Quote:
Originally Posted by bkcardcollector
Perhaps Garfinkel wanted to be a baseball star as you can see him wearing a baseball uniform and pitching the ball. Another solid group of reds.
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Some background on why Jack Garfinkel was nicknamed "Dutch".
- The original "Dutch" was Dutch Dehnert of the Original Celtics in the 1920s.
- Confusingly, the Original Celtics were a re-assembling of a Pre-WWI team called the New York Celtics. While both teams were New York teams, only the Pre-WWI team was made up of Irish-Americans. When the re-assembling got done after the war, the team made it a point to try to get players from ethnic (er, European) backgrounds to appeal to different groups. Nat Holman was Jewish, Joe Lapchick's parents were Czeck immigrants, the aforementioned not-very-good Eddie Burke was actually an Irish American which might have led him to greater prominence than deserved, and Henry "Dutch" Dehnert was - you guessed it - from a Dutch background.
- Dutch Dehnert then mastered what became known as the Pivot Play wherein a man took up shop at the high post facing away from the basket (think about how bizarre that looked to people who weren't used to it, why are you facing the wrong way?) and his teammates cut around him to get easy shots by the rim. Worth noting that at first "pivot" and "center" not only weren't synonyms but weren't necessarily the same player at all. Having height was acknowledged to help with passing vision, but you couldn't just put your jumping center in such a role and expect it to work any more than you can take a random center today and ask them to play like Bill Walton or Nikola Jokic - who are the modern analogues to Dehnert.
- Dehnert's Pivot Play rapidly ate the entire basketball world. At a time where college & pro basketball were 2 very different things and the style from college would end up largely be what won out, still, within a few years all the college teams - just like all the pro teams - were looking to have a man like Dehnert.
- And one of the other terms for "Pivot" thus became "Dutch".
- So Jack Garfinkel (Garfinkel not being a Dutch name) became known as "Dutch" because from a young age he excelled in the Pivot role with his excellent passing, and the image you see here likely represents one (of the many) passing techniques he used.
I have no explanation though for why he's wearing a different jersey than everyone else in his Bowman card though lol.