You may know where Allegheny Cemetery is. Heck, you may have even visited the place. It’s a pretty, wooded, hillside facility in Lawrenceville, and it has some history. It’s the sixth-oldest rural cemetery in the United States. (And, to be clear, a “rural cemetery” doesn’t have to be in a rural area. It’s defined as a cemetery that uses landscaping in a park-like setting and also called a “garden cemetery”. It’s distinct from the kinds of cemeteries that existed before the 19th Century, usually small, sectarian plots in cities under control of a church. But, I digress.)
Allegheny Cemetery was incorporated in 1844, just 13 years after the very first rural cemetery in the U.S., Mount Auburn Cemetery near Boston, so, as you might imagine, there are lots of old graves in the place, and, among the oldest are those of soldiers who fought in the French and Indian War. (Their graves were moved from Trinity Cathedral.) Lots of other notables are amidst the more than 124, 000 people interred at Allegheny Cemetery. Beano Cook is there. So is John Baptiste Ford, founder of PPG Industries and Ford City, PA. Joseph Horne, founder of the department store chain is there as well. With Thomas Mellon, founder of Mellon Bank. The most famous residents of Allegheny Cemetery, though, are two men who couldn’t have been more different.
One is Henry K. Thaw. Thaw, heir to a multi-million dollar fortune and also mentally unstable, committed one of the most famous murders in the country’s history. On June 26, 1905, on the roof of Madison Square Garden, Thaw shot famed architect Stanford White to death as a result of a relationship White had had with Thaw’s wife, Evelyn Nesbit, when the latter was 16 years old. Thaw was tried twice for the murder. One trial ended in a hung jury (and goes down in history as the first trial in the U.S. in which a jury was sequestered). At the end of the second, Thaw was found not guilty by reason of insanity, meaning he was never punished for his misdeeds.
The other man in question was born poor in Georgia. His father moved the family to Pittsburgh when he was 12. By age 16, he was doing what he did best…and, what he might have done better than any man who ever lived. Playing baseball. But. Being born black in 1911 meant that Josh Gibson never got to play Major League Baseball, since the Major Leagues were segregated for his entire life. Gibson was regarded by many as the best player in the Negro Leagues for much of his career, and that included his final two seasons, 1945 and 1946, while he was battling the effects of the brain tumor that eventually killed him. In January, 1947, Gibson died in Pittsburgh. Less than three months later, Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. By then, however, Gibson was a resident of the pretty Lawrenceville hillside occupied by Allegheny Cemetery, punished his entire life simply for not being white.
There are lots of other folks with some degree of fame at Allegheny Cemetery. If you read even an extensive list of those, however, you won’t likely find the name of Sihugo “Si” Green. But, Green, believe it or not, played an outsized role in the history of one of American’s biggest sports leagues, the NBA.
Sihugo Green was born in New York City on August 20, 1933, and his connection with Pittsburgh didn’t begin until college. He chose to enroll at Duquesne University, then a college basketball power. And, Green was a heck of a player for some very good Dukes teams. With the talent the New York native had, there wasn’t any question that he’d be an early NBA draft choice…even in the pint-sized NBA of the time. Because, the NBA of 1956 was a far cry from the 30-team behemoth the league is today. The current NBA features teams from coast to coast and, of course, in Canada. The 1955-56 version of the NBA had only eight teams and not one of them played south or west of St. Louis. Oh, and while some big cities like St. Louis, Philadelphia, Boston, and New York were represented, the rest of the league’s teams sat in Minneapolis, Syracuse, Rochester, and Ft. Wayne. In fact, six of the ten most populous cities in the country, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, and Washington didn’t have teams. And, as, basically, a Northeastern and Upper Midwestern league, the NBA had no national profile and was a poor fifth among team sports in the country, trailing college basketball, professional and college football, and, by leaps and bounds, the dominant sport in the country, baseball.
So, this was the league into which Sihugo Green, a two-time All American, was about to be drafted. Of course, Green wasn’t the only college senior that NBA teams were excited about adding to their rosters. Nor was he the most talented or most decorated. That would have been one William Felton Russell of the University of San Francisco. Russell, upon graduation, was, by any measure, the greatest college basketball player of all time. He’d lead USF to 55 consecutive wins and two consecutive national championships. He was also named national player of the year for two consecutive years. There was no question that Russell was the most talented player in the draft. And, the team that had the first pick in that draft was the Rochester Royals.
The Royals, however, were about to make what might very well be the biggest draft mistake of all time in any sport. The team wanted an outside shooter, but, more importantly, didn’t want to pay the $25,000 bonus Russell was asking for. Sensing a chance to steal a great player, Red Auerbach, the coach of the Celtics, approached Rochester officials and offered to get ownership the Ice Capades to do a show in Rochester if the team didn’t draft Russell. Rochester took the ice show and Sihugo Green. And changed the course of the NBA forever.
Boston, after a huge draft day trade, ended up with Russell and went from a team that finished a few games over .500 the year before and flamed out in the first round of the playoffs to the team that would win eleven of the next thirteen NBA Championships. And, that could have been Rochester. Really.
See, the Royals had the worst record in the league in 1955-56, but the team was not without talent. It had two Hall of Famers, Jack Twyman and the guy who was likely the greatest power forward of all time, Maurice Stokes. (Stokes, by the by, was born in Rankin and attended Westinghouse High School in Pittsburgh.) Now. Add Russell. Three Hall of Famers. And, it gets better. Rochester had the number one pick again in 1957. With Green entrenched at guard and “Hot Rod” Hundley at the top of everyone’s draft board, Rochester traded the pick. Now. I know what you’re thinking. With Russell, Rochester wouldn’t have had the top pick. Correct. It would have been picking later in the round…and, without Green on the roster, would have been looking for a guard and had a shot at another Hall of Famer, Sam Jones, who went last in the round. OK. FOUR Hall of Famers. And, with both Russell and Jones not in Boston? Dynasty.
Now, you could argue that the number of Hall of Famers would have dropped to three after Stokes’ career ended prematurely due to a brain injury suffered when he hit his head off the court in March, 1958, an injury exacerbated by a plane flight a few days later. (Tragically, Stokes ended up permanently paralyzed and Twyman, his close friend, became his legal guardian and cared for him for the rest of his life.) But. That number of Royals Hall of Famers would have quickly returned to four.
The team was losing money in Rochester, a small market, and ownership knew it needed to move to a bigger city if it wanted to compete with the likes of New York, Philadelphia, and Boston. The owners moved the team to Cincinnati in April, 1957 and kept the Royals nickname. And, being in Cincinnati meant that the team had the rights to use territorial picks on players coming out of the University of Cincinnati. In 1960, three-time college player of the year Oscar Robertson, who’d attended Cincinnati, made himself eligible for the NBA draft. The Royals took him. And, at that point, the team’s line up could have included Twyman, Jones, Robertson, and Russell. And, by 1963, another Hall of Famer, Jerry Lucas.
Now. If you’re going to argue that there’s no guarantee, even with lineups that star-studded, that Rochester/Cincinnati would have won 11 titles in 13 years like Boston did, well. You’re right. There certainly isn’t. What isn’t arguable is that the Royals, not the Celtics (who, again, would have been without Jones and Russell, the latter by far their most important player), would have been the NBA’s second great dynasty (after George Mikan’s Minneapolis Lakers, another team with a Western Pennsylvania connection…it was coached by John Kundla, who was born in Star Junction, Fayette County in 1916. Kundla lived to be 101 years old, passing on in 2017.)
As it was, the Royals got better with Robertson and Lucas, but could never match the Celtics. They won no titles in Cincinnati, and, by 1972, with both players traded (and Robertson winning NBA titles in Milwaukee), the struggling team moved again, this time to Kansas City. That’s where it changed its name to the “Kings” (to avoid confusion with the Kansas City Royals baseball team). Originally billed as the Kansas City-Omaha Kings (since the team initially played half its home games in Omaha), the franchise stayed in Kansas City until 1985. It won no titles there and was eventually driven out of town by competition for the winter spots dollar from the Kansas City Comets…an indoor soccer team. (Not kidding.)
From Kansas City, the franchise moved west again, this time to Sacramento, where it remains today. Where it has, like in Kansas City, won no championships. In fact, since that day in 1956 when the Royals took an ice show and Sihugo Green instead of Bill Russell, the franchise has won exactly zero championships. The Celtics have won seventeen. Oh. And, when the team arrived in Sacramento, its head coach was a guy named Phil Johnson. Johnson was fired by the team (for the second time), midway through the 1986-87 season. An interim coach (Jerry Reynolds) held down the job until Kings management could decide on a permanent replacement for Johnson. The guy they eventually picked, 32 years too late, was one William Felton Russell.
As for Sihugo Green, he played only 33 games for the Royals, 13 in his rookie season, 1956-57, and then, after missing the next season due to military service, 20 more in 1958-59 before being traded to St. Louis. Green ended up playing nine seasons in the NBA with four teams and averaging 9.2 points per game. On October 4, 1980, Green, at the much-too-young age of 47, passed on from cancer, and went to join Gibson and the others on that Lawrenceville hillside, forever the answer to the trivia question, “Which former NBA player was drafted ahead of Bill Russell.”
Things Amic Thinks About 