Before the Rookie: Hank Luisetti

Hank Luisetti's rookie story comes with a twist. Some Hall of Fame collectors use his 1968–74 Basketball Hall of Fame Bookmark as their starting point. But an oversized Esquire postcard takes his collecting history back more than twenty years earlier.

The issue is Esquire's Esky "Great Moments in Sports," set #14, card #2, cataloged by the specialist collection Retro Baloncesto as a 1945 release. Measuring approximately 4½ × 7 inches, it reproduces James Bingham's painting "Luisetti Scores Again" — the painting had just appeared as a full-color gatefold in Esquire's January 1945 issue. The catalog documents the postcard, its reverse, and its packaging — and the reverse removes any doubt about the scene: Stanford vs. L.I.U., Madison Square Garden, December 30, 1936, under a 1944 Esquire copyright. The painting captures the most famous night of Luisetti's college career. This was a basketball collectible long before the Hall's bookstore bookmark.

The subject deserved the attention. Luisetti helped popularize the running one-handed shot when two-handed set shots dominated basketball. On December 30, 1936, he scored 15 points as Stanford defeated Long Island University 45–31 at Madison Square Garden, ending LIU's 43-game winning streak. Just over a year later, on January 1, 1938, he scored 50 against Duquesne in a 92–27 victory — the first major-college player to reach that mark.

A three-time consensus All-American, Luisetti never played professional basketball — but his career ran six more years. First came Hollywood: in 1938 Paramount paid him $10,000 to play a basketball player opposite Betty Grable in Campus Confessions, his only film, and the AAU suspended him for a year, ruling that the movie made him a professional. The film left paper of its own — a 1938 promotional still of Luisetti, sold years later in a Lelands photo lot, may be the earliest Luisetti collectible of all. He played on in the AAU — Stewart Chevrolet, the San Francisco Olympic Club, the Phillips 66ers — and in Navy service basketball at St. Mary's Pre-Flight, until spinal meningitis, contracted in 1944, ended his playing days; doctors told him playing again would endanger his health. In 1950, the Associated Press ranked him second only to George Mikan among the players of basketball's first half-century. His #7 is the only number retired by Stanford men's basketball, and his statue stands outside Maples Pavilion.

Later collectibles followed: the Hall of Fame bookmark and the 1977–79 Sportscaster #52-24. They preserved the image of a player inducted into the Hall's inaugural 1959 class.

For this series, the Esquire postcard changes the story: Luisetti's supposed absence from the hobby was a discovery waiting to happen — a painted tribute hiding in plain sight, decades before his familiar Hall of Fame issue.

Images: 1945 Esquire Esky postcard front and reverse; 1968–74 HOF Bookmark; 1977–79 Sportscasters #52-24.