Kenny Sailors

By LEW FREEDMAN

The game is in his soul, even after all these years. Kenny Sailors doesn’t have the quick dribble anymore and at 87 he has given up testing his vertical leap.

But like much of America he will be fascinated by the NCAA men’s basketball Final Four in San Antonio. The eye he brings to it as he cuddles up to the television set in his Laramie, Wyoming apartment will differ significantly from the viewpoint of other millions.

In 1943, Kenny Sailors was part of the Final Four, though they didn’t call it that then. He was the top scorer for the University of Wyoming and when the Cowboys won the championship, Sailors was named the Most Valuable Player.

 “I got a trophy and I got a watch,” Sailors recalled the other day.

He also earned a lasting place in the sport.

What Sailors, a 5-foot-10 playmaker, who grew up in rural Wyoming, brought to the table was a bit of flash and dash. He was airborne when the game was as rooted as an oak tree. Not only could Sailors dribble in and out of defenses, he made them pay from outside.

His exotic shot, ridiculed as impractical by many conservative coaches, was the simple weapon we now know as the jump shot. Others were famous for taking running one-handed shots, but Sailors was the first true practitioner of the modern jump shot, credited by the late coach Ray Meyer, UCLA’s John Wooden, and hordes of witnesses.

There is a Life magazine cover photograph of Sailors from the 1940s in mid-air, unleashing a shot. The other nine players are flat-footed on the Madison Square Garden floor. The picture is an artifact of history, one illustration of Sailors as basketball pioneer.

Sailors invented the jump shot out of necessity. When he was a boy his older brother had grown to 6-foot-5 and when they played one-on-one the improvised jumper was the only way Sailors could get off a shot.

Sailors played for Wyoming, but World War II was on, and he entered the service for three years. He returned to campus, finished his degree, and at 26 was just in time to play the first five years of the NBA. Sailors averaged a high of 17.3 ppg. for the old Denver Nuggets, but in those restive times his teams, the Nuggets, the Providence Steamrollers and Cleveland Rebels, kept folding. Sailors spent part of a season with the Boston Celtics – Red Auerbach’s first year – but eventually moved to Alaska and became a hunting guide.

Well into his 70s, Sailors shot his jump shot in the gym and he only stepped back when it seemed possible one of his grandchildren might beat him one-on-one at last.

For the last several years Sailors has been back in Wyoming, where as a member of the University’s Hall of Fame and a regular attendee at football and basketball games, Sailors is a resident celebrity. Fans still find him, seeking autographs, some on his only basketball card, issued in 1948.

“I get letters all the time,” Sailors said. “A letter a day, sometimes more.”

The school set up a sailorsjumpshot.com web site for him. There is a lot of history on it to read.

Sailors’ senior year was the only time Wyoming won an NCAA basketball crown and as this year’s tournament unfolded, he was taken with Davidson.

“I was rooting for that little team,” Sailors said. “It’s good sometimes when the underdogs win.”

(Lew Freedman is a Chicago-based sports writer and the author of the recently released “LeBron James – A Biography” from Greenwood Publishing.)