Biography
A small, overweight, balding man with deep eyes and penchant for wearing bow ties, Gottlieb was described by Red Smith as "a wonderful little guy about the size and shape of a half-keg of beer."
Gottlieb organized, and played for, the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association teams in the 1920s. Along with a few other sports promoters, he organized the Basketball Association of America, the league that later became the NBA.
Gottlieb coached the original Philadelphia Warriors, bought the team, and sent it to San Francisco in order to expand the game westward. He headed the NBA rules committee for 25 years. When he died at age 81, he had been solely in charge of NBA scheduling for three decades. In 1971, he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. "Gottlieb was about as important to the game of basketball as the basketball," fellow Hall of Famer Harry Litwack said.
Gottlieb took on many duties. He started teams and organized leagues. He was in charge of semipro baseball in Philadelphia, and made the schedule for the Negro National League. He also helped coordinate the overseas tours of the Harlem Globetrotters.
The NBA might have been able to get started without him, but it probably wouldn't have survived. Sportswriter Mike Lupica wrote in a eulogy, "They used to joke that if he got hit by a car and died, the NBA died with him."
Read more about this topic: Edward Gottlieb
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