On January 1, 1938, in a Cleveland gymnasium, Stanford forward Hank Luisetti did what no college basketball player had ever done. The box score from that game, simple and succinct, tells the story.
| Player | Fg | Ft | Pts |
| Luisetti | 23 | 4 | 50 |
Luisetti’s 23 field goals and four free throws against an overmatched Duquesne team made him the first 50-point scorer in history. Sixty-five years later, Luisetti still holds Stanford’s record for most points in a game.
In those days, entire teams seldom scored 50 points; that night in Cleveland, Duquesne managed only 27 (to Stanford’s 92). The three-point shot had not yet been invented; the shot clock, which encourages faster play and higher scores, was almost 50 years in the future. But armed with basketball’s latest innovation—a one-handed running shot he developed—the 6-foot-2-inch, 185-pound Luisetti was a formidable offensive force.
Most players in Luisetti’s era threw the ball at the basket using two hands, with both feet squarely on the ground—a so-called “set shot.” It was highly accurate but easy to defend against. Luisetti brought a new style and athleticism that forever changed the way the game was played. Shooting on the move, dribbling behind his back, flying in high for rebounds and pushing the ball downcourt before the defense could react, he astonished even his own teammates.
“These were things that were impossible to the athletes of his day,” says Richards Lyon, ’38, MD ’44. “But Hank did them easily.”
A three-time All-American, two-time Player of the Year and a member of the Basketball Hall of Fame since 1959, Luisetti died on December 17 in San Mateo of an unknown ailment. He was 86.
Stanford coach Mike Montgomery, whose father played against Luisetti in college, called Luisetti “one of the innovators of the modern game of basketball.”
“He revolutionized shooting,” Montgomery told the San Francisco Chronicle. “Somebody would have come up with [the one-handed shot] somewhere along the line, but he was the guy who was first and he had tremendous success with it. Once he started shooting like that, people said, ‘Oh, you can do that,’ and it became the way everybody did it.”
One game in particular sent tremors throughout the basketball establishment. On December 30, 1936, Stanford, the defending Pacific Coast Conference champion, played Long Island University, the nation’s No. 1 team, at Madison Square Garden. LIU had won 43 straight games but had never faced a player like Luisetti. His 15 points led Stanford to a 45-31 upset in front of more than 17,000 fans. When he left the game, the crowd stood and cheered. And the next day, the New York Times raved: “It seemed that Luisetti could do nothing wrong. Some of his shots would have been deemed foolhardy if attempted by any other player, but with Luisetti doing the heaving, these were accepted by the crowd as a matter of course.”
One of those enthralled by Luisetti’s performance was schoolboy Ray Lumpp, who later starred for the New York Knicks. “When we got back to school after Christmas vacation, every kid had a one-handed shot,” Lumpp remembered in the Chronicle. “We all wanted to be like Hank.”
The son of Italian immigrants, Angelo Enrico Luisetti was born on June 16, 1916, in San Francisco. His father, Stefano, had arrived shortly after the 1906 earthquake and earned a job clearing rubble from the fires that resulted. Eventually, Stefano owned an Italian restaurant on Market Street.
As a boy, Luisetti honed his one-handed shot on San Francisco’s playgrounds. His unique release wasn’t born of creativity—it was a necessity.
“Shooting two-handed, I just couldn’t reach the basket,” he once said. “I’d get the ball, take a dribble or two, and jump and shoot on the way up. I didn’t jump and shoot at the height of my jump, the way they do now. I’d let the ball go right near my face; I’d push and shoot, off my fingertips.”
Luisetti led San Francisco’s Galileo High School to city championships in 1933 and 1934, earning a scholarship to Stanford. He quickly turned around a basketball program that had endured five straight losing seasons. During his three years on the varsity squad, Stanford went 68-12. Luisetti’s total of 1,596 points in four years was a national record at the time, and he fouled out of only one game (when four fouls—not five—was the maximum). And he continued to influence Stanford’s success after graduation. Luisetti’s name recognition and achievements attracted top players to the Farm, and in the four years after his departure Stanford won 75 percent of its games, culminating with the 1942 NCAA championship.
“Hank put Stanford on the map,” says Lyon.
Paramount Pictures also tried to capitalize on Luisetti’s fame—in 1938, it paid the recent Stanford grad $10,000 to star opposite Betty Grable in Campus Confessions. The reserved Luisetti hated the experience, and the film flopped.
Luisetti played for the Phillips 66ers and St. Mary’s Pre-Flight of the Amateur Athletic Union in the early 1940s. (The NBA wasn’t founded until 1946.) During World War II, he joined the Navy but was discharged after developing spinal meningitis. After recovering, he turned down offers to play professionally and, in 1951, coached the Stewart Chevrolets to the AAU championship. For many years, he enjoyed a successful career in the travel business, retiring from the E.F. McDonald Co. at the age of 65.
Luisetti’s wife, Jane, preceded him in death. He is survived by his longtime partner, Nancy Gommeringer; his son, Steven; his daughter, Nancy; six grandchildren; two step-grandchildren; and seven great-grandchildren.
In 1950, the Associated Press named Luisetti the second-best player of the first half-century, behind George Mikan of the Minneapolis Lakers. A bronze statue of Luisetti, produced by teammate Phil Zonne, ’40, was dedicated at Maples Pavilion in 1988.
Says Lyon: “He had a grace of action and personality . . . a fluid motion he quietly transmitted to all of us.”
