Douglas had to secure portable baskets to put on the dance floor. One was positioned right in front of the bandstand. Rows of folding chairs were lined up for the sidelines. The floor was slick, making it hard for players to cut.
“It was twofold: People came to see the team and came to dance,” said John Isaacs, who played with the Rens from 1936-41. Isaacs roomed on the road with Hall of Famer William “Pop” Gates, one of the nation’s finest all-around players. “Once the game was over, people stayed. It was like, ‘Let’s go back to dancing.’”
Gates remembered the playing conditions: “It was a very slippery floor. They had baskets they put up before every ball game and markers they put down for the foul lines and so forth. The spectators were seated at tables in rows on the second floor and in boxes in the third tier. That was supposed to be an elite area. The ballroom had a high ceiling, so you didn’t have to worry about your shots. All you had to worry about was running into that hard wooden barrier around the floor because it had sharp edges. Sometimes when the game got rough, the guys would be flying over the barrier into people’s laps.”
John O’Brien Jr. played at the Renaissance Casino many times with the Brooklyn Visitations. “The fans were the wealthiest black people in Harlem, dressed, believe it or not in tuxedos. A good-looking crowd – handsome women, good-looking guys – and they loved the basketball game, but they loved to get the game over for dancing afterward.”
The Rens had a busy schedule. They played 120 games a year or more, usually playing one game a day and twice on Sundays. In order to meet their payroll and expenses, they had to play that much. The Rens weren’t picky and played all teams – semipro, black colleges, and other professional teams including the Celtics. They usually won.
They had a formidable lineup of players including Frank Forbes, Clarence “Fats” Jenkins, Leon Monde, Wee Willie Smith, Chuck “Tarzan” Cooper, Bill Yancey, Eyre “Bruiser” Saitch, John Holt, and James “Pappy” Ricks. All were outstanding athletes.
Jenkins was considered the fastest man in basketball. “Fats” actually wasn’t fat at all. He was muscular and one of the shortest players on the team. At 5’7”, he could run around anyone and was elected Rens’ team captain. He had played as an amateur on the Saint Christopher’s Club that won the Colored World Championship title in 1914 and also from 1917-19.
When Jenkins went pro, he first played for the New York Incorporators. He then played on the Loendi Big Five, the team that won the Colored World Championship, from 1920-23.
He also brought his remarkable skills to the Commonwealth Big Five Team, the team that won the Colored World Championship in 1924, before joining the Rens.
Charles “Tarzan” Cooper was another fine athlete. Superb at rebounding, Cooper would start the fast break after getting the ball.
Joe Lapchick of the Celtics especially admired Cooper, claiming he was “the greatest center that ever played the game.”
Wee Willie Smith and Cooper controlled the inside of the court, while the other players were excellent outside shooters and ball handlers.
The games between the Rens and the Celtics were extraordinarily popular and would bring in as many as 15,000 fans. The Rens’ road secretary, Eric Illidge, brought a tabulator to each game and counted the fans because the Rens’ share of the ticket money was calculated by how many paying fans were in attendance. Most of the games progressed pretty smoothly, but there were at least five games where race riots occurred.
“Race riots?” interjected Charles, who had been engrossed in hearing about this era of basketball history.
“Yeah,” answered Ralph, “let me go on.”
During a game the Rens were playing in Akron, Ohio, Wee Willie Smith got into a skirmish with a white player. The crowd got so enraged, the fans attacked Smith and his teammates. The Rens got into a circle and fought off the mob. Luckily someone turned the light switch off, ending the brawl. The police escorted the Rens out of town.
Off the court wasn’t much better. Richard Lapchick, whose father was Joe Lapchick, the center for the Celtics, made this comment about Joe and Bob Douglas’ friendship: “My father used to ask Bobby out for drinks all the time after games and Bobby would say, ‘No, no, no.’ Finally, he realized why Bobby was saying no, when in 1926 he and Bobby had a conversation and Bobby said, ‘You‘ve got to understand, Joe, the places that you want to take me to, I’m not welcome. And I don’t want to go in there and face the icy stare of racist white men.’”
Because of the discrimination, the Rens had their own custom-built $10,000 bus. The Rens, hungry and tired after traveling for several hours following a game, would stop in front of a restaurant. The players would get off and walk toward the restaurant door. Before they could enter, an owner would often growl, “Waddya want?” The players would say they were hungry. The owner would reply, “We don’t serve colored folks.”
Because they heard this response so many times, they would just head back to the bus without getting emotionally upset. Sometimes, they drove all night searching for a place to eat. Since most hotels wouldn’t accommodate them, they would have to sleep on the bus.
The team members were spat upon by some fans, insulted by others, and they often slept on cold floors and dined on cold-cut sandwiches in the bus.
“Sometimes you would sit at a restaurant counter, leafing through the menu,” said player John Isaacs, “and you didn’t see the man coming from behind the counter. And he sees you and walks to the wall and grabs his rifle and says, ‘Get out of here.’ You didn’t have any choice but to leave.”
In 1925, the American Basketball League (ABL) refused the Rens’ membership in the league. The Celtics in protest refused to join the ABL. William Yancey, who had played on top black baseball teams during the 1920s and 1930s, and also played for the Rens, stated: “When I was playing for the Renaissance in basketball, sometimes we used to get treated something awful. We’d go in town and couldn’t get any food, and then they’d expect us to make ‘em look good! In baseball we didn’t get bothered too much except in the South. In the North, we never had any problems, not that you’d notice. Because the white ballplayers thought it was an honor to play us. Oh, we used to have problems getting food in the North. The restaurants didn’t want to serve us. That was general in the North, but we never had too far to ride. If we were going from New York to Philadelphia, how long is that going to take? And if you were going to Pittsburgh, you could stop at Harrisburg. There’s always ways.
“Our biggest problem was when we were on the road all the time, like when I was playing basketball. I’ll never forget the time we went into West Virginia for the first time and there was no motel at all where we could go. It took us maybe a couple of hours to find lodging for eight or nine fellas – one stay here, two stay here, like that.”
White players, both off and on the court, thought highly of the Rens’ players. Frank Baird, who played for a strong Midwest team, the Indianapolis Kautskys, stated: “I was very sympathetic. When the Renaissance came in, they had to stay at the colored YMCA at Sennett and Michigan. We’d go with them and play around the state. There was no place they could get anything to eat, so they brown-bagged it. We’d get to the gym at 6:30 for an 8 o’clock game, and they’d be down in the locker room already dressed and having a sandwich or something. Maybe they’d save part of it and eat on the way back to Indianapolis. I thought that was one of the most unfair things. They were nice guys and they were tough. I’m pretty sure over the years they beat us more than we beat them.”
Honey Russell, who was a star player with the Cleveland Rosenblums and later with the Chicago Bruins, stated, “They were one of the cleanest teams that played the game.”
In 1939, the Rens defeated another up-and-coming black team, the Harlem Globetrotters, and the Oshkosh All-Stars in the World Tournament held in Chicago.
Their records were outstanding. In 1933, they won 88 straight games before being defeated by the Celtics. In 1939,