It also didn't take me long to decide that Tri-Cities wasn't for me, and that I wasn't going to go there to play basketball.

These days I smile benignly at the fights that I see in NBA games. There aren't any broken noses or black eyes, which happened quite often when I played.

I was literally fabricated over in France and born about six months after the boat landed at Ellis Island. This was the heart of the Depression. For the first 12 years of my life we lived in a terrible ghetto on the East River.

But as a coach I wanted to keep things from being too complicated.

We lived in Yorkville until 1940, at which point we moved into the St. Albans neighborhood of Queens.

There were riots in just about every game we played with Syracuse.

Kerner decided to trade my rights to the Chicago Stags, which sounded better to me than Tri-Cities, but the Stags folded up almost immediately.