Bud Palmer, Jump Shot Pioneer, Dies at 91
Bud Palmer, left, and Carl Braun in 1947. Palmer was the Knicks’ first captain and one of the game’s first jump shooters.
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: March 22, 2013
Bud Palmer gained fame as a sports telecaster, covering everything from the Olympics to dog shows. He was Mayor John V. Lindsay’s official greeter, welcoming dignitaries to the city. He was the first writer of Glamour magazine’s “Ask Jake” column, offering women advice from a man’s viewpoint. (“Don’t show up drunk for a dinner date.”) And he was the first captain of the New York Knicks.
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Bud Palmer, left, being sworn in as New York City's Commissioner of Public Events by Mayor John Lindsay in 1966.
Palmer was the Knicks’ first captain and one of the game’s first jump shooters.
But perhaps his most consequential role was in helping to change the game of basketball in a fundamental way: if he did not invent the jump shot, Palmer was one of the first to shoot one.
The Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame suggested that Glenn Roberts may have fired the first jumper at a Virginia high school in the early 1930s, while the N.C.A.A. archives credit John Miller Cooper of the University of Missouri around the same time. The journalist John Christgau, in his book “The Origins of the Jump Shot: Eight Men Who Shook the World of Basketball,” makes a strong case for Kenny Sailors of Wyoming as the one who, in 1934, began developing the purest jump shot, the one familiar to basketball fans today.
But in Christgau’s telling, Palmer, who died on Tuesday at 91 at his home in West Palm Beach, Fla., was one of those eight pioneers.
Palmer could remember no eureka moment, although at age 6 he was so small and weak that he had to launch his shots with a leap. He knew he had shot them regularly as a student at Phillips-Exeter Academy in the late 1930s. He realized, he said, that “if I dribble, and stop, and jump, I will have an advantage.”
When he tried out for the Knicks in 1946, it was still so odd that Coach Neal Cohalen thundered, “What the hell kind of shot is that?”
Palmer sat on the bench for several weeks, until he and the coach huddled at a bar. Palmer told Cohalen that he had been successful with the shot and said that its unusualness was an advantage because opponents had little experience defending against it. Cohalen said shooting blindfolded was also unusual.
But Palmer’s shooting accuracy ultimately won the day. Over three seasons in New York, he averaged 11.7 points in 148 regular-season games and 14.4 points in 14 playoff games. Besides being the Knicks’ first captain, he was the team’s highest-paid player. Decades later, whether the story was true or not, old-time Knicks fans had made Palmer part of their holy writ: a Knick, they assured grandchildren, had shot the first jump shot.
John Shove Flynn was born in Hollywood, Calif., on Sept. 14, 1921. His father, Maurice Dennis Flynn, was a swashbuckling silent-screen star universally known as Lefty. His mother, the former Blanche Palmer, was an unsuccessful but wealthy soprano. After they divorced, Mrs. Flynn switched back to her maiden name and insisted her children follow suit. John acquired the nickname Bud because, the story goes, he was a budding image of his father.
Bud took up boxing at 6, but after mothers of boys whose noses Bud had bloodied complained to Bud’s mother, he switched to basketball.
When she was estranged from Lefty, Bud’s mother took Bud and his sister to live in Switzerland, where he attended Le Rosey, a boarding school. After four years, the family moved to Princeton, where Bud attended the Hun School and deepened his love of basketball. When he transferred to Exeter, he took up the jump shot to compensate for being only 5 feet 4 inches.
But he continued to grow, and by the time he reached Princeton he was about 6-4 and made to play the post, close to the hoop, finding little opportunity to execute his jump shot over three seasons.
At the end of his junior year, he enlisted in the Navy and learned to pilot a B-26 bomber towing targets for fighter planes. “I was one of the most shot-at soldiers in World War II,” he said.
In 1946, he took the bold step of approaching Ned Irish, the president of Madison Square Garden and a founder of the Knicks, to ask for a tryout. Irish dismissed him until St. John’s Coach Joe Lapchick, whom Princeton had almost beaten in the N.I.T. tournament, told him about Palmer’s jump shot. Lapchick later coached Palmer on the Knicks.
After three seasons with the Knicks from 1946 to 1949, during which he started his advice column, Palmer decided to move on to television. He briefly ran a children’s show for NBC and did a stint as Palmo, the Hindu magician, on a local show called “Globo’s Circus.” He began as a sportscaster covering the Knicks for WMGM radio, and later for television on WGN-11. He eventually covered sports for all three major networks.
In his television work, he was praised for choosing not to describe exactly what people were seeing, particularly in golf, which has a tradition of silence. He once memorized 24 cigarette commercials so that when he delivered them they would seem natural.
From 1966 to 1974, he held a $1-a-year job as New York City’s Commissioner of Public Events. He greeted and planned social affairs and ticker-tape parades for leaders like the Duke of Edinburgh and the Israeli leader Golda Meir; champion athletic teams; and astronauts.
Palmer died of metastatic prostate cancer, his daughter Gene Palmer said. In addition to her, he is survived by two more daughters, Lisa Palmer and Betty Landercasper; his son, John; and two grandsons. He was married four times.
As a Knick, Palmer roomed on the road with Sweetwater Clifton, one of the first black players in the N.B.A. He once confronted a hotel manager in Baltimore to demand, successfully, that Clifton be allowed to stay.
Later, after a few beers in their room, Clifton told his friend, “Damn, for a white boy, you sure can jump.”
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