{"id":28303,"date":"2023-10-26T12:21:15","date_gmt":"2023-10-26T10:21:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/e59c034a-0869-4f49-b1ed-68600ae2d5c4"},"modified":"2023-10-26T12:34:29","modified_gmt":"2023-10-26T10:34:29","slug":"i-discovered-the-first-professional-basketball-player-in-my-family-tree","status":"publish","type":"rss_feed","link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/wdytya\/rss_feed\/i-discovered-the-first-professional-basketball-player-in-my-family-tree\/","title":{"rendered":"I discovered the first professional basketball player in my family tree"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>

By Gail Dixon\n <\/p>

Published: Thursday, 26 October 2023 at 10:21 AM<\/p>

\n\n

Much of the little Gary Cooper, a retired potter from Stoke-on-Trent, knew about his family history was thanks to his dad. \u201cMy father was a real raconteur. He was very close to his grandfather when he was growing up, who told him numerous tales of his own childhood. But a lot of what he remembered was incorrect. I had to dispel a lot of family myths when I started doing my research.\u201d<\/p>

One of the earliest records he discovered was the marriage<\/a> of Thomas Cooper (the brother of Gary\u2019s great great grandfather Joseph Cooper) and Ann Simpson. This couple led him deep into the history of the Potteries, but were also the key to his most unusual finding, the discovery of the world’s first professional basketball player.<\/p>

\u201cMy Stoke-on-Trent family on my father\u2019s side goes back at least 250 years. I would have been able to trace it further, but there were riots in the Potteries in 1842 and a vast majority of the Hanley records were destroyed, so my line comes to a dead stop in about 1775.\u201d<\/p>

Although his Stoke-on-Trent relatives were respectable, they were poor and their life stories are blank apart from the details in the official records. This was true of Thomas, a potter, and Ann. \u201cThey and their family vanished after the 1881 census. I was left scratching my head for decades as to what had happened to them.\u201d His last sighting of Thomas and Ann was at 5 Hassell Street in Hanley with six of their children.<\/p>

A GI bride in the family<\/h2>
\u201cI\u2019d been researching my tree on Ancestry<\/a> for a while using British and Irish<\/a> records,\u201d says Gary. But when he started looking into the life of his aunt Gladys, a GI bride, he took out a Worldwide subscription<\/a>.<\/p>
He answered his questions about her fairly quickly, but then he noticed something interesting. Thomas and Ann\u2019s names were included in the site\u2019s US records. \u201cBoom \u2013 Thomas, Ann and their children burst unexpectedly back into my tree from several thousand miles away. It looked like they\u2019d emigrated to the USA.\u201d<\/p>
Gary built up a picture of the Coopers\u2019 lives in the States using Ancestry\u2019s records, as well as documents and newspaper<\/a> cuttings that US researchers had uploaded to the website. <\/p>
\u201cA lady named Susan Corrigan, Thomas\u2019 great great granddaughter, and Grace Cooper, another of his descendants, have both supplied me with numerous bits and pieces of information, which has been really useful.\u201d<\/p>
Fred Cooper with his wife Catherine and children Mabel and Tom<\/figcaption><\/figure>
Among these was one crucial record \u2013 a passenger list<\/a> for the SS England<\/em> showing that the family had crossed the Atlantic in 1886. \u201cIt was missing a few of the children\u2019s names because one had already gone over and another went over later, but the ages were pretty much correct.\u201d It was unmistakably his family.<\/p>
\u201cI used the US census records to trace their movements there \u2013 it was fascinating to find out what they\u2019d got up to.\u201d He also used US birth, marriage and death records.<\/p>
Many of the records centred on Trenton, New Jersey, on the East Coast. \u201cTrenton is an old colonial town. There was a battle there during the American War of Independence.\u201d And, like Stoke-on-Trent, it was famous for its pottery industry. The town attracted a lot of workers from Stoke who started new lives using the skills they already had.<\/p>
The Coopers probably settled in Trenton for that reason, and Gary learnt that Thomas\u2019 eldest child William had managed a pottery factory there. \u201cIn William\u2019s obituary, it mentioned that his brothers, Fred and Al, were noted basketball players. I didn\u2019t think much of it at the time, but, about a week later, I was talking to a friend and she said, \u2018The basketball thing sounds interesting \u2013 why don\u2019t you follow it up?\u2019\u2009\u201d<\/p>
World’s first professional basketball player<\/h2>
So Gary started digging around. It was then that he had his second big surprise.<\/p>
\u201cI came across an obituary for Fred Cooper. It said he was the world\u2019s first professional basketball player! Initially I was in utter disbelief. I traced the family links between me and Fred backwards, forwards, any way I could. After a few days, it seemed obvious that the paper trail was absolutely solid.<\/p>
\u201cI\u2019m not really all that interested in sport,\u201d he admits, \u201cbut I found a great book about the history of basketball called Cages to Jump Shots \u2013 Pro Basketball\u2019s Early Years<\/em> by Robert W Peterson (Bison Books, 2002). Not only did it contain plenty of background information and a fairly detailed account of the first professional match, but there was a photo of Fred and his team.\u201d<\/p>
Basketball was essentially an amateur sport at first. It started in the YMCAs along the East Coast and became increasingly popular, attracting more and more attention. \u201cPeople wanted to see the best players, and they were prepared to pay for it. Trenton was one of the top teams, and they initiated the first professional match. This took place on 7 November 1896 against Brooklyn YMCA at the Masonic Temple in downtown Trenton.<\/p>
$\"\"$ Fred Cooper is mentioned on a plaque at the Masonic Temple in Trenton, New Jersey<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\u201cIt was played on the top floor in a net-like cage that went around the court to stop the ball going out of play. About 700 people watched.\u201d After the game, the players were each paid $15. \u201cFred was paid first, so by default he became the world\u2019s first professional basketball player.\u201d A plaque commemorating the game erected later on the site records that, as captain, Fred was paid a dollar more \u2013 $16.<\/p>
This wasn\u2019t the only reason Fred made sporting history. \u201cHe and his friend Al Bratton devised a system of quick passes between each other that flummoxed the opposition\u201d, a tactic that is still seen in the game today. When Trenton went professional, other teams followed suit and the early leagues became established. <\/p>
\u201cTrenton dominated for several years under Fred\u2019s captaincy.\u201d He then moved on to coaching other teams. \u201cThey didn\u2019t have Trenton\u2019s talent, but Fred seems to have been fairly successful.\u201d<\/p>
Although he had played basketball professionally, it was never a full-time job. \u201cHis main occupation was as a sanitaryware presser at a factory in Trenton, which produced such items as sinks, toilets and baths. He was what they would have called a \u2018clay end worker\u2019 in Stoke-on-Trent \u2013 somebody who worked on the production line.\u201d<\/p>
Local Hero<\/h2>
Gary was keen that the people of his home city should know what Fred had achieved. \u201cHis story was unknown in Stoke, so I wrote it up for my blog Stoke-on-Trent History<\/a>. <\/p>
“Fred Cooper was lucky. He was in the right place at the right time, he had the right skill set, and he had the right understanding of tactics. His older brother Arthur was on Stoke Swifts, the second team for Stoke Football Club, which eventually became Stoke City FC, and all of the Cooper lads had been brought up playing football. Fred and Al Bratton seem to have introduced football tactics to basketball with their system of short passes, and they altered basketball forever.\u201d<\/p>
Aside from Fred\u2019s basketball career, did the family\u2019s move to the USA change his fortunes? \u201cI suspect that in many ways his life was very much the same as it would have been. The family worked in the pottery industry in Trenton just as they would have done if they\u2019d stayed in the Potteries. I do think there were more chances for social movement in Trenton. If you were born working class in Stoke-on-Trent, you\u2019d have stayed working class, but in Trenton a couple of his brothers went on to manage pottery factories. And Fred became the head of Trenton\u2019s recreation department.\u201d<\/p>
Gary is extremely proud of his sporting relation. \u201cFred was a go-getter, somebody who enjoyed what he did and tried to excel at it \u2013 and he certainly did that!\u201d<\/p> <\/body><\/html>\n
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By Gail Dixon Published: Thursday, 26 October 2023 at 10:21 AM Much of the little Gary Cooper, a retired potter from Stoke-on-Trent, knew about his family history was thanks to his dad. \u201cMy father was a real raconteur. He was very close to his grandfather when he was growing up, who told him numerous tales […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":28304,"template":"","categories":[1,16],"acf":{"readingTimeMinutes":"7"},"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/36\/2023\/10\/i-discovered-the-first-professional-basketball-player-in-my-family-tree.jpg",620,412,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/36\/2023\/10\/i-discovered-the-first-professional-basketball-player-in-my-family-tree-150x150.jpg",150,150,true],"medium":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/36\/2023\/10\/i-discovered-the-first-professional-basketball-player-in-my-family-tree-300x199.jpg",300,199,true],"medium_large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/36\/2023\/10\/i-discovered-the-first-professional-basketball-player-in-my-family-tree.jpg",620,412,false],"large":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/36\/2023\/10\/i-discovered-the-first-professional-basketball-player-in-my-family-tree.jpg",620,412,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/36\/2023\/10\/i-discovered-the-first-professional-basketball-player-in-my-family-tree.jpg",620,412,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/uploads\/sites\/36\/2023\/10\/i-discovered-the-first-professional-basketball-player-in-my-family-tree.jpg",620,412,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"importmanagerhub@sprylab.com","author_link":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/wdytya\/author\/importmanagerhubsprylab-com\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"By Gail Dixon Published: Thursday, 26 October 2023 at 10:21 AM Much of the little Gary Cooper, a retired potter from Stoke-on-Trent, knew about his family history was thanks to his dad. \u201cMy father was a real raconteur. He was very close to his grandfather when he was growing up, who told him numerous tales…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/wdytya\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed\/28303"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/wdytya\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/rss_feed"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/wdytya\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/rss_feed"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/wdytya\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/wdytya\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/28304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/wdytya\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/c01.purpledshub.com\/wdytya\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}