It’s basketball season in Kansas City. This week, the Big 12 Conference is holding its men’s post-season basketball championship tournament at Sprint Center through Sunday.
Next week, the NAIA’s 79th annual men’s basketball national tournament will take place at Municipal Auditorium. The one man who was responsible for bringing college basketball championships and NAIA national basketball championships to Kansas City should be remembered. He was my great uncle, George L. Goldman, one of the most highly-regarded, and well-known, citizens of his day.
Uncle George was a local basketball standout from the 1909-12 era and eventually became a civic leader in Kansas City. In 1935, as the first director of the brand new Kansas City Municipal Auditorium, Goldman conceived of the idea of filling the auditorium each year with national championship games in the sport he loved. He was responsible for attracting sports, musical events, and exhibition of all kinds to the auditorium. Through his efforts, and through his basketball acquaintances, the first national tournaments were staged at the Municipal Auditorium. For years thereafter, he helped retain these tournaments here.
As most basketball fans in the metropolitan area already know, Kansas City has been the home of more Big 8/Big 12 finals, and Final Four basketball tournaments, than any other city in America. For generations, Kansas City basketball fans, as well as hotels, bars, restaurants and merchants throughout the city, have benefited from Goldman’s accomplishments. It is hard to imagine what Kansas City would have been like for the past 80 years without these tournaments.
Bringing what ultimately became the NCAA to Kansas City was only half of Goldman’s story. In the early days of the Municipal Auditorium, he also felt that a national championship tournament for smaller colleges should be established. He proceeded to assemble a group of basketball notables — including James Naismith, the originator of the game, and Emil Liston, a coach from Baker University — and put together the first National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics basketball tournament in 1937. Three years later the NAIA became an official organization of small athletic programs dedicated to character-driven intercollegiate athletics. This group ensured that national basketball tournaments of the NAIA would be played every year at the Municipal Auditorium, (moving to Kemper Arena for many years) and they have been played here every year since. The NAIA is headquartered today in Kansas City, Missouri.
Even in years when the Big 8 tournament or Final Four tournament was not held in Kansas City, fans throughout the Greater Kansas City area were treated to a week of NAIA games, which often included some of the greatest players, and most exciting games, in the country. Young basketball players growing up in this area have been inspired by the athletes, and coaches, who came here from across in the country, and all of the coaches and players have considered Kansas City the epicenter of college basketball. Indeed, it is fitting that we now have the College Basketball Hall of Fame and the College Basketball Experience here. None of this would have happened had it not been for Goldman.
Goldman’s basketball career was forged in the 1909 through 1912 seasons of the Kansas City Athletic Club (KCAC). Goldman led the KCAC team to a national championship. Years later, C.E. McBride, sports editor for the Kansas City Star, wrote that scoring 50 points in a game was commonplace for Goldman. Tham Campbell, a sports historian of the Goldman era and after, compared Goldman to Hank Luisetti of Stanford, who played in the 1930s, and to all of the other great court stars up until that time. Campbell wrote, “I still contend that this 6-foot-2-inch Goldman boy, weighing at that time about 180 pounds, using either right or left hand, preferably the left, was one of the best, probably the best, basketball scorer I’ve ever seen.”
For his basketball prowess, and for his role in bringing college basketball tournaments to Kansas City, Goldman was eventually enshrined in the Missouri Sports Hall of Fame, and was designated a charter member of the Missouri Basketball Hall of Fame.
In his later years, Goldman became a city councilman, and served as mayor pro tem of Kansas City for four years. He was the representative of the city who greeted Charles Lindbergh shortly after Lindbergh’s historic flight across the Atlantic, on the day the Kansas City Municipal Airport was dedicated, in 1927. The airport was created while Goldman was on the City Council.
Goldman continued his devotion to sports in Kansas City by supporting the Catholic Youth Organization (CYO), the Ban Johnson League, and many other sports-related organizations. For the youth of Kansas City, he built a baseball stadium on the east side, in which Ban Johnson League games were played for many years. He ultimately donated that stadium to the Kansas City Catholic Diocese. Because of his many years of service to the CYO, Goldman received the Benemerenti Medal from Pope Pius XII, the first Jew in America to have received such medal. The Cherokee Indian Nation made him an honorary chief for the contributions he made to the Cherokee community near Grand Lake in Oklahoma. Goldman, a prominent jeweler in downtown Kansas City with his brother, Fred, was active in the civic life of Kansas City until his death in 1969.
A lifelong friend of President Harry S. Truman from the early days in which they were both active in Jackson County politics, Goldman spent many Friday afternoons swapping stories at the Truman home with the president and Mrs. Truman after Truman’s return to Independence. He was a member of Truman’s close circle of friends who started the Eddie Jacobson Foundation and the Harry S. Truman Good Neighbor Award Foundation, and who initiated the annual Truman Day luncheons that continue to this day.
Jim Haney, executive director of the National Association of Basketball Coaches (NABC), has noted that the NABC probably would not be in Kansas City if it had not been for the rich history of the growth of collegiate basketball in the Kansas City area, including these college basketball tournaments hosted here. In the College Basketball Experience, attached to the Sprint Center, there is a display citing that more college basketball championship games have been held in Kansas City than any other city, but Goldman’s name is not mentioned anywhere. Haney told that me that without a doubt Goldman’s story deserves to be told.
There is an aristocracy of sports figures in Kansas City whose names are celebrated for providing the lives of our citizens with great inspiration, and great entertainment, in the world of sports. The names include Ewing Kauffman, Lamar Hunt, Tom Watson, George Brett and Buck O’Neill. The name George L. Goldman certainly belongs within that group.
Mick Lerner is a practicing attorney in Overland Park, Kansas.
