Racial divide set aside in ‘The Secret Game’

Little, Brown and Company

400 pages, $27

One Sunday morning in 1944, Duke Medical School’s basketball squad beetled across Durham to play the North Carolina College for Negroes’ Eagles, the highest scoring team in the nation. The young white doctors pulled their jackets over their heads to disguise themselves as they entered the gym; then the Eagles locked down their facility to hide what would become “the South’s first integrated college basketball game.” If neither team knew quite what to expect that day, author Scott Ellsworth offers one certainty: “Jim Crow was not invited.”

Beautifully paced, its eloquence cloaked within a common touch, “The Secret Game” is Ellsworth’s revealing account of the segregated home front during World War II, when “the first whisperings of a rising wind” became audible in the modernizing South. It also unfolds as a lively, concise history of basketball, tracking its rapid diffusion into the Midwest and the South, particularly North Carolina.

Ellsworth sketches basketball’s early titans, three of whom found themselves together at the University of Kansas in the 1930s. John Naismith is a teetotaling, boot-tough Canadian who — over a weekend in 1891 — invented the sport at a Massachusetts YMCA Training Center. Forrest “Phog” Allen, the master tactician, author and promoter, designed his own athletic shoe and taught his players “the proper way to gargle while standing on his desk in his underwear.” John McLendon, the disciple of both men, would become the nation’s first great African-American coach.

With his suave jump blues look, the pioneering McLendon was only a few years older than his players when he took command of the North Carolina College team in 1937. His strategy of “roundball blitzkrieg,” with its strong emphasis on physical conditioning, transformed the Eagles into a phantom powerhouse in the era before black schools achieved “visibility.”

A strong off-the-court leader, McLendon emerges as the heroic presence in “The Secret Game.”

“Coaching in the South was like coaching in a minefield,” he once said. One had to maintain one’s dignity in front the players at any cost. Following a seating altercation with a Greyhound driver, McLendon marched the Eagles off a bus onto a Virginia roadside. There was little hope they could make their game that night, but, Ellsworth writes, “they were walking, for the first time in their lives, the walk of the free.”

Ellsworth’s portrayal of the team is enlivened by anecdotes about gambling, corn-liquor and their hard-partying leader, Henry “Big Dog” Thomas, who conducted himself like “a meteorite looking for a place to land.”

Over at the Duke School of Medicine, the basketball doctors (“a well-oiled machine”) had a reputation for demolishing opponents, including their own school team, the Blue Devils. Like the Eagles, the surgeons partied hard, favoring a recreational concoction known as “Purple Jesus.” (“If you drank too much … you’d find out why it was called what it was called in the first place.”)

Duke had built the largest indoor stadium in the South, designed by a black Philadelphia architect who would never have been allowed inside the facility. But the school’s student body had a strong complement of Northerners and Westerners, like Jack Burgess. Troubled by racism on campus, he may have teased his reluctant teammates to accept the match with North Carolina College, which meant violating the state’s race laws.

Through an accumulation of sometimes startling details, Ellsworth reconstructs the secret game inside “The Secret Game.” During this period of North Carolina’s racial partition, physical contact between whites and blacks was proscribed, so an undercurrent of real danger adds to the tension. While the book has an abundance of fascinating basketball arcana, Ellsworth limits his play-by-play commentary to the main event, building anticipation. When the moment finally arrives, he seems to hover just above the action, marveling at the “sly screens and no look passes” of Duke and the fast breaks and unorthodox techniques of the Eagles.

A handful of NCC students, peering through the gym’s windows, witness this “unimaginable, brave new world … a shining [if forgotten] moment in the separated South.” Afterward, both teams join in a spontaneous pickup game when “the only lines on the court were made of paint.” If the Eagles had nagging doubts about how they might measure up to the white players, one of their sharpshooters concludes “[they are] just a bunch of guys like us.” Writing to his parents, Jack Burgess comments that the Southerners on his team had “changed their views quite a lot” on racial issues.

In “The Secret Game,” the cinematic potential of its climax is offset by the sobering, tragic realities of American apartheid. Ellsworth frequently summons mundane concerns of the 1940s — bus schedules, the natural world and the weather on this or that day — to steady the course with poetic passage. Returning from New York to Durham in a segregated train car, the Eagles’ melancholy is braced by the chromatic moment when “the first green leaves … coming out on the willows, and bright patches of forsythia and lilies of the valley could be spotted along the back fences and side yards of the farms and little towns they passed along the way.”