Daily News | The dark truth of Joe Fulks, Philadelphia’s first pro basketball legend
“The first superstar the league ever had,” Gottlieb told Jasner. “I can see him scoring those 63 points today …”There were other aspects of Fulks that Gottlieb had seen, too. Everyone who knew Fulks well had seen them. But Gottlieb did not discuss them on the record with Jasner. The story was a brief remembrance, 500-600 words filed minutes before the presses started churning and cranking, and those aspects were darker.
Despite having just 23 boys in grades nine through 12, Birmingham School qualified for the 1932 state basketball tournament in Louisville, and its players became heroes to the younger kids in town, including Fulks. As a pre-teen, he practiced by sneaking onto the high school’s outdoor court to shoot a brick at the two rims, shredding the nets with every swish, and, later, by heaving a bladderless, sawdust-filled ball toward a basket nailed to the side of his house.
When the federal government put into motion a plan to dam the Tennessee — a plan that would prevent flooding in other river towns but would level Birmingham — the Fulks family moved 14 miles northeast to Kuttawa. By the time the dam was completed in 1943, Birmingham was gone. Its original site is now engulfed by Kentucky Lake.
He wouldn’t have ended up in Philadelphia if he hadn’t been drafted into the Marine Corps in 1943. By then, he had gotten married — he met his wife, Mary Sue, at The Turnaround — and though he served in Guam and on Iwo Jima, he became a national sensation not for his bravery in battle but for his basketball exploits, leading the San Diego Marine Base and the Fleet Marine Force teams in scoring. Both squads went unbeaten, too.
That night marked the apex of Fulks’ career, and his decline was sure and rapid and, on the surface, inexplicable. His scoring average fell almost by half from the 1948-49 season to 1949-50, from 26.0 to 14.2, and in a January 1950 interview with The Sporting News, when Gottlieb was asked why the Warriors, on their way to finishing with a 26-42 record, were struggling so much, he minced no words.
“You’re 32, and it’s like a whole life is over, a new one’s starting, but you haven’t got the signals,” he said later that year. “You come out of a little town like Kuttawa … and you go into the Marines without finishing college. You stay there 3½ years, and you come up to the big town. So for a time there isn’t anything you can’t do. You’re on top.
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