The dark truth of Joe Fulks, Philadelphia’s first pro basketball legend

It was late on the night after Joe Fulks died from a shotgun blast to his neck when Eddie Gottlieb’s phone rang. As the hours passed on Sunday, March 21, 1976, word snaked out over the national wire services that Fulks, 54, was dead and that the cause was, in all likelihood, foul play. In the newsroom of the Philadelphia Daily News, a diligent reporter named Phil Jasner called Gottlieb to get his reaction. The Daily News had witching-hour deadlines then. Gottlieb was 77. It’s possible that Jasner woke him up.

Gottlieb had coached Fulks with the Philadelphia Warriors during the era of professional basketball when Fulks, an angular 6-foot-5 forward with what one writer described as “a slow southern drawl that suggested a deep calm,” was the greatest scorer in the still-nascent sport. Wielding an innovative tool that he helped to popularize, the jump shot, Fulks had scored 63 points in one game, a record that he set in February 1949 — the NBA wasn’t even called the NBA then; it was the Basketball Association of America — and that stood for 10 years.

The Warriors had won the BAA championship in 1946-47, when Fulks was a rookie, and he was the league’s leading scorer that season and the next before averaging a career-high 26.0 points in his third. In 1971, five years before authorities entered a mobile home in western Kentucky around 4 a.m. and found blood puddling around his body, Fulks had been one of 10 players named to the NBA’s Silver Anniversary Team. Bill Russell, Bob Cousy, and Paul Arizin were also among the honorees.

“The first superstar the league ever had,” Gottlieb told Jasner. “I can see him scoring those 63 points today …”

There were other aspects of Fulks that Gottlieb had seen, too. Everyone who knew Fulks well had seen them. But Gottlieb did not discuss them on the record with Jasner. The story was a brief remembrance, 500-600 words filed minutes before the presses started churning and cranking, and those aspects were darker. They led to the end of Joe Fulks’ career, and they led to the end of his life.

MURRAY, Ky. — To reach the place at Joe Fulks’ alma mater where his memory is most alive, descend to the lower concourse of CFSB Center, the home arena of the Murray State University Racers, and wind through a hallway or two. In the foyer of the Murray Room, the pre- and post-game reception space for the basketball program’s alumni, boosters, and staff, three magazines from the late 1940s, arranged inside a wall unit so that full-page, black-and-white photographs of Fulks are easily visible, keep him and his accomplishments preserved behind glass.

On Oct. 26, 1921, Fulks was born 20 miles north of here, in Birmingham, Ky., one of several enclaves that were set on a finger of land between the Tennessee and Cumberland Rivers and that orbited the town of Golden Pond. The region had fewer than 400 residents and no airport, yet Golden Pond still managed to be a major distribution site of whiskey and moonshine during Prohibition. Dozens of airplanes used the area’s endless meadows and river banks each week as their runways and landing strips, lifting off for New York and Chicago, supplying black-market booze to the syndicates of gangsters Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, and Al Capone. Made and sold and often consumed to excess, alcohol was endemic to the culture there. Life was soaked in it.

“My dad thought a moonshiner was just as legitimate as a used-car salesman, even more so,” said Judge Bill Cunningham, a retired justice on the Kentucky Supreme Court who has written several books on the region’s history. “If you had a conviction of moonshining, it was a kind of a badge of honor.”

Though he wasn’t physically abusive to his children, Fulks’ father, Leonard, a laborer who struggled to find work during the Great Depression, “disappeared for weeks at a time to pitch wild drunks,” John Christgau wrote in his book The Origins of the Jump Shot. Joe filled the hole his father’s absences left by taking up the sport that provided his hometown with its greatest measure of pride.

Despite having just 23 boys in grades nine through 12, Birmingham School qualified for the 1932 state basketball tournament in Louisville, and its players became heroes to the younger kids in town, including Fulks. As a pre-teen, he practiced by sneaking onto the high school’s outdoor court to shoot a brick at the two rims, shredding the nets with every swish, and, later, by heaving a bladderless, sawdust-filled ball toward a basket nailed to the side of his house. So spindly that he had to set a basketball atop his shoulder like he was putting a shot, he started incorporating his legs into his shooting form as a freshman at Birmingham at the suggestion of the team’s head coach, Robert Goheen.

The moment marked a starter’s pistol report in a revolution. Over the half-century after James Naismith wrote his original 13 rules for basketball in 1891, several players around the country, all acting independently of each other, experimented with the jump shot and have since been credited with inventing or mainstreaming it. Fulks was one. He practiced until, as he grew taller and stronger, he could shoot with either hand and began leaping a few inches off the ground as he did so.

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“I didn’t see too many people using a jump shot,” he said in March 1975. “I saw a lot of people running and shooting, and I found out if you stopped and shot at the basket, it was a lot more accurate and more confusing for your defensive player.”

Fulks starred at Birmingham, leading the school to a district championship in 1939, the Paducah Sun calling him “western Kentucky’s greatest basketball player” of the previous decade. No wonder. The court was his lone place of peace amid disasters natural and man-made.

A black widow bit him one night near his family’s outhouse. He spent days in bed with a hellish fever. Purple pustules bubbled up on his skin. A doctor had to lance them. Worse, for Birmingham and its inhabitants, were the days of thick and unrelenting rain throughout western Kentucky late in 1936 and into 1937, a storm so terrible that, according to Christgau, the Tennessee River rose to 54 feet, its backwater pooling inside houses and sweeping through the town like a mighty brown monster.

When the federal government put into motion a plan to dam the Tennessee — a plan that would prevent flooding in other river towns but would level Birmingham — the Fulks family moved 14 miles northeast to Kuttawa. By the time the dam was completed in 1943, Birmingham was gone. Its original site is now engulfed by Kentucky Lake.

As a senior, Fulks led Kuttawa to a 22-2 record, and years later, he and his high school teammates would claim that he first took to drinking at this time, a local sports god living it up: whiskey swirled into store-bought bottles of Coke, late nights dancing and carousing at a riverside club called The Turnaround. Though Kentucky, coached by Adolph Rupp, and Indiana were among the programs recruiting him, Fulks opted to return to familiar and comfortable environs and accept Murray State’s scholarship offer.

His statistics weren’t otherworldly; he averaged 16.6 points for the freshman team, then 13.2 over his two seasons on varsity. Fulks’ teams at Murray won 48 of the 58 games he played, and he is the school’s only alumnus who has been inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. Yet his name isn’t spoken here with the same reverence reserved for a select few who followed him through the program: Popeye Jones, former 76ers guard Isaiah Canaan, Cameron Payne, and of course — and despite a recent series of controversial and irresponsible incidents — Ja Morant.

“The old-timers told me Fulks was not dominant here,” said Dave Ramey, who was Murray State’s sports-information director in the early 1990s. “I’ve had some people bite back on me about that, but he was not what he was in Philadelphia.”

He wouldn’t have ended up in Philadelphia if he hadn’t been drafted into the Marine Corps in 1943. By then, he had gotten married — he met his wife, Mary Sue, at The Turnaround — and though he served in Guam and on Iwo Jima, he became a national sensation not for his bravery in battle but for his basketball exploits, leading the San Diego Marine Base and the Fleet Marine Force teams in scoring. Both squads went unbeaten, too. “To win,” Fulks once said, “you’ve got to have points, so I fire away at every opportunity.”

Gottlieb noticed. On April 19, 1946, he mailed Fulks a letter. Dear Fulks, he wrote, you have been highly recommended to me as a basketball player, and I am writing to find out if you would be interested in playing professional ball in Philadelphia for my team. Fulks was. He signed with the Warriors for an $8,000 bonus, almost walking away from the deal because he was so insulted by Gottlieb’s initial offer of $5,000.

He proved to be worth every cent through his first three seasons in the pros, his style of play a precursor to the likes of Rick Barry, Larry Bird, and Steph Curry. “He was a great, great player, one of the first guys who had a great variety of shots,” Celtics coach/patriarch Red Auerbach once said. “He could shoot them any way from any place. We set up defenses revolving around him.” A 1947 headline in the Louisville Courier-Journal proclaimed him to be “the Babe Ruth of basketball.” Gottlieb called him “a once-in-a-lifetime player” and bragged that he wouldn’t trade him for George Mikan and $10,000.

On Feb. 10, 1949, a snowstorm covered Philadelphia in white, making the roads to The Arena, at 46th and Market, so treacherous that fewer than 1,000 people showed up to bear witness to Fulks’ 63-point performance against the Indianapolis Jets. He took 56 shots from the field and hit 27 of them. Frustrated after having five different defenders try to guard Fulks and watching each of them fail, Jets coach Burl Friddle told one of his players, Go to the scorer’s table and report in as Fulks. Maybe we can stop him that way.

“If there was one player who revolutionized the game,” Matt Guokas Sr., one of Fulks’ teammates with the Warriors, once said, “it was him.”

That night marked the apex of Fulks’ career, and his decline was sure and rapid and, on the surface, inexplicable. His scoring average fell almost by half from the 1948-49 season to 1949-50, from 26.0 to 14.2, and in a January 1950 interview with The Sporting News, when Gottlieb was asked why the Warriors, on their way to finishing with a 26-42 record, were struggling so much, he minced no words.

“It’s easy to answer. It’s Joe Fulks,” Gottlieb said. “This year, he is merely another player. He isn’t hitting the net like he was. He does not get into position to receive passes which would give him shots at the basket. …

“Why has he slipped? I don’t know. Maybe he lost that split-second timing, that extra urge that sent him to stardom. Maybe he has outlived his usefulness to us. But whatever the reason, he is not the Fulks of the past three seasons.”

The reasons were kept out of the papers and cloaked in euphemism. They went unmentioned during an age when a famous athlete’s semi-public foibles generally went unmentioned. Midway through Fulks’ first season with the Warriors, for example, a group of his buddies from Birmingham drove to the St. Louis Sports Arena to see him play, only to be perplexed when he sat out the entire first half. At the break, he climbed into the stands to join his friends, peppering them with questions about goings-on in western Kentucky, his breath reeking of whiskey. After the game, he announced in the locker room that he was leaving the Warriors and heading home, only to have his teammates argue with him and, finally, persuade him to stay.

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“This might have been the first big city he was ever even in,” Guokas once said.

The Warriors drafted Arizin, a gifted shooter similar to Fulks, out of Villanova in 1950. It took him less than two years to supplant Fulks as the team’s primary scoring threat. Fulks retired in 1954, averaging less than nine minutes and three points over his final season, a poor imitation of the player he had been, still in denial about why.

“You’re 32, and it’s like a whole life is over, a new one’s starting, but you haven’t got the signals,” he said later that year. “You come out of a little town like Kuttawa … and you go into the Marines without finishing college. You stay there 3½ years, and you come up to the big town. So for a time there isn’t anything you can’t do. You’re on top.

“And then, all of a sudden, you know you’re slipping. And then the stories start coming. You pretend you don’t hear them. The stories say this and that about your life off the court. You take a glass of beer, and somebody with more tongue than sense says it’s an all-night binge. You know that’s for the birds. You know that even though you’re not up at the peak anymore, you’re still doing things that nobody could do if those stories were even one-tenth true.”

He moved back to Kentucky with Mary Sue and their four children. A friend helped him find a job at a chemical plant. He did some scouting for the Warriors. Cunningham lived three doors down from Fulks’ parents in Eddyville, and as a 10- and 11-year-old kid, he would tour their house, marveling over Joe’s trophies and awards. “We were all in awe of him,” Cunningham said. “In a rural area, you have somebody like that, who’s reached that kind of stardom, they’re going to be bigger than life.”

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Except he wasn’t anymore, not really. Life shrunk him. His bosses at the plant fired him multiple times, according to Christgau, before he stopped drinking and started working as an athletic aide at Kentucky State Penitentiary. Wearing horn-rimmed glasses and a dark suit, he posed for a group photo in San Diego with the other nine members of the NBA’s Silver Anniversary Team in January 1971, the day before the league’s All-Star Game. Russell stood behind Fulks’ right shoulder, Mikan behind his left. The NBA had long since evolved into a league of graceful and powerful big men playing above the rim: Russell, Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. To see Fulks in that photo is to wonder, even in the context of that era, how he ever fit in the sport in the first place.

It was his last moment of national recognition. It presented a temptation too strong for him to resist. Reunited and commiserating with his peers and friends, he began drinking again during the celebration. For all his discomfort in Philadelphia, for all his yearning to quit basketball, he had never let go, even after he retired, of the fame and glory that the sport had given him.

“I was finished. I knew that,” he said in a 1975 interview with The Inquirer’s Skip Myslenski. “But it’s hard. It’s hard. Most people who start out, pro athletes, it’s probably the first job they ever had of importance, responsibility. Then, to break away from it — unless you’ve planned something else, it’s hard to break away from it completely.”

He and Mary Sue divorced, and he became romantically involved with Roberta Bannister, a widow who lived in Eddyville, dating her for 14 months. She had a 24-year-old son named Greg, who was skinny and appeared frail, not physically imposing, and who got along with Joe well enough but didn’t appreciate his relationship with Roberta.

On March 15, 1976, The Paducah Sun ran an item listing recent births at Western Baptist Hospital, among them, to Mr. and Mrs. Joe Fulks Jr., “Mayfield, a girl.” Fulks had become a grandfather. Six nights later, after he and Greg spent a day together drinking vodka and repairing Fulks’ car, the two of them returned to Roberta’s mobile home at 11, sat at the kitchen table, and pounded down shots of Tvarscki for hours, finishing two half-pints. Testing later revealed that Fulks’ blood-alcohol level was 0.22 and Greg Bannister’s was 0.20. The legal limit in Kentucky today is 0.08.

Roberta asked Fulks to sleep off his bender in the guest bedroom. At 3:30 a.m., he and Greg entered the room. There, Fulks found Greg’s revolver. He twirled it around, its shells falling out of the cylinder and thudding against the floor. Then Greg picked up his 20-gauge shotgun, he said later, to “show it” to Fulks. In the aftermath of what happened next, as the details dripped out in court testimony and newspaper accounts, the other ninth-tenths of Joe Fulks’ truth surfaced for everyone, not just those closest to him, to see.

Greg Bannister went on trial for the murder of Joe Fulks in late August 1976. Prosecutors said that the two men had argued about the firearms — that Fulks had wanted to take Bannister’s pistol “for safekeeping” — and Bannister had shot Fulks intentionally. Bannister’s attorneys countered that the shooting had been accidental. The jury in the case deliberated for five hours, then found Bannister guilty of reckless homicide, sentencing him to 4½ years in prison.

“It was,” Cunningham said, “a real tragic story.”

Outside Briensburg Baptist Church in Benton, Ky., a 25-minute drive from the small shrine to Fulks in The Murray Room, a headstone and a grave marker provide Fulks’ birth and death years and acknowledge that he was a corporal in the Marine Corps. They make no mention of basketball at all. A roadside sign, gray stone to match the graves, tells passers-by that this is Birmingham Cemetery, relocated here after its namesake’s destruction, six miles west of where a town now buried at the bottom of a lake once stood. Even in death, Joe Fulks couldn’t quite make it all the way home again.