Elmira's Leo Ferris helped shape the NBA
Hall of Fame nominee was co-founder of the league and instrumental in creation of shot clock.
- Ferris grew up in Elmira and graduated from Elmira Catholic High School in 1934.
- He was one of the people credited with the formation of the NBA in 1949.
- Ferris was general manager of the Syracuse Nationals from 1949 to 1954.
Leo Ferris loved to perform magic tricks for family, friends and anyone else who wanted to be entertained. His magic touch extended to all facets of his life, particularly basketball.
More than 20 years after his death, the impact of the Elmira native is evident on a grand scale in the National Basketball Association. Ferris was one of the founding fathers of the NBA and was involved in the creation of the shot clock, which revolutionized the sport. He also helped integrate pro basketball in 1946 by signing William "Pop" Gates to play for the National Basketball League’s Tri-Cities Blackhawks.
Ferris, who died of Huntington’s disease in 1993 at age 76, had a brief but Hall of Fame-caliber career his family hopes will be recognized with induction into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts. Ferris was nominated as a contributor, and the inductees will be announced Monday in Houston as part of the NCAA Final Four weekend.
Christian Figueroa, a 37-year-old opera singer from Brookline, Massachusetts, is Ferris’ grandnephew and has worked to bring attention to Ferris’ contributions to the sport. Figueroa submitted the Hall of Fame nomination and has also pushed his great-uncle for induction into the Chemung County Sports Hall of Fame and the Greater Syracuse Sports Hall of Fame.
An ESPN.com story in October helped give Ferris national exposure. Even if his great-uncle doesn’t make it into the Hall this year, Figueroa is happy to see him getting his due. Ferris’ wife, Beverly, started this journey before her death in 2010, and Figueroa is hoping to take it across the finish line.
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“We recognize that the first time around it’s unlikely,” Figueroa said of Ferris' induction chances. “Other people have been on the list for a while. It’s all about getting the ball rolling and being acknowledged. It’s important for me to spread the word among his hometown, because not everybody knows it. History has a way of forgetting certain things.
“It’s important for the family to honor Bev’s legacy of trying to fight for that acknowledgment. She fought hard and did quite a lot of work.”
From prep star to NBA co-founder
Ferris was born in Elmira on May 31, 1917, and attended Elmira Catholic High School, where he was a star forward on the basketball team, which competed in a national tournament in Chicago after winning a title as a member of the New York-Pennsylvania High School Basketball League. He was part of the first graduating class at Elmira Catholic, which was a precursor to Notre Dame High School.
After serving in the Army and starting an advertising agency in Buffalo with Ben Kerner, Ferris partnered with Kerner and B.W. Grafton to found the Buffalo Bisons National Basketball League franchise in 1946. The team soon moved to Moline, Illinois, and eventually played in the NBA as the Tri-Cities Blackhawks before moving to Milwaukee, St. Louis and finally Atlanta in 1968. That path makes Ferris co-founder of the NBA's current Atlanta Hawks franchise.
In 1946, Ferris signed Gates, who made his debut with the Blackhawks in October, six months before Jackie Robinson broke the Major League Baseball color barrier with the Brooklyn Dodgers. Gates was joined by William “Dolly” King in integrating the NBL that year.
In Todd Gould’s 1965 book “Pioneers of the Hardwood: Indiana and the Birth of Professional Basketball,” Gates talked about his appreciation for Ferris.
“When Leo Ferris came to me, it was like a godsend,” Gates said. “It was a real highlight of my career to be accepted by the NBL as one of only two blacks in the league.”
In 1948, at age 31, Ferris became vice president of the NBL and sold his stake in the Blackhawks.
Ferris’ ability to help bring top players into the NBL, such as Dolph Schayes and four members of the starting five of 1949 NCAA champion Kentucky, was one factor in the merger of the eight-team NBL with the 12-team Basketball Association of America. The leagues combined on Aug. 3, 1949, and a photo of the five men most directly involved in the merger — Ferris, Ike Duffey, Ned Irish, Walter Brown and Maurice Podoloff — is one of the iconic images in sports history.
Although the NBA actually counts its history as starting with the BAA in 1946, many people point to that day in 1949 as the league's real beginning.
After the merger, Ferris became general manager of the NBA's Syracuse Nationals. He continued in that job until 1955, helping to build the Nationals’ 1954-55 NBA championship. A contract dispute led Ferris to resign in January, three months before Schayes led the Nationals to the title.
Syracuse kept its NBA team until 1963, when the Nationals were bought and moved to Philadelphia, becoming the 76ers. Ferris left the world of sports after his resignation at age 37 and had a successful career in real estate in the Syracuse area, working alongside Beverly.
Elmira roots stay strong
Although Ferris left Elmira at about 20 years old, his ties with the city continued throughout his life. He brought both the Bisons and Nationals to Elmira for games and visited family in the area at least once a year.
Ferris’ niece, Ann Sponyoe Thorner, still lives in Elmira. Ferris’ sister, Edna Marie Ferris Sponyoe, was the mother of Ann and Joan Sponyoe, who is Figueroa's mother.
Joan remembers the excitement that would surround visits to Elmira from Uncle Leo.
“It was always very, very exciting because he caused a great sensation,” said Joan, who moved to San Juan, Puerto Rico, shortly after college and has remained there for the past 50 years. “Every year, he had a new Cadillac Eldorado convertible. When that would pull up on Baty Street, which is where we lived at the time, it would create quite a sensation.”
She described her uncle as jovial, articulate, confident, handsome and well over 6 feet tall. She said he would perform magic tricks for the family and play math games with them, with other kids from the neighborhood also coming over. Dinners at the Mark Twain Hotel or the glamorous O’Brien’s Inn in Waverly were common during his visits.
Ferris would also show up with tickets to see the likes of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, who were among the many big stars Ferris got to perform at halftime of Nationals games.
It was from family pictures Beverly Ferris would break out that Christian’s interest in his great-uncle’s legacy took bloom. Christian would visit Elmira with family every summer and ended up attending Syracuse University, but Ferris was so sick with Huntington's disease late in life that Christian would stay with relatives during visits to his great-uncle's home. The family legacy has extended to Christian’s 5-year-old son, also named Christian, who is already a huge basketball fan.
“I’m absolutely thrilled my son Christian has taken such an interest,” Joan said. “It’s long overdue and well deserved. I hope some recognition comes out of this. At the very least he’s getting well researched and well documented.
"He would hear stories (about Ferris). He will tell me he remembers when he was a little boy, he would always have stories with (Beverly)."
Shot clock changes the sport
In the early 1950s, the NBA had a problem with teams stalling and dribbling out the clock to protect leads or as a way to deal with superior talent. A 19-18 victory by the Fort Wayne Komets over the Minneapolis Lakers in 1950 that included only four points in the fourth quarter remains the lowest-scoring game in NBA history. Needless to say, fans weren't impressed with that type of basketball.
Ferris and Nationals owner Danny Biasone used a shot clock in a scrimmage in 1954, and the rule change was adopted by the NBA for the 1954-55 season. A lot of stories and records credited only Biasone for a long time and the NBA's own website to this day lists Biasone as the sole inventor of the 24-second shot clock. Biasone, who died in 1992, was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2000.
Joan Sponyoe said it was likely her uncle who came up with the formula for the shot clock based on his love of math.
“(My mom) would tell us about the awards he got in math,” she said. “From that point on, that just followed right through and it probably had to do in the development of the 24-second shot clock.”
According to a story from the Syracuse Post-Standard's Jack Andrews, who covered the Nationals for the newspaper, Ferris would scribble shot clock formulas onto a napkin while at a bowling alley owned by Biasone. Figueroa said Bob Sexton, a Nationals spokesman, publicly thanked Ferris for pushing for the shot clock at a team banquet.
Said Figueora: "We know, based on what was said to Beverly, he was the one who developed the formula. He was the one basically working on the task that they both had tried to get to the bottom of. Once Leo resigned, then whatever narrative of Dan Biasone being the creator of the shot clock came out.
"A lot of vital and crucial information of the creation of the 24-second shot clock was basically omitted for 30 years until Beverly was going through press reports and saying, 'This is what was going on.'"
Through her efforts and the likes of former Post-Standard columnist Sean Kirst, Ferris' role became more known. In March of 2005, a monument was unveiled in downtown Syracuse that gave credit to Ferris and Biasone for coming up with the formula for the shot clock. Nationals scout Emil Barboni and college coach Howard Hobson, who earlier had the idea to use a shot clock, are also recognized on the monument.
“I hear about the 24-second shot clock, but it didn’t sink into me as much as a young woman and teenager, but boy, now I see the significance of that big time,” Joan said. “And helping to form the NBA. These are truly magnificent accomplishments. Not that he did it alone, but I think he was the brains behind a lot of this because of the kind of man he was. He was a real go-getter.”
Variations of the shot clock are now used at the pro, college and high school levels, with only a few stubborn high school state associations, including Pennsylvania, still not using it. During the ceremony in Syracuse in 2005, Schayes talked about the importance of the change, according to a story from Associated Press writer John Kekis.
“Michael Jordan and the 24-second clock were made for each other,” said Schayes, who died in December of last year. “Without the 24-second clock, would there have been a Michael Jordan? Would there have been a John Havlicek? Would there have been a Bill Walton? Of course not.”
Walton attended the ceremony and said the shot clock was "the most important rule in the history of basketball."
Hall of Fame hopes
Ferris’ story has a sad side in his fight with Huntington’s disease, an inherited disease that impacts functional abilities and cognitive skills. Despite the cruel nature of the ailment, Ferris remained at home until his death on June 4, 1993, in Syracuse.
His two sons from a previous marriage and Jamie, his daughter with Beverly, all died of Huntington's disease. Jamie, who died two years ago at age 53, joined her mom in trying to further her dad's legacy.
While it may not come this year, Figueroa is hopeful someday he will be able to make the 90-mile drive from Brookline to Springfield to see a Hall of Fame monument honoring his great-uncle.
“I’m finally optimistic because there’s been a certain level of frustration. Maybe I adopted my aunt’s frustrations,” he said. “It breaks your heart to think she fought so hard and years before she died she found out Leo’s name was about to be included in the 24-second shot clock (monument) in Syracuse. That, of course, is a victory.”
Perhaps they can take encouragement from the family of James Laurie “Deacon” White, a baseball player from Caton, Steuben County, who was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2013, more than 120 years after his career ended.
“It would be a dream come true, of course,” Joan Sponyoe said. “National Hall of Fame. That would be wonderful. I’m sure that Beverly, his wife, and his daughter would be up there cheering.”
On Twitter: @SGAndrewLegare.