Charles Cooper
Basketball
Basketball pioneer & Hall of Famer
Though his long basketball journey eventually took him to the Pro Basketball Hall of Fame in 1977, Charles “Tarzan” Cooper, as its first African-American inductee, traveled a long and hard road to reach Springfield.
In the nearly two decades he played for barnstorming black professional teams, most notably the legendary Harlem Renaissance, Cooper and his teammates had to endure thousands of grueling bus trips, hostile crowds in tiny gyms, and hotels and restaurants that turned the players away.
Even so, for the rest of his life, Cooper, a Philadelphian who died here in 1980 at age 73, longed to do it all over again.
“A year after we won the world championship, I took a job painting houses for fifty dollars a week,” he said in 1973. “Sometimes I’d find myself leaning against the ladder, missing those days when we were flying high.”
A physical and athletic 6’ 4” center who was introduced to the sport at Philadelphia’s Christian Street YMCA, Cooper was a Rens star for 12 seasons, from 1929 through 1941. His defense and his rebounding helped those teams achieve a 1,303-203 record, win an astounding 88 games in a row, and capture a World Championship at an integrated 1939 tournament. In 1943, while serving as player-coach of the Washington Bears, his team won a second world title.
“People might not recall his name,” said Joe Lapchick, himself a Hall of Famer who played for the Rens’ great rivals, the Original Celtics, “but Tarzan Cooper was the best center I ever played against.”
According to Lapchick’s son Richard, Director of The Institute of Diversity and Ethics in Sports, despite the discrimination the all-black Rens regularly faced, Cooper and his father went out of their way to deliver a message.
“My dad and Tarzan Cooper developed a habit,” Lapchick said. “Before the game, before the jump ball, they wouldn’t shake hands, but they would literally embrace each other and often kiss each other. They wanted the fans in those stands to understand that this was about more than a basketball game for them.”
Statistics don’t exist for most of Cooper’s Rens’ career, nor for the years when he played with such other black professional teams as the Bears and the Philadelphia Panthers, but opponents said there were no contemporaries whose skills compared to his.
The Rens were as good as any team in that era,” legendary UCLA coach John Wooden once said, “and Charles Cooper was better than any center.”
Born in Delaware in 1907 but raised In South Philadelphia, Cooper discovered the relatively new sport of basketball early and honed his talents at the Christian Street Y. After starring at Central High, he played a few seasons for the hometown Panthers and other black teams before becoming the lynchpin of the pioneering Rens.
Founded by Bob Douglas and named for the Harlem ballroom-casino where they initially played, the Renaissance developed a core of players who, along with the Original Celtics and Harlem Globetrotters, rose to the top of the decentralized sport in the decades before World War II. Sportswriters called that group of Rens–which included Clarence Jenkins, James Ricks, Willie Smith, Bill Yancey, John Holt, and Bruiser Saitch in addition to Cooper–the Magnificent Seven.
Cooper’s defense, rebounding and jump-ball abilities (there was a jump after every basket) were keys to the Rens’ success in that low-scoring era. They were so cohesive and dominant in 1932- 33, with Cooper providing an immovable force in the middle, that they lost only eight of 128 games, running off 88 consecutive victories in one long and memorable stretch.
Organizers in Chicago, looking to take advantage of basketball’s growing popularity, staged a World Professional Championship Tournament in 1939. The nation’s best, including the Rens, Original Celtics and Globetrotters all competed but it was Cooper’s team that walked away with the title, defeating the Oshkosh All-Stars in its final.
“Tarzan Cooper was the greatest of his day,” teammate Ed Younger told Ebony magazine in 1975. “He played ferocious defense and swept the backboards. We beat everyone.”
When the barnstorming age began to fade, the Rens applied for admission to at least two fledgling pro leagues–the American Basketball League and National Basketball League–but were rejected because of their race. Consequently, Cooper never made much money playing basketball. After retiring as a player, he worked as a painter, a shipbuilder, and a bartender at a South Street tavern.
But as he aged, that old feeling would occasionally well up inside that old body.
“‘It seems like I spent my whole life on the road,” Cooper said in 1975. “And when I look back all I see is that old bus. But If I could run like those young fellows now, I’d hop on that bus and I’d hit the open road again.”
By Frank Fitzpatrick
