Seven Titles, One Ballroom: The SPHAS and Philadelphia’s Early Basketball

On Saturday nights at the Broadwood Hotel, basketball was only part of the evening. The Philadelphia SPHAS played in the ballroom; afterward, fans could stay to dance. The arrangement placed a professional team in the middle of a neighborhood social life, in a room that served more than one purpose.

The SPHAS were not a footnote because they played in a ballroom. They won seven championships in the American Basketball League. They faced some of the strongest touring teams of their day. For years, Eddie Gottlieb, the promoter and coach most closely associated with the club, made them a durable presence in a sport whose leagues could be much less durable.

Yet the SPHAS are often approached from the wrong direction: backward from the NBA’s Philadelphia Warriors. Gottlieb helped launch the Warriors in a new league in 1946, and players moved from one club to the other. The SPHAS, however, did not change their name and become the Warriors. They remained in the ABL. For a time, Philadelphia had both teams, representing two different basketball worlds and two different futures.

That distinction restores something important to the older club. The SPHAS had a history worth knowing before the Warriors existed.

The team took shape in the late 1910s among South Philadelphia high-school friends. It was initially connected to the Young Men’s Hebrew Association and later sponsored by the South Philadelphia Hebrew Association, whose initials supplied its enduring name. The association was more than a line on a program. The club represented a Jewish community, and its uniforms made that identity visible. Accounts from the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame describe Hebrew lettering and a Jewish star; road jerseys identified the players as “Hebrews.”

Most, though not all, SPHAS players were Jewish. That qualification matters. The team’s identity was neither an incidental label nor a rule that defined every roster spot. It came from the people and institutions that built the club, the way it presented itself, and the community around its games. It coexisted with a practical search for players who could win.

Philadelphia offered plenty of basketball talent, including at Temple, which became a source of SPHAS players. The roster over the years included Harry Litwack, who would later coach Temple; Cy Kaselman and Inky Lautman, noted for their shooting; Shikey Gotthoffer; and Moe Goldman, whom the Jewish Sports Hall of Fame identifies as the ABL’s most valuable player for 1937–38. The names help explain why the SPHAS lasted. Neighborhood attachment brought an audience, but opponents still had to be beaten on the court.

Gottlieb’s contribution was to keep finding a court, an opponent and a way forward. When the Eastern League collapsed in the mid-1920s, the SPHAS did not disappear with it. They continued through exhibitions against established professional and barnstorming teams. Those games gave the club a test beyond its local following and, in a shifting basketball economy, a means of remaining active.

One six-week stretch recorded by the Jewish Sports Hall of Fame captures the level of competition: nine wins in 11 games, including a three-game series against the Original Celtics. The SPHAS also beat the New York Renaissance, the celebrated all-Black team known as the Rens, by 36–33 in overtime and 40–39. The margins were narrow, but the results belong in the story. They show a team with community roots competing successfully against major opponents outside a settled league schedule.

The opponents also point to the wider world in which the SPHAS played. Professional basketball before the NBA was not one tidy ladder leading upward. Clubs worked through regional leagues, exhibitions and touring schedules. A team might have a loyal home crowd and still need games against traveling powers. It might be prominent in one city without having the kind of national platform that later made NBA franchises familiar far beyond their home arenas.

The SPHAS proved especially formidable once established in the ABL. Their championship seasons were 1933–34, 1935–36, 1936–37, 1939–40, 1940–41, 1942–43 and 1944–45. Seven titles, spread across more than a decade, describe sustained excellence rather than one brief peak. The Greater Philadelphia encyclopedia also credits the club with 12 playoff appearances.

Those numbers need their proper setting. An ABL championship was not an NBA championship under another name, and the leagues did not occupy the same place in public attention. But diminishing the older competition because a later one became bigger would miss what the SPHAS accomplished. They repeatedly won in the professional circuit available to them, while leagues around them changed and sometimes failed.

Their success also complicates an easy story about Jewish athletes and early basketball. The SPHAS openly carried a Jewish name and identity while winning at a high level. Their record stands against the notion that the club had to set its roots aside to compete. At the same time, no season’s results can tell us exactly what identity meant to every player or spectator. The firmer, more interesting history is visible in the combination: the jerseys, the South Philadelphia association, the ballroom crowd, the broadening pool of players and the championships.

The Broadwood games brought those elements together. There was no need to choose between describing the SPHAS as a neighborhood institution and treating them as serious professionals. The same team could draw people to a Saturday-night social gathering and then demand a full competitive effort from the visiting club. That double life was part of their strength.

It also makes 1946 a sharper turning point than a simple change of league might suggest.

That year, the Basketball Association of America began play. Gottlieb placed a separate Philadelphia franchise in the new league: the Warriors. He brought some talent with him. An August 1946 item in the American Jewish Outlook reported that former SPHAS players Petey Rosenberg and Jerry Fleishman had signed with the Warriors. Meanwhile, the SPHAS stayed in the ABL, with Litwack taking over as coach.

In other words, the man and some of the players crossed over; the team itself did not. The new Warriors drew upon experience accumulated in Philadelphia basketball, including the SPHAS years, but they were a new franchise. Gottlieb had used the Warriors name before, which can make the trail of clubs look deceptively continuous. The organizational break matters more than the familiar names. One team entered the BAA. The other remained where it was.

The Warriors won the BAA’s first championship in 1946–47. The SPHAS continued, but the older ABL now occupied a lower tier of professional basketball. In a single city, the contrast could hardly be clearer. Gottlieb’s new venture was part of the league structure that would become the NBA; the club he had helped make famous locally was left to carry on in the circuit it had long helped define.

This was not an overnight disappearance. The SPHAS played on with less success, and their later years connected them to the touring basketball world, including games involving the Harlem Globetrotters. Gottlieb sold the club in 1950. It ultimately ceased operations in 1959.

Even that ending has sometimes been made too neat. Accounts occasionally say the SPHAS became the Washington Generals, the Globetrotters’ familiar touring opponent. There is a connection through Louis “Red” Klotz, who played for the SPHAS from 1944 to 1947. But the Globetrotters’ account says Klotz was invited in 1952 to form a team to play them. His later venture should not erase the distinct history of the SPHAS, any more than the Warriors’ rise should turn the older club into a mere predecessor.

Gottlieb went on to hold an important place in professional basketball’s next era. He coached and managed the first BAA champion and played a role in the 1949 merger of the BAA and National Basketball League that created the NBA. His path helps explain why the SPHAS can be overlooked: the story of the game’s expansion naturally follows the people who built its largest institution.

But looking only along that path leaves out the ballroom.

For the SPHAS, place was not a quaint detail attached to a championship list. South Philadelphia supplied the friends who organized the club, the association that gave it a name and the community that gathered for its games. Gottlieb’s organizing kept it active across unstable leagues. Players from that world met—and beat—formidable opponents. Year after year, the team returned to championship contention without giving up the identity printed on its uniforms.

The Warriors mark one beginning of Philadelphia’s NBA history. The SPHAS tell a different story: of a neighborhood team that became a professional power on its own terms, and of how much a city’s sporting life can contain before the best-known league arrives.