Edward Gottlieb - Early Life

Early Life

Gottlieb was involved with sports throughout his life. Born Isadore Gottlieb in 1898 in Kiev, he moved with his family to Philadelphia at the turn of the century. By the time he was a young adult he had not only played on but had also coached, owned, and operated neighborhood sports teams.

He was, by his own admission, a born promoter and organizer. By 1918, he had changed his name to Edward,; that year, when he was 19, he organized a team of mostly Jewish players representing the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, which supplied the team with uniforms for three years. The players later found a new sponsor with the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association, a social club from which the team derived its new identity. The team wore uniforms with the acronym SPHAs stenciled across the chest in Hebrew letters. Even after the association stopped providing the uniforms, the team kept the unusual name. Having no home court, the team nicknamed themselves "the Wandering Jews".

In the early days of the SPHAs, a game was as much a social event as anything. "We played in a lot of dance halls in those early years," Gottlieb told The Associated Press. "It was basketball, then dancing. A very nice Saturday evening for yourself and your date. We used to let the girls in for free, because you couldn’t have a dance after the game without the girls. We had no trouble getting the guys to pay for the basketball game when they heard that news."

The SPHAs became one of the powerhouses of basketball in the East. The team entered the Philadelphia League and won two consecutive championships, the final two in the league’s history. The SPHAs then joined the Eastern League, which went out of business in the same season, forcing the team to book its own games.

Gottlieb, an entrepreneur and future schedule maker, had no trouble lining up a series of exhibition games against teams from both New York’s Metropolitan League and the American Basketball League, which in 1925–26 began operation as the country’s first major professional basketball league.

The SPHAs won five of six games against ABL teams in 1925–26, losing only to the league’s top club, the Cleveland Rosenblums. The SPHAs then defeated two of the game’s best touring squads, the New York Original Celtics and the New York Renaissance Five (Rens), in best-of-three series. In about six weeks, Gottlieb’s team had won nine of 11 contests against the most celebrated squads in basketball.

For the next two years Gottlieb devoted his energy to the Philadelphia Warriors, a 1926–27 ABL entry. The Warriors, who featured former SPHAs stars Chick Passon and Stretch Meehan, competed in the ABL for two seasons, posting winning records both years. The ABL, its decline hastened by the Great Depression, shut down two seasons later, in 1931. Meanwhile, Gottlieb had rebuilt the SPHAs in 1929 with younger talent, and in 1933 the team joined the ABL, which had reorganized as a smaller, regional circuit after a two-year hiatus.

The clubs in this reincarnation of the ABL played in small arenas, armories, and dance halls, much as teams had in the early 1920s. The SPHAs were the premier team, winning championships in three of the league’s first four seasons and taking titles in 7 of 15 years. The club stayed together for 31 years, until 1949, when Gottlieb became too involved with the new Basketball Association of America. Gottlieb sold the SPHAs to Red Klotz in 1950.