November 29, 1928: Providence, NFL Champions

Jimmy Conzelman

November 29, 1928: On this Thanksgiving Day, the people of Rhode Island have something to be thankful for: For the 1st time since the Providence Grays were baseball's World Champions in 1884, 44 years earlier, they have a World Championship team.

NOTE: Until 1939, America celebrated Thanksgiving Day on the last Thursday in November, regardless of whether it was the 4th Thursday or the 5th. From 1940 onward, it's been the 4th Thursday in November, whether it's the last one or not.

The Providence Steam Roller were established in 1916, by men working for the Providence Journal newspaper: Sports editor Charles Coppen and sportswriter Pearce Johnson. Three men shared in the ownership and management of the team: Coppen, Judge James Dooley, and sports promoter Peter Laudati. Johnson served as what would now be called the general manager.

The team soon became a regional power. In 1924, its schedule featured several NFL teams. The Steam Rollers posted a 3–2–1 record against those teams. The 1924 Steam Roller then went on to win the mythical "undisputed championship of the Northeast." The team's success that season was enough to make Steam Rollers management and fans start thinking about playing in the NFL.

They joined for the 1925 season, moving from their former home of Kinsley Park to a 10,000-seat cycling stadium called the Cycledrome, which wasn't quite big enough to hold a regulation football field, and so the corners of one end zone were cut off. Laudrati had both of these stadiums built. They went 6-5-1, then 5-7-1 in 1926.

The Providence Cycledrome

They hired star back Jimmy Conzelman, still only 29 years old and still playing, as head coach for 1927, and he improved the team to 8-5-1. Their other players included back Gus Sonnenberg, who went on to greater fame as a professional wrestler; and back George "Wildcat" Wilson, who had starred at the University of Washington.

They began the 1928 season by beating the football team named the New York Yankees, 20-7 at the Cycledrome. They lost at home to the Frankford Yellow Jackets, 10-6. They did not lose again that season: They beat the Dayton Triangles at home, 28-0; the Yankees at Yankee Stadium, 12-6; the Pottsville Maroons at home, 13-6; and the Detroit Wolverines at home, 7-0.

With Pennsylvania having "blue laws" prohibiting the playing of professional sports on Sundays, the Yellow Jackets would often schedule home-and-home series on back-to-back days: In Philadelphia on a Saturday, and then against the same team, at their stadium, on Sunday. On November 17, the Steam Roller went into Frankford Stadium in Northeast Philadelphia, and came away with a 6-6 tie. On November 18, at the Cycledrome, they beat the Yellow Jackets 6-0.

The following Sunday, they beat the football version of the New York Giants at home, 16-0. They were set to play the Maroons at Minersville Park in Pottsville, Pennsylvania. Jack Cronin rushed for a touchdown in the 2nd quarter, and that was it: Providence 7, Pottsville 0. With the Yellow Jackets already having lost 3 games, this game the Steam Roller the NFL Championship.

They closed the season on December 2, at home, playing the Green Bay Packers to a 7-7 tie. They finished 8-1-2, for a winning percentage of .889. The Yellow Jackets were 11-3-2, at .786; while the Wolverines were 7-2-1, at .778. (At the time, ties were not counted in winning percentage. If they had been, it would have been Providence .818, Frankford .750, Detroit .750, so it wouldn't have made a difference.)

Under the rules that began in 1933, Providence would have won the Eastern Division, and Detroit the Western Division, and they would have played each other in the NFL Championship Game. This being an even-numbered year, the Eastern Division winners would have hosted, so the Steam Roller would have done so. But this was still the pre-title game, single-division NFL, so the Steam Roller won the title outright.

But they couldn't hold it together. Conzelman could only guide them to 4-6-2 in 1929, and 6-4-1 in 1930. He left, and they finished 4-4-3 in 1931. Their last home game came on another Thanksgiving, November 26, a 38-7 loss to the Packers; and their last game, on November 29, was a 0-0 tie against the Giants at the Polo Grounds. The owners then turned the franchise back over to the NFL.

Providence has never gotten another NFL team. In 1971, the Boston Patriots changed their name to the New England Patriots, and moved to Foxborough, Massachusetts. It's almost exactly halfway between downtown Boston and downtown Providence. The Patriots have won 6 Super Bowls, but they do not claim New England's 1st NFL Championship, that of the 1928 Providence Steam Roller, as their own.

The Providence Journal, a.k.a. the ProJo, remains the largest-circulating newspaper in Rhode Island. A Peter Pan Bus Terminal now stands on the site of the Cycledrome.

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November 29, 1928, being Thanksgiving, was a Thursday. There were 3 other NFL games that Thanksgiving Day:

* The Frankford Yellow Jackets beat the Green Bay Packers, 2-0 at Frankford Stadium in Philadelphia.

* The Detroit Wolverines beat the Dayton Triangles, 33-0 at Navin Field (the eventual Tiger Stadium) in Detroit.

* And the Chicago Bears beat the Chicago Cardinals, 34-0 at Wrigley Field in Chicago.

There were also 24 college football games on this day, but most of them were not the more familiar rivalries that would develop:

* Brown beat Colgate, 16-13 at Brown Stadium in Providence, Rhode Island.

* New York University (NYU) welcomed Oregon State to Yankee Stadium, and lost, 25-13 in front of a crowd of 40,000.

* Syracuse beat Columbia, 14-6 at Baker Field in Manhattan.

* The University of Pennsylvania beat Cornell, 49-0 at Franklin Field in Philadelphia.

* The University of Pittsburgh beat Penn State, 26-0 at Pitt Stadium in Pittsburgh.

* Maryland beat Johns Hopkins, 26-6 at Municipal Stadium in Baltimore.

* West Virginia beat Washington & Jefferson, 14-0 at the old Mountaineer Field in Morgantown, West Virginia.

* Virginia Military Institute (VMI) beat Virginia Polytechnic Institute (VPI, now usually called Virginia Tech), 16-6 at Maher Field in Roanoke, Virginia.

* North Carolina beat Virginia, 24-20 at Lambeth Field in Charlottesville, Virginia.

* North Carolina State beat South Carolina, 18-7 at Riddick Stadium in Raleigh, North Carolina.

* Mercer beat Wake Forest, 14-12 at Memorial Stadium in Asheville, North Carolina.

* Clemson beat Furman, 27-12 at Manly Field in Greenville, South Carolina. I guess Furman's home field wasn't manly enough.

* Georgia Tech beat Alabama Polytechnic (now Auburn University), 51-0 at Grant Field in Atlanta.

* Florida beat Washington & Lee University, 60-6 at Fairfield Stadium in Jacksonville.

* Alabama beat Georgia, 19-0 at Denny Stadium (now Bryant-Denny Stadium) in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

* Kentucky and Tennessee played to a tie, 0-0 at Shields-Watkins Field (now Neyland Stadium) in Knoxville, Tennessee.

* Arkansas beat Southwestern College, 73-0 at Russwood Park in Memphis. Southwestern, in Memphis, is now known as Rhodes College, and competes at the NCAA Division III level.

* Mississippi (Ole Miss) beat Mississippi State, 20-19 at Scott Field (now Davis Wade Stadium) in Starkville, Mississippi.

* Louisiana State University (LSU) and Tulane played to a tie, 0-0 at Tulane Stadium in New Orleans.

* Oklahoma beat Missouri, 14-0 at Owen Field (now Gaylord Family Memorial Stadium) in Norman, Oklahoma.

* The University of Tulsa beat Oklahoma A&M (now Oklahoma State), 31-0 at McNulty Park in Tulsa, 

Oklahoma.

* Texas Christian University (TCU) beat Southern Methodist University (SMU), 15-6 at Ownby Stadium in Dallas.

* Texas beat Texas A&M, 19-0 at Memorial Stadium in Austin.

* Baylor beat Rice, 25-14 at Rice Field in Houston.

* The University of Detroit beat Georgetown, 33-13 at Titan Stadium in Detroit.

* Marquette beat Iowa State, 6-0 at Marquette Stadium in Milwaukee.

* Drake beat Creighton, 6-0 at Creighton Stadium in Omaha, Nebraska.

* Nebraska beat Kansas State, 8-0 at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln.

* The University of Colorado beat the University of Denver, 7-0 at Hilltop Stadium in Denver.

* New Mexico beat Colorado Mines, 32-13 at University Field in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

* Utah beat Utah A&M (now Utah State), 20-0 at Ute Stadium in Salt Lake City.

* Oregon beat UCLA, 26-6 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum.

* Montana beat Gonzaga, 7-0 at Gonzaga Stadium in Spokane, Washington.

* And Washington beat Washington State, 6-0 at Husky Stadium in Seattle.

The NBA hadn't been founded yet, but there were 3 games played in the NHL:

* The New York Rangers beat the Chicago Black Hawks, 2-1 at the old Madison Square Garden, which was then new.

* The Montreal Canadiens and the Pittsburgh Pirates played to a tie, 1-1 at the Montreal Forum. The Pirates folded in 1930.

* And the Montreal Maroons and the Detroit Cougars played to a tie, 1-1 at the Olympia Stadium in Detroit. The Cougars became the Falcons in 1930, and the Red Wings in 1932. The Maroons folded in 1938.

November 9, 1965: The Night the Lights Went Out

November 9, 1965: It was "The Night the Lights Went Out." At 5:27 PM, just as the Tuesday night rush hour was getting rough, a blackout hit the Northeastern United States, hitting New York City especially hard. Over 30 million people were without power.

Given the time of year, it was already dark out. Traffic lights went out. People got stuck in elevators. People got stuck in the City's Subway system.

The Consolidated Edison Company, a.k.a. Con Ed, managed to spare Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn from the blackout when they disconnected their Arthur Kill Generation Station, on Staten Island, from the grid. Some parts of New Jersey, powered by Public Service Electric & Gas, a.k.a. PSE&G, were not affected, allowing the City's newspapers to use the printing presses of the Newark Evening News to print their next day's editions, such as they were: Even The New York Times only printed 10 pages.

The New York Police Department later said that the City had the fewest reported crimes of any night since records began to be kept, breaking the record of February 9, 1964, the night The Beatles made their 1st appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. This would end up in sharp contrast to the next major blackout, in 1977, when rioting developed, and it was the most arrests the NYPD ever made in 1 night.

Power was restored before the morning rush hour. Ever since, while there were also blackouts in New York in 1961, 1963, 1967, 1977 (as mentioned), and in 2003, people old enough to remember it mean November 9, 1965 when they asked, "Where were you when the lights went out?" (UPDATE: There was a brief blackout in 2023 as well.)

And there is no truth to the (pardon my choice of words) urban legend: There were no more babies born in New York in early August 1966, 9 months later, than there were in early August 1965 or in early August 1967.

*

As I said, November 9, 1965 was a Tuesday. The baseball season was over, as the Los Angeles Dodgers had won the World Series 26 days earlier, beating the Minnesota Twins in the World Series. Both the NFL and the AFL were in midweek.

It was early in the NBA and NHL seasons. However, because of the blackout, for only the 2nd time in their history, the New York Knicks had to postpone a game. The 1st was on November 22, 1963, the night of the day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

The New York Rangers were not affected by the blackout, as they were not scheduled. None of the NHL's 6 teams were. But there were 3 games played in the NBA that night -- 2 of them, surprisingly, in the Northeast:

* The Boston Celtics beat the Baltimore Bullets, 130-116, at the Rhode Island Auditorium in Providence.

* The Philadelphia 76ers beat the Los Angeles Lakers, 118-110 at the Philadelphia Civic Center's Convention Hall. Wilt Chamberlain scored 39 points, and Hal Greer scored 32. In a losing effort, Jerry West scored 32.

* And the San Francisco Warriors beat the Detroit Pistons, 107-102 at the Cow Palace in the San Francisco suburb of Daly City, California. Nate Thurmond scored 18 points, and grabbed 42 rebounds.

November 6, 1929: The NFL's 1st Night Game

The site of Kinsley Park, 2020

November 6, 1929: With the field at the Cycledrome -- a 10,000-seat bicycle racing track with a football field almost fully squeezed into it -- so waterlogged that the referees will not permit play, the Providence Steam Roller, defending NFL Champions, move their scheduled game with the Chicago Cardinals to their former home, Kinsley Park. This 6,000-seat stadium has floodlights, and so, this becomes the 1st night game in NFL history.

The Cardinals win, 16-0, but the gate receipts from the sellout crowd count the same. And, with the stock market having crashed a few days ago, the Steam Roller -- that's how their name was always written, as 2 words, and no S on the end -- need all the help they can get.

As it turns out, it's not enough: The team gets through the 1930 and '31 NFL seasons, drops out, holds on in another league through 1933, and folds, a victim of the Great Depression. Kinsley Park was torn down in 1933, and no trace of it remains.

November 6, 1929 was a Wednesday. Why they were playing on a Wednesday, I don't know. But they had already played on November 5, a Tuesday; and would play on November 9, a Saturday, and November 10, a Sunday. No wonder the Steam Roller only went 4-6-2 that season: They were exhausted. They didn't win any games between October 13 and November 17, going 0-4-2 over that stretch.

At any rate, no other NFL games were played on that day. Baseball season was over. The NBA hadn't yet been founded. And the NHL season didn't start until November 14. So there were no other scores on this historic day.

October 24, 1884: Providence, World Champions

The 1884 Providence Grays. Old Hoss is at the far left,

holding a bat despite his fame coming as a pitcher.

October 24, 1884: The New York Mets lose the World Series. Well, not exactly.

The Providence Grays, Champions of the National League, defeat the New York Metropolitans -- and, yes, this early franchise was called the Mets for short -- 3-1, behind the pitching of future Hall-of-Famer Charlie "Old Hoss" Radbourn, at the Polo Grounds in New York. This gives the Grays the first-ever postseason series between champions of 2 major professional baseball leagues, a series that was officially called the "World's Series."

In those days, pitching was mostly done underhanded, and most teams had as few as 2 pitchers. The Grays had 2: Radbourn and Charlie Sweeney. But they hated each other, and even fought in the clubhouse. Following a drunken incident on July 22, Sweeney left the team.

Radbourn had pitched 76 of the team's last 98 games in 1883, and offered to pitch every game for the rest of the season. Of the remaining 43, he ended up starting 40 and winning 36. His final won-lost record was 60-12 -- or 59-12, depending on whose rules and accounting you go by. (The criteria for which pitcher to credit with a win had yet to be standardized.) Either way, it's an all-time record that was never seriously challenged even before 1893, when the distance from the pitcher's mound to home plate was increased from 50 feet to 60 feet, 6 inches.

A Game 3 was played, for charity, and the Grays won that, too. The Grays had won the NL Pennant in 1879, too, but would go out of business after the 1885 season. Radbourn went on to the Grays' arch-rivals, the Boston Beaneaters (forerunners of the Atlanta Braves), probably because they could pay the most. In an 1886 team photo, he raised his middle finger, and this is believed to be the earliest photographic evidence of anyone "flipping the bird," although the gesture goes back at least as far as ancient Rome.

He stayed in the majors through the 1891 season, retired with a record of 310-194, ran a billiard parlor, and died in 1897, possibly of the effects of syphilis. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1939, but his plaque reads "CHARLIE RADBOURNE," with an extra E on the end. His tombstone in Bloomington, Illinois also puts the extra E on the end.

The last survivor of the 1884 Providence Grays was outfielder Paul Radford, who lived until 1945 -- 61 years, 10 States and 11 Presidents later.

Aside from teams known as the the Providence Steam Rollers in the NFL (1920-1931, 1928 Champions) and the NBA (only the inaugural 1946-47 season), the State of Rhode Island has never had another major league sports team -- the New England Patriots, who play 25 miles from downtown Providence in Foxboro, Massachusetts, don't count.

The Grays had previously won the NL Pennant, and thus became de facto World Champions, in 1879. With a population of about 105,000 in 1884, Providence remains the smallest city ever to be home to the World Champions of baseball. Today, the population is nearly double that, about 191,000, but still much too small to be home to a major league sports team. The Grays' home, the Messer Street Grounds, had a suburban-style housing development built on it.

*

October 24, 1884 was a Friday. No other baseball games were played. No college football games were played, although a few were played the next day. Hockey was still all-amateur and all in Canada. And basketball wouldn't be invented for another 7 years. So, no other scores on this historic day.

October 7, 1885: The End of Major League Baseball In Providence and Buffalo

The Providence Grays at the Messer Street Grounds

October 7, 1885: The Providence Grays sweep a doubleheader from the Buffalo Bisons, 4-0 and 6-1 at Olympic Park in Buffalo. Fred Shaw wins both games for the Grays, pitching a no-hitter in the opener.

These are the last 2 games ever played by these franchises, who are both struggling for cash, despite the Grays having won the National League Pennant the season before. Only 12 fans pay admission, as Buffalo, as it so often is, turns out to be cold in October. Not twelve thousand, not twelve hundred, but twelve.

Never again has a major league baseball team -- capitalized or otherwise -- played in the State of Rhode Island. And, unless you count the Federal League of 1914-15, it took until the COVID-19 epidemic, forcing the Toronto Blue Jays to play their 2020 "home games" at Sahlen Field, for another major league baseball team to represent Buffalo, or any other city in the State of New York, other than the City of New York.

Although Buffalo has an NFL team and an NHL team, and it has an in-city population of 258,000 that isn't that much less than those of St. Louis, Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, its metropolitan area population of 1,134,000 ranks it 49th among American metro areas. The current smallest area with an MLB team, Milwaukee, has nearly twice as many: A little over 2 million. If you count Canadian cities, Buffalo drops to 56th.

Providence? It has 178,000 people, and while its metro count of 1,604,000 isn't that far behind Milwaukee, it's usually included within Boston's area. Providence is, for this reason, the home of Boston's Triple-A baseball (well, Pawtucket is) and hockey teams, and the NFL team is actually slightly closer to Kennedy Plaza in Providence than to Downtown Crossing in Boston.

But Providence ain't getting another MLB team. And, since the Jays were allowed to go back to Toronto in mid-2021, that was probably it for Buffalo, which will never again get any closer than it did in 1991, when it was one of 5 finalists for the 2 that began play in 1993.

*

October 7, 1885 was a Wednesday. Niels Bohr was born in Copenhagen, Denmark. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1922, for his contributions to the understanding of the atom, including developing what came to be known as the Bohr model.

During the 1930s and '40s, he aided refugees from the Nazis, and became part of the British mission to the Manhattan Project, to develop the atomic bomb. The element Bohrium, with an atomic number of 107, was named for him.

He was a friend of fellow physicist Albert Einstein. Once, Einstein repeated his famous line, "God does not play dice with the universe," and said, "Einstein, stop telling God what to do." Bohr died in 1962.

There were 2 other baseball games on this day, both also in the National League. The New York Gothams, the team that would become the Giants beat the St. Louis Maroons, 5-1 at one of the earlier versions of Sportsman's Park in St. Louis. And the Detroit Wolverines beat the Boston Beaneaters, the team that would become the Braves, 7-1 at Recreation Park in Detroit.

There was a college football game played on this day -- sort of. The current players at the University of Pennsylvania defeated their alumni, 42-0 at the University Athletic Grounds in Philadelphia. 

February 10, 1966: "Valley of the Dolls" Is Published

February 10, 1966: Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann is published. It becomes the biggest-selling novel in American history.

Jacqueline Susann (no middle name) was born on August 20, 1918 in Philadelphia. She acted on early TV, but said, "I got cast as what I looked like: A glamorous divorcée who gets stabbed or strangled." Then she did a lot of commercials, but saw that 25 years of hard work had culminated only in recognition as “the Schiffli girl."

So, having written TV shows and commercials, she turned to fiction. She didn’t get her 1st novel published until she was 45. And she died at 56, from her 2nd bout with cancer, having published only 4 novels. (There was 2 more, posthumously.) But her 2nd novel was Valley of the Dolls, and it sold 17 million copies in her lifetime – now, 31 million.

She was played by Michele Lee in Scandalous Me: The Jacqueline Susann Story in 1998, and Bette Midler in Isn’t She Great? in 2000.

In the 1986 film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, James T. Kirk (played by William Shatner) jokes that the novels of Susann and Harold Robbins were full of "colorful metaphors," leading Spock (Leonard Nimoy) to sarcastically call them "the giants."

Valley of the Dolls was filmed in 1967, directed by Mark Robson, starring Barbara Parkins, Patty Duke, Susan Hayward, Paul Burke, Lee Grant, and the ill-fated Sharon Tate. Critics panned the film, but it was a hit at the box office. The 1970 film Beyond the Valley of the Dolls went a lot further it terms of sex and drug scenes, and bears no connection to either the previous film or the book on which it was based, other than title.

*

February 10, 1966 was a Thursday. Football star turned announcer Daryl "Moose" Johnston was born.

Baseball and football were out of season. One game was played in the NBA: The San Francisco Warriors beat the Boston Celtics, 128-117 -- a home game for the Celtics, but instead of the Boston Garden, it was at the Rhode Island Auditorium in Providence, Rhode Island. Rick Barry scored 36 points for the Warriors.

Two games were played in the NHL. The New York Rangers lost to the Detroit Red Wings, 6-2 at the Olympia Stadium in Detroit. And the Boston Bruins beat the Montreal Canadiens, 2-0 at the Boston Garden.

January 28, 1948: Nat Hickey, the NBA's Oldest Player

January 28, 1948: For the 2nd night in a row, Nat Hickey, head coach of the Providence Steam Rollers, inserts himself into his team's game.

It did no good, either time. On January 27, the Rollers -- named for the city's former NFL team -- lost to the St. Louis Bombers, 94-61 at the Rhode Island Auditorium in Providence. Hickey took 5 shots from the field, and missed them all. He made 2 out of 3 free throws, for 2 points.

It almost worked on January 28, but not quite: The Rollers lost to the New York Knicks, 75-73 at the old Madison Square Garden. Hickey played 3 minutes, missed his only shot, and committed 4 fouls. A poor performance, by any standard.

A photo from that game. Hickey is Number 11.

Hickey was desperate to improve a team that had just fallen to 4-24 on the season, and would finish 6-42, easily the worst overall record in the Basketball Association of America, in its 2nd season. He was fired as head coach. Ken Loeffler coached the Rollers in the 1948-49 season, and they finished last again.

For the 1949-50 season, the BAA merged with the National Basketball League, and formed the National Basketball Association. To this day, the NBA traces its founding to the founding of the BAA in 1946, and so all BAA records -- but no NBL records -- are counted as NBA records. (Example: The Los Angeles Lakers count all 4 of their NBA Championships as the Minneapolis Lakers as "World Championships," and their 1949 BAA title as one as well; but not their 1948 NBL title.) The Steam Rollers were not among the BAA teams invited into the NBA, and Providence has not had a major league team in any sport since.

Hickey was the 1st NBA head coach to activate himself to try to help his team. He wouldn't be the last: In 1969, Boston Celtic legend Bob Cousy was coaching the Cincinnati Royals, and returned as a player, with only slightly more success than Hickey. Lenny Wilkens and Dave Cowens were later appointed head coach for their teams while still playing for them; Cowens only coached the one season, while Wilkens had more success as a coach after retiring as a player.

So what's the big deal about Hickey? Since those appearances in late January 1948 are counted as NBA games, they make him the oldest player in NBA history: He was 2 days short of his 46th birthday.

He was born on January 30, 1902 -- that's right, an NBA player was born in the 1st full year of the Theodore Roosevelt Presidency -- on Korčula, an island in the Adriatic Sea, off the coast of Croatia, then part of the Kingdom of Dalmatia, within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He was born with the name Nicola Zarnecich.

The family came to America, and he grew up in Hoboken, Hudson County, New Jersey, across the Hudson River from New York City. He anglicized his name to Nicholas J. Hickey, and was nicknamed "Nat." He grew to be 5-foot-11, which is short compared to today's basketball players, but not then. For comparison's sake: My grandfather, George Goldberg, born 4 years later, was 5-foot-8, and was the tallest player on his team at Theodore Roosevelt High School in The Bronx, and they won the City Championship in 1924.

A guard and a forward, Hickey did not attend college, but played for some early pro basketball teams, including the dominant New York team known as the Original Celtics, featuring 2 men who became even bigger legends as coaches, Nat Holman and Joe Lapchick; the Cleveland Rosenblums, who, like the Original Celtics, won titles in the 1920s version of the American Basketball League; and the Chicago Bruins, a team run by Chicago Bears boss George Halas.

Hickey also played minor league baseball, as an outfielder. In 1938, 10 years before his record-setting basketball game, he managed the Williamson Colts of Williamson, West Virginia, a farm team of the St. Louis Cardinals, in the Mountain State League, which was in Class D, equivalent to today's Rookie Leagues. This post made him the 1st professional manager of Stan Musial.

West Virginia would also be a site of tragedy for Hickey. On January 11, 1951, he was coaching the Johnstown Clippers, of Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in the All-American Basketball League. He was driving some members of his team back home after a game in Wheeling when he lost control of his car on U.S. Route 30, the Lincoln Highway, and crashed. George Karmarkovich, a fellow Yugoslav (although Serbian as opposed to Croatian) and his best player, was thrown from the car and killed. He was only 24 years old.

An inquest ruled that Hickey was not responsible for Karmarkovich's death, but the team was soon disbanded, and he never coached again. He remained in Johnstown, and died on September 16, 1979.

Because Hickey played only 2 games -- really, only a few minutes in total -- in the early days of the NBA, before it even had the NBA name, and for a team that didn't last much longer after that, he was forgotten for a long time. When Cousy played his last game with the Royals in 1970, he was 41, and thought to be the oldest player in NBA history. In 1989, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar retired at age 42, and was then thought to have broken the record. In 1997, Robert Parish played at 43, and that was then thought to be the record. And in 2007, Kevin Willis played for the Dallas Mavericks at 44 years, 224 days old.

But the records were checked, and Nat Hickey was found to be the oldest: 45 years, 363 days old. As of January 28, 2022, the oldest active player is Udonis Haslem of the Miami Heat, 41. He shows no desire to retire. But to break Hickey's record, he would have to play in the NBA until June 8, 2026 -- which means that whatever team he is on in the 2025-26 season would have to make the NBA Finals that season to make it official, or else he'd have to play the 2026-27 season opener at 46 years and 4 months.

*

January 28, 1948 was a Wednesday. The Steam Rollers-Knicks game was the only one in the NBA that night. Baseball and football were in their off-seasons. But all of the NHL's "Original Six" teams were in action that night:

* The New York Rangers beat the Chicago Black Hawks, 3-2 at the Chicago Stadium.

* The Detroit Red Wings beat the Boston Bruins, 4-2 at the Boston Garden.

* And the Montreal Canadiens and the Toronto Maple Leafs played to a 3-3 tie at Maple Leaf Gardens in Toronto.