Digging Through the Archives: Unearthing Basketball History One Newspaper at a Time

If you want to know who dropped 50 in last night’s game, you’ve got ESPN, Twitter, and a dozen highlight reels at your fingertips.

But what if you want to know who dropped 50 in 1957?

Or who led the National Basketball League in points in 1943?

Or an average of how many fans showed up for a game in 1938?

Or who Leo Ferris or Bobby Cook was? Or the Waterloo Hawks, Dayton Rens or Providence Steamrollers?

This blog goes beyond the NBA, to the beginnings of basketball. Where they played in a cage on stages, dance hall floors, banquet halls and cafeterias. The floors were often pieced together, using mismatched planks of wood with unforgiving dead spots.

This is basketball time travel.

The mission? To dig through the yellowed pages of old newspapers and media— microfilm reels, brittle clippings, dusty archives — and pull out the raw, unfiltered, sometimes misspelled, often typo-riddled, but always real data that built the game today.

This is about squinting at 12-point type, deciphering handwritten box scores, going through old, scored programs and piecing together games where the score was buried in the back of the sports section on the page before "the funnies."

Why? Because basketball history didn’t start with the digital era. It started with ink on paper. With reporters scribbling notes courtside. With fans clipping headlines and pasting them into scrapbooks.

This is for anyone who wants to know what the action was like before the cameras rolled. Who played through injuries because there was always someone waiting to replace them. Who was so much more talented than their opponents that rule changes were needed to keep the game fair.

You’ll see the finds — the weird, the wild, the forgotten. You'll see stats of 1920s game recaps to team media guide pages. You'll see corrections of records.

You'll read about games played in a concrete box with a wooden roof and a floor that hadn’t been sanded in recent memory. The crowd? 6,000 screaming fans, half drunk, half furious, all ready to riot if their team lost.

Disputed scores will be confirmed through cross-referenced rival papers. Team data on little known teams and players will be found throughout the war stories told by the old timers, who could throw a punch and get charged with a common foul.

It’s messy. It’s slow. It’s glorious.

If you’ve ever wondered what the game looked like before the internet, before the 24-second shot clock, before the three-point line — you’re in the right place.

This is where the fun begins.

— Salt City Cager