Dolph Schayes, Jewish Basketball Hall of Famer, Dies at 87
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
Jewish basketball pro Dolph Schayes, a 12-time All-Star voted one of the 50 greatest players in National Basketball Association history, has died.
Schayes, who had terminal cancer, died on Thursday in Syracuse, New York, at the age of 87, the New York Times reported.
Schayes was, according to a 2014 article in The New York Jewish Week, “arguably, to professional basketball, what Sandy Koufax and Hank Greenberg were to baseball — the most prominent professional Jewish athlete to ever to play his sport.”
The first NBA player to score 15,000 points, Schayes never missed a game between February 1952 and December 1961, according to the Times, and led the Syracuse Nationals to the championship in 1955.
In 1966, Schayes was named NBA coach of the year for his work with the Philadelphia 76ers.
Schayes was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1973.
Born in the Bronx (his given name was Adolph) to Romanian Jewish immigrants in 1928, Schayes began playing basketball on local playgrounds, then played for the Bronx’s DeWitt Clinton High School. As a freshman at New York University, where he studied aeronautical engineering, Schayes helped the team reach the NCAA finals.
In 1977, he coached the U.S. basketball team in Israel’s international Maccabiah Games, where it won a gold medal.
He is survived by his wife, four children and nine grandchildren. A funeral is planned for Monday.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
