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Stanford's best player ever, part 3 (Hank Luisetti's life)
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Hank Luisetti was not a great scorer in high school in San Francisco before he came to Stanford and became one of the greatest players ever, and his revolutionary one-handed shot was born out of necessity.
In today's Part III of our three-part series on the best player in Stanford history, we take a brief look at Luisetti’s life, adding that dimension to Monday’s Part I, which dealt with his major impact on basketball, and Part 2, which looked as his amazing statistics.
He is the headliner of our alltime Stanford first team, joining Brevin Knight, Adam Keefe, Rich Kelley and Todd Lichti. Luisetti came from a different era from the other four, and is really in a different class as well.
Angelo Enrico Luisetti was born in 1916 to Italian immigrant parents near the North Beach section of San Francisco, not far from the residence of Joe DiMaggio, who was a year and half older. Luisetti was so bow-legged as a youth he had to wear braces to straighten them, and when he went down to the nearby playground – the same playground at which Helen Jacobs learned to play tennis a few years earlier – Luisetti was not strong enough to reach the basket with the standard two-handed set shot. Luisetti had to fling the ball with one hand to get it there, at first winging it like a discus and later launching the ball from near his face and jumping during the shot to help propel it. He did not know he was developing the shot that would change basketball.
He was a good player at Galileo High School in San Francisco, good enough to win two city titles and earn a scholarship to Stanford. But he had made his name there with his playmaking and defensive skills, not his scoring.
The points starting coming while he was on the freshman team at Stanford, and he scored 70 points in a two-game stretch in one weekend.
Luckily for him and basketball, Stanford varsity coach John Bunn did not try to change Luisetti’s unorthodox shot or stifle Luisetti’s flashy style. Bunn had played under Phog Allen at Kansas and had been a student of basketball inventor James Naismith, so Bunn considered himself a traditionalist. When he saw Luisetti tossing in 20-foot shots one-handed, leaping over taller players to get rebounds and slipping perfectly placed behind-the-back passes to teammates, he figured it was in his best interests to let Luisetti keep his style, a style that was 30 or 40 years ahead of its time.
Luisetti’s most memorable games were the December 1936 game in which he introduced his one-handed shot to the skeptical East Coast crowd while ending Long Island’s 43-game winning streak at New York’s Madison Square Garden, and the January 1938 game in which he scored 50 points (still a Stanford record) in a blowout of Duquesne. He was twice named national player of the year, and Stanford won the national title his junior year. And he changed the way the game was played.
He declared after his final college game in 1938 he would never play professionally, and later that year he appeared in a movie with Betty Grable titled “Campus Confessions.” Luisetti hated the experience and the movie flopped, but he was suspended for a year by the AAU for accepting $10,000 to play the part of a fancy-dribbling basketball player.
In 1940 he played for the Olympic Club in San Francisco, and, after joining the Navy following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, he played at St. Mary’s Pre-Flight School in 1943 and 1944, playing the best basketball of his career there
In November of 1944, he contracted spinal meningitis, was hospitalized for four months, lost 40 pounds and was told he could never play basketball again. He was 28 years old, the prime of most players’ careers, but he was done.
Nonetheless, he was offered $10,000 to play in the NBA (the Basketball Association of American was started in 1946 and became the NBA in 1949). He turned it down and began working for a car dealership in San Francisco, and he later worked in the travel business.
In 1988 a stature of Luisetti lauching his famous one-handed shot was installed at Stanford’s home arena, Maples Pavilion, and it was later moved outside the building, where it stands today. His No. 7 is the only men’s basketball number ever retired at Stanford.
He died in December 2002 at the age of 86.
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