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His glasses taped to his head now, with tangles of thick black hair, he could have been a double for the silent-screen comedian Harold Lloyd, and he was just as conspicuous on a basketball floor. Two scouts from the athletic department at DePaul University noticed his size and cornered him after a Quigley game. What were his intentions for college, they wanted to know. He told them he intended to study to become a priest. But by the fall of 1941 he knew that his calling was basketball, not the priesthood, and he enrolled at DePaul University.

He was only twenty-two years old. He was the Kangaroo Kid, and stories about his jumping ability, fed by sportswriters who measured one of his driving basketball leaps at seventeen feet, bordered on the mythical. But with the world at war, he enlisted in the Coast Guard, and by June 1944 he and Ari were engaged. Two weeks before the wedding, his mother died suddenly. He had nowhere to call home 27 First Quarter now and no money. Only his skill at basketball seemed to separate him from those sad Salvation Army indigents for whom he had once raised money by playing his trumpet.

4 It all made him as mysterious and powerful as High John de Conquer, promising laughter and hope. Meanwhile, white audiences especially failed to realize that beneath his comedic talent and that happy-go-lucky court clown lay the gifts of a magnificent athlete. Beneath that ropy, Raggedy Ann body there were lightning reflexes and the instincts of an All-Star. He could shoot as well as anybody. When he wasn’t playing the flatfoot pivot clown, wandering the floor as if his feet were stuck in glop, he had half a dozen moves around the basket—a jump hook shot that was years ahead of its time, his unstoppable windmill hook, spin moves, leaping fallaways that required a delicate touch, and just the opposite, power plays where he went right over the top of his opponents and strong-armed the shot.