-handed from an elevated position. That's the shot we see today," says Krause, who spent more than a decade looking into this, writing and talking to anyone and everyone with even the slightest connection to a supposed original jump shooter -- anyone who could provide any kind of evidence, be it a photograph or verifiable story, that could help get him closer to a conclusion.
"What I found," Krause continued, "was that a lot of guys shot some variation of a jump shot, a running shot off one foot or what have you. But Kenny's shot is the shot we see today. Was he the first? I don't think anyone could ever say that for certain. But what you can say, and I'm very comfortable saying this, is that Kenny was the first player to really develop the jump shot and use it consistently. The jump shot we see today is Kenny's shot."
Christgau concurs with every word of this, though he took a little different approach to his research, breaking the country into eight different regions.
"There wasn't really much national media back then," Christgau said. "If you lived in Minnesota, like I did, you didn't know what was going on in California. So there were probably a number of 'first' shooters in different areas, and I wanted to talk to the people who knew those areas best. There were a lot of names thrown around. Jumpin' Joe Fulks. Bud Palmer, who was a great player with the New York Knicks. My college coach at San Francisco State told me that Hank Luisetti was the first jump shooter. So I called Hank, at the time he was living in Burlingame (Ca.), and he told me, 'I never had a jump shot. I had a running one-hander.'
"Another name you hear a lot is Belus Smawley, but Belus went up with his back to the basket and sort of twisted in the air," Christgau continued. "Yeah, he was jumping and shooting, but that's not the shot players use today. If you want to see the shot players use today, look at that famous picture that was in Life magazine, the one of Kenny shooting in Madison Square Garden. That shows it perfectly. That was the shot of the future."
This was the Life Magazine shot heard 'round the world. (Photo courtesy of Wyoming Athletics)He was Kenny Sailors. The papers called him the "Wyoming Kid."
Three years earlier he had stormed the nation's biggest stage, dazzling the New York crowd as Wyoming dethroned powerhouse programs Georgetown and St. John's to become college basketball's unlikeliest king. Now here he was, less than a year removed from serving his country in the South Pacific, back at the Garden, flashbulbs popping as he introduced the world to the shot that would change basketball forever.
"It's the damndest story you've ever heard," Brandenburg said. "Now all we can do is hope that someone is listening to it."
***
Exactly one month ago Saturday, Kenny heard a knock at his door. It could've been a nurse coming to check his blood pressure, which happens multiple times every day at the Spring Wind assisted living center in which he now resides. But it wasn't.It was Bobby Knight.
Turns out, the legendary coach was in Laramie to call the San Diego State-Wyoming game for ESPN that night, and when Wyoming assistant AD Tim Harkins put a call in to see if Knight would be interested in meeting Kenny, Knight jumped at the chance. Harkins says it was hard to tell who was more tickled to meet who.
"He's quite a guy," Sailors said of Knight. "He sure knows the game, and he sure seems to think a lot of me, which I appreciate."
Later that night, Knight used a portion of the broadcast to endorse Kenny not just as the original jump shooter, but as a great player who should be in the Hall of Fame. Shortly thereafter, Dick Vitale put out the following tweet:
He's in the college Hall of Fame, elected in 2012. But not the big one. Not the Naismith.
"It's a significant, significant oversight," said Krause. "It's a travesty, really."
Theories abound as to why, or how, Sailors has slipped through the cracks all these years. Some say the Hall has leaned more and more toward honoring NBA legends, which is unfair to Kenny in that the NBA wasn't around for most of his career, and when it was, only in its infancy. Kenny did play three seasons the NBA, one each with the Denver Nuggets, Boston Celtics and Baltimore Bullets, and in the 1949-50 season his 17.3 points per game was good enough for fourth in the league. Still, as mentioned earlier, the AAU was where all the best players played back then, and there Kenny was a two-time All-American. He was also a two-time college All-American.
At the 1990 Final Four in Denver, as part of a celebration of the NCAA Tournament's first 50 years, five players were recognized as the tournament's All-Decade players. Kenny was honored for the 1940s. The other four? Bill Russell, Lew Alcindor, Magic Johnson and Patrick Ewing. Not exactly bad company.
So what gives? How is Kenny Sailors not in the Hall of Fame? Jacob Hamilton, an independent filmmaker who is currently directing a documentary about Kenny's life, wonders if he has simply been forgotten."He basically disappeared from basketball for 30 to 40 years when he was done playing," Hamilton said. "He dropped off the map. I think that has at least something to do with it."
It's true. Kenny did more or less disappear, moving to Alaska after his playing days were over to run a big-game hunting and fishing outfitting service with his wife, Marilynne, who had a breathing condition that made living in the high Wyoming altitude very difficult. For Kenny, family has always come first, and the outdoors have long been one of his passions. Basketball was something he did, something he was good at, something that for a short time helped him earn a living and provided him with an NBA pension. But for a man who defined such a major part of the game, the game has never defined him.
It's not like that these days. The sports stars of today hardly get to be human, and what they do on the court or the field has become, at least in the public eye, something of a life or death situation. Kenny fought in a war. He won a seat on the Wyoming legislature in 1954 and ran for the US Senate in 1962 and 1964. He has lived long enough to see his beloved wife of 59 years, along with two of their three children, pass away. He could never lose perspective on what has been a truly extraordinary life.
"In my office, I have a huge picture of that Wyoming national championship team, with Kenny in the middle holding the MVP trophy, and I will always have that picture in my office," said Shyatt, who currently has Wyoming one game out of first place in the Mountain West Conference. "But I'll tell you what, the times that Kenny comes over here and sits down with me or my son, Jeremy, we rarely talk about basketball. We talk about his life experiences. He gives Jeremy little nuggets of wisdom, and I appreciate that more than anything. He is a good, good man."
Still, being a good man doesn't get you into the Hall of Fame. Shyatt knows this. That's why he's part of a group that has come together to promote Kenny's story (since Kenny would never do it for himself). This group, which has submitted a package to the Hall of Fame containing video and written tributes detailing the considerable merits of Sailors' career, also includes, among others, Wyoming AD Tom Burman, Harkins, Brandenburg and Krause.
Kenny stands with Bobby Knight, who has long endorsed Sailors for the Hall of Fame."I had never seen anyone before who could do that," Heathcote said. "I was mesmerized."
This Saturday, as has become tradition during the NBA's All-Star weekend, the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame will announce both its 2015 direct elects as well as a pool of finalists, from which the remaining elects will be announced during the Final Four. Right now, at this very moment, a lot of people in Wyoming are sitting on pins and needles wondering if Kenny's name will be called. People desperately want this to happen for him while he's still around to appreciate it.
"I'm 94 years old. I don't get excited about too much these days," Sailors jokes. "But yes, it would mean a lot to me to get into the Hall of Fame. You bet it would. Basketball has done a lot for me."
Brandenburg, upon hearing this, can only chuckle at Sailors' unending humility.
"He's got that backwards," Brandenburg says. "Nobody has ever done more for basketball than Kenny."
Update: Sailors not among 2015 Hall of Fame Finalists
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I just love that he's white no racial, but if white men can't jump how we invent the jump shot?
You can argue all you want about who invented the jump shot. A lot of people have researched it and the majority of them agree that Kenny invented the shot that's still being used today. You can't argue that Kenny is the first man to start shooting one in professional basketball. You can't argue that textbooks teach people to shoot jump shots exactly how Kenny did it. That's not all he did. He was an NCAA all-American in 1942, 1943, and 1946. He was the NCAA player of the year in 1943 and 1946. He was the NCAA tournament MVP in 1943. He won the national championship in 1943. He was a two time AAU all-American. Kenny Sailors DESERVES to be in the Hall of Fame.
Hank Lusetti
What a life! A very inspirational story. Whether or not this guy actually 'invented' the modern jump shot shouldn't even be that important, as it seems he at least developed it into an art at the collegiate, AAU, and Pro levels - performing at an All-Star level in each of those venues. I'm surprised and pleased he was a Celtic at one point. I'd say give the guy a berth in the Basketball Hall of Fame. He's earned it! Yeow Meow Cats!!!
Not to take anything away from Sailors,who may have done more to popularize the jumpshot, but my money is on Glen Roberts of Wise, Va. as the "inventor " of the jumpshot. Take a look at the dates- Roberts was setting scoring records with the jumpshot in high school(1929) before Sailors was 10 years old(born 1921).
Glenn Roberts and The Genesis of The Jump Shot
Early cage star led the nation in scoring at tiny Emory & Henry College with his revolutionary new shooting style.
Glenn Roberts was born October 25, 1912 on a hillside farm in Pound, Virginia, a small rural town of 150 inhabitants in Wise County near the southwest corner of the Old Dominion State. The Roberts family, nine strong, eked out a living in tiny Pound where life was always harsh.
How harsh?
Glenn and his brothers cleared the white stuff out of every room in the old farmhouse most mornings after a snowfall.
Glenn and his brothers walked to school. Rain or shine the old dirt road was five miles one way and Glenn regularly made the trek by the light of his lantern when the dark of the evening sky came early each fall.
This was life in Pound for the Roberts boys. Humble to say the least.
Glenn was the second oldest of the seven boys – Guy, Glenn, Harry, Ola, Darrell, Percy and Wallace in order – in the Roberts household and he more than held his own in any physical endeavor. The Roberts boys were all strapping young lads, perhaps the result of years spent working on the family farm. Still Glenn and his brothers found time for other diversions and basketball was always a favorite. “For us it was basketball, farm chores, and school,” Glenn recalled. Unwinding after a long day or occasionally before the school bell rang usually meant basketball, played on a makeshift outdoor basketball court. There Glenn experimented with a new style of shooting. Today, we know this shot as the jump shot.
“Our high school did not have an indoor basketball court when I was playing. Because of our eagerness for basketball we practiced in all kinds of weather. At times it was too muddy to dribble the ball and move effectively especially since we practiced most of the time in our pair of all-purpose shoes. When we could avail ourselves of a basketball we would often congregate under our basket and practice in an unorganized way. Whoever recovered the ball after a shot was attempted was on his own to get off a shot at the basket against the combined efforts of everyone else to prevent the shot from being taken. Because of this combination of conditions it was necessary to devise something besides an ordinary effort to even get the ball to the basket unless you got lucky. By starting to jump as high in the air as I could after recovering the ball and releasing the ball after jumping out of reach of the others I started to get the ball to the basket consistently and before long I even succeeded in making some baskets without depending entirely on luck.”
The old saying goes that necessity is the mother of invention. In the case of Glenn Roberts, a practical solution to an old problem signaled the future of basketball. Glenn refined his new shooting style in high school and by the time he graduated he had led Christopher Gist High School to two state championships and one undefeated season going 35-0 in 1931. The two-time All-State performer was off to college in the fall to rerewrite the record books at Emory & Henry College.
The Roberts boys were all great players but Glenn was the king of the court. Still five of Glenn's six brothers played on state championship teams in high school.
Emory & Henry College, with a 400-strong student body during the era of Glenn Roberts, stretches over 330 acres in the village of Emory, Virginia, in the Virginia highlands. Evoking the spirit of Thomas Jefferson, Emory and Henry, a Methodist school, seeks to enlighten and nurture its students in an environment of physical beauty and intellectual challenge.
But even better than all that for Glenn Roberts – tiny Emory had an indoor gymnasium. Glenn had waited almost 20 years to play on an indoor homecourt and it was in that gymnasium that Roberts perfected his new shot.
From 1931 to 1935, Roberts played pivot for the Emory & Henry College Wasps putting up numbers that most college players still do not match to this day. Roberts scored at will, tallying 2,013 points in 104 games over the course of his college career, an average of 19.4 points per contest. In one game against Union College of Kentucky, Roberts tallied 38 points. In another game against the House of David, a professional barnstorming team of the era, Roberts netted 50 points...against a 7-foot opposing center! At one point during the 1933 season, Roberts had scored twice as many points as his nearest conference competitor. And while the schedule included only teams located east of the Mississippi River, Emory & Henry took on all comers. Big schools like Tennessee and Virginia Tech and of course the smaller schools like the aforementioned Union College. Glenn scored 1,531 career points, a national record at the time, against college teams. He put up 482 points against professional, semi-professional, and YMCA teams. These numbers let basketball insiders know that the jump shot was the real deal. Newspaper scribes compared him to the likes of Joe Lapchick and Dutch Dehnert, two of the greatest players in basketball’s first half-century.
Despite his solid frame – Roberts stood 6’4” and weighed 180 pounds – Glenn was nicknamed “Slim” and certainly benefited from the tutelage of his 5’5” coach, “Pedie” Jackson. Jackson worked with Roberts on playing the pivot position with his back to the basket. Other players would pass to him, Roberts would leap into the air, turn, and shoot the ball with some “English” so that it would hit the backboard with spin and drop through the basket. Glenn operated down low in games and scored most of his points on jump shots from 5 feet in.
“...it was in college that I became proficient in developing multiple moves such as the forward and backward pivot and dribble to maneuver into a better shooting position. It was also in college that my timing developed to the point where I could jump and absorb the shock from the defensive effort and then hang free in the air momentarily (sic) before releasing the ball. As a result I could make a basket almost every time I got the ball within the present high point distance from the basket.”
Recognized as one of the greatest players in the country, Roberts was named All-State and All-Conference center all four years at Emory, the last by unanimous vote. He was a First Team Helms Foundation All-America in 1935, an honor made all the more amazing by the fact that the other four members of that year's squad - Leroy Edwards of Kentucky, Bud Browning of Oklahoma, Pitt's Claire Cribbs and Jack Gray of Texas - played at bigger schools where media coverage was more mainstream.
Roberts became something of a celebrity in his own right though as he was even featured in Ripley’s Believe It Or Not. But perhaps the greatest testimony to his scoring feats occurred when members of the Rules Committee began efforts to diminish the advantage of the big man by instituting the three-second rule.
A very nice addendum to the article! I enjoyed reading both. Looks like this guy ought to be in the Basketball Hall of Fame as well! Yeow!
For all of you questioning why Sailors isn't in the Hall of Fame, it might be because of the uncertainty surrounding whether he was truly the one who invented the jumpshot or not.
If I had any say, I'd say that all 8 or so of the men who people have made arguments for should all get in as a group. The Hall of Fame could put up a display and the player with the best claim could be given the most prominence in the display, and others with an argument "might" not complain too much as long as they are also included? Just an idea.
good idea. thoughtful and fair.
