''Wat'' A Player
Catching up with ''Wat'' Misaka, first NBA player of Asian descentJackie Robinson and Wataru "Wat" Misaka are inextricably linked.
It was 1947 and both were pioneers in integrating professional sports. While Robinson broke the color barrier in baseball, Misaka did the same in basketball with much less fanfare. More than half a century before the Dallas Mavericks drafted China's Wang Zhizhi in 1999, the New York Knicks drafted Misaka, the first NBA player of Asian descent, in the first round.
Misaka, a 5-7 guard, appeared in three games and scored seven points for the 1947-48 Knicks before he was cut for reasons never made clear to him. But he recalls his brief stint in the NBA as a pleasant one.
"We had training camp in Bear Mountain and Carl Braun was my roommate," said Misaka, 77. "Even after we returned to New York we remained very friendly and he had me out to his place out on Long Island a couple of times."
A Japanese-American, Misaka was born in Ogden, Utah, and, except for his time with the Knicks and a stint in the military, has lived in the area his whole life. After playing for Weber Junior College (now Weber State University) in Ogden, he helped guide the University of Utah to the 1944 NCAA and 1947 NIT championships and was inducted into the Utah Sports hall of Fame in 1999. Two years before, he was inducted into the Japanese-American National Bowling Hall of Fame.
Despite the specter of World War II still fresh when he broke into the NBA, Misaka experienced little intolerance while with the Knicks.
"Whether real or not, I felt less prejudice against me in New York than I did anywhere else," said Misaka. "Playing for Utah (at Madison Square Garden), New Yorkers are great fans of underdogs and they really backed us up, even against St. John's. When I went back as a Knick, there were people who remembered me from playing for Utah and would say hello on the streets, sometimes."
A Utah Jazz (who else?) fan, Misaka has followed Wang's progress with great interest. And while Misaka is rooting for the 7-1 center to be a forerunner of an influx of Asian basketball talent, Misaka is unsure whether he will feel any kinship other than one of basketball when he finally sees Wang play.
"It's kind of strange," said Misaka, who turned down an offer to play for the Harlem Globetrotters so that he could return to school to earn a degree in engineering. "My parents were Japanese. But in my entire career, I played with whites, so I just feel like I'm just like the rest. The way it was and the way they treated me, I was just another basketball player."
Here is another article:
Asian Men Can Jump
The NBA’s First APA Player Remembers
By Sam Cacas, AAV Contributing Editor
He may not exactly be "like Mike," but the Japanese-American hoopster who played his way through World War II to become the NBA’s first-ever Asian-Pacific-American is still a star figure in APA sports history
February 8, 1999 - A little more than 52 years have passed since Wataru (Wat) Misaka stepped on a basketball court and became the first Asian Pacific American to play in the National Basketball Association. But to this 76-year-old native of Ogden, Utah, his shot at professional basketball "doesn’t seem like a long time ago."
Recalling his NBA and college basketball career from his home in Bountiful, Utah, Misaka emphasized that he "always felt athletically talented." In high school, he was a four-letter man--in football, baseball, basketball and track. At the University of Utah, he led the Utes to a National Collegiate Athletic Association championship in 1944 and a 1947 National Invitation Tournament. At the time, the NIT championship was a more highly coveted and acclaimed accomplishment in college basketball than the NCAA championship.
The Nisei’s forte was defense. "Though I was not much of a scorer, I defensed whoever I was guarding so they couldn’t dribble around me and I was also good at denying a pass to the person I was guarding," he said, vividly recalling a 1947 game against Kentucky in which he was assigned what had become a familiar task: guarding the opposing team’s highest-scoring player.
In typical "Wat" fashion, he completely shut down that Kentucky player, who was averaging 20 points per game at the time. Or almost completely.
"He scored one point on a free throw off a foul that I didn’t commit," Misaka admitted.
The nation’s first APA pro hoopster recalls that before the Second World War, the students, fans, and players generally treated him well. Since he lived outside of the western military exclusion zone, he avoided evacuation into a concentration camp, but he recalls visiting a friend at the Topaz, Arizona camp. Although he kept playing through the war, he remembers playing a college game in which some fans screamed, "Get the dirty Jap!"
Such experiences were not uncommon in his day-to-day life growing up in Ogden, Utah, especially after World War II started. "People would say, ‘You better get out of the way’ when I walked near them on the sidewalk, and many of them would try to pick fights with me."
Misaka felt it was "quite a compliment to be the number one pick of the Knicks in 1946 attributing the honor as well as his making the team to his collegiate reputation. But at the time it happened, he did not think much of it. "In those days, many players continued to stay in school to get more education and earn more money than they would playing pro basketball." In the three games Misaka played, he recalled playing about 10 minutes each game, and getting several steals.
"I was pretty much aware that I was the first Asian Pacific American to play in the league," he explained. "But my teammates were very cordial with me and thus I didn't dwell much on being a minority person." Misaka pointed out, however, that his NBA career was much too brief for him to make any judgment about his experience.
And 42 years after playing three games for the New York Knicks under the legendary coach Joe Lapchick, Misaka says it would be mere speculation to say he was cut because he was Japanese American. In retrospect, he say "I’m more upset now about being cut than I was when it happened, because looking back and seeing the players who didn’t get cut, I believe it was unfair for them to cut me."
He added that it was rare for a college player – especially a number one pick like himself – to be cut from a team. In those days, playing college basketball was the high point of any organized basketball player's career since the professional basketball leagues were not yet firmly established, explained Misaka. "It came as a complete surprise to me," he said. "While I have no evidence of any racial animosity on the part of the coach, I was given no explanation for being cut by the team owner – Ned Irish – who only told me that the coach made the decision."
Misaka later turned down an offer from basketball mogul Abe Saperstein to play for the Harlem Globetrotters in order to return to school, where he later earned an engineering degree. He went on to work for the Sperry company in Utah for more than 20 years before retiring and working as a contract manufacturer in Bountiful.
Very few APAs have tried to follow in Misaka’s NBA journey. According to league records, a Chinese national player made the Los Angeles Clippers in 1994, but chose to play on his country’s Olympic team before the regular season started and has never returned; a few mixed-race APAs played briefly during the last 20 years. But 52 years after leading the way for future Asian Pacific Americans, Misaka is "very hopeful that there will soon be another person of Asian descent playing in the NBA."
Wat Misaka, 1st non-Caucasian player in NBA
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/11/sp...ref=basketballWataru "Wat" Misaka (Japanese: 三阪 亙 Misaka Wataru) (born December 21, 1923) was the first player of Asian descent and the first non-caucasian person to play in the National Basketball Association (then known as the Basketball Association of America).
Pioneering Knick Returns to Garden
Sixty-two years ago, Wat Misaka was the darling of Madison Square Garden. When he flitted between the superstars from Kentucky or St. John’s, the crowd cheered his name, his Japanese-American name.
“They cheered for the deprived and the unfortunates,” Misaka recalled of the Garden crowd, rooting for a 5-foot-7 guard shutting down the great Ralph Beard of Kentucky.
Misaka was so successful at the Garden in 1944 and 1947 that he became the first draft choice of the Knicks. He lasted just three games, but is remembered as the first non-Caucasian player in modern professional basketball, three years before African-Americans were included.
Since the day he was cut in the fall of 1947, Misaka had not been back to New York, much less the Garden, but on Monday, he returned. In the hallway leading to the dressing room, he was shown plaques for every Knicks team, and there on the 1947-48 plaque was his name.
“Etched in bronze,” Misaka said.
His name and his life are celebrated in a documentary, “Transcending: The Wat Misaka Story.” He is part of basketball history but also part of American history, having lived through the internment period during World War II and later serving in the United States army in Hiroshima, three months after the atomic bomb was dropped there.
“I don’t think I’ve ever gotten over the devastation,” he said Monday.
His job with the military was to use his modest Japanese language skills to determine the effect of repeated bombing on civilians. When Misaka visited an uncle on an island near Hiroshima, they ate clams out of the bay, not even understanding the concept of radioactivity.
“We didn’t have children for 12 years, and he thought that might be the reason,” said his wife, Katie, an Ohio-born teacher descended from an ancient Samurai family in Hiroshima.
The documentary is by Bruce Alan Johnson and Christine Toy Johnson, married filmmakers from New York, who got the idea when they saw a brief mention of Misaka a few years ago.
“Why don’t we know about him?” asked Christine Johnson, of Katonah, N.Y., who is of Chinese ancestry.
Because Misaka’s family had roots in Utah, they were allowed to remain there after the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, rather than be interned at Topaz, Utah, where thousands of Japanese-Americans were sent.
With the war raging, Misaka made the team at the University of Utah, although Coach Vadal Peterson did not start him, possibly for fear of touching off fans, or possibly to keep Misaka in a supporting role.
When Utah went to the prestigious National Invitation Tournament in New York, Misaka drew raves in a loss to powerful Kentucky. Then the team was invited to the less prominent N.C.A.A. tournament and earned a return trip to New York, where it beat Dartmouth for the title.
After his military hitch, Misaka returned to Utah — and had to hustle his way back onto the team, ultimately helping it win the N.I.T., in which he held Beard to 1 point in the final.
The old footage in the documentary is delightful, showing players in short shorts, taking four or five passes before freeing somebody for a layup. Misaka is a whirlwind.
The Garden crowd, cigar haze and all, loved him so much that the Knicks selected him for the inaugural season of the Basketball Association of America, a forerunner of the N.B.A. Competing against much larger guards, Misaka made it to the regular season, scoring 7 points in three early games.
The filmmakers suggest that the Knicks’ general manager, Ned Irish, might have been discouraged by the racial gibes on the road. Misaka recalls a few so-called teammates giving him faulty advice to make him look bad on the court, but he seems to accept that a 5-7 guard was at a disadvantage, even in 1947. The Knicks had given him a rare guaranteed contract, worth $4,000, but they cut him, anyway.
“I don’t think race was an issue,” Misaka says in the film.
The film reveals that Misaka, who had been a big hit against the Harlem Globetrotters, was offered a place with the all-black Globetrotters, but he declined. He went home, earned his degree, married and worked as an engineer.
Now he has come back to New York — and the “new” Garden, merely 41 years old.
•
The Garden staff put a ball in Misaka’s hands as he looked up at his old No. 15 hanging from the rafters, twice. “They retired your number,” somebody said. Actually, the twin numbers are for Earl Monroe and Dick McGuire.
Misaka was happy to hear that McGuire was still scouting. He has been in touch with his talented teammate Carl Braun, who now lives in Florida.
The floor and the baskets were not in place Monday, so Misaka declined the challenge to take a phantom layup. It seemed quite enough that he was finally back at Madison Square Garden and his name was on a plaque. He had lived long enough for history to rediscover him.
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