John Isaacs, Star for Rens Basketball, Dies at 93

John Isaacs, a key member of the Harlem Renaissance basketball team, which showcased some of New York City’s greatest black players during the Depression and captured the first world professional championship, died Jan. 26 in the Bronx, where he lived. He was 93.

Mr. Isaacs died 11 days after being hospitalized for a stroke he had while doing the job he loved most, teaching basketball to children, said Frank Noboa, the director of the Madison Square Boys and Girls Club in the Bronx. Mr. Isaacs — Mr. I to everyone at the club — had worked for the organization for the last 50 years.

“Even though he had experienced great things in his life,” Mr. Noboa said, “Mr. I remained very humble.”

Lean and graceful, Mr. Isaacs was a star on the Renaissance teams of the 1930s, acquiring the nickname Wonder Boy from the team owner, Bob Douglas, who paid him $150 a month and $3 a day in meal money. A 6-foot-3 point guard, Mr. Isaacs led Textile High School in Manhattan to a Public School Athletic League championship as a senior before leaping directly to the pros.

He had “the most natural ability of any man ever to play for me,” Mr. Douglas once said.

Mr. Douglas, a prominent black businessman in Harlem, organized the team in 1923, naming it the Harlem Renaissance Big Five, though most fans just called it the Rens. At the time, the team used the Renaissance Casino ballroom in Harlem as its home court, sharing the floor with the big bands of Count Basie and Jimmie Lunceford.

The Rens, an independent franchise for most of their existence, became nationally known as they barnstormed across the country with a roster of stars that included William Gates, who was later inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame; Willie Smith; Charles Cooper; Al Johnson; Eyre Saitch; John Holt; Clarence Jenkins; and Lewis Badger. At one point, the Rens put together an 88-game winning streak.

As an all-black team, the Rens often played at great risk; many victories ended in fistfights with white players and fans who could not accept losing to a black team. On the road, they faced discrimination.

“We would walk into a white-owned restaurant, and the best they could ever do for us was let us eat, standing, in the kitchen, where no one else could see us,” Mr. Isaacs told The New York Times in 1997.

The Rens’ toughest battles were against an all-white team from New York named the Original Celtics, led by the star players Nat Holman and Joe Lapchick, who went on to illustrious coaching careers. John Wooden, the legendary U.C.L.A. coach, once called the Rens “the greatest team I ever saw.”

Mr. Isaacs, who was born in Panama but received a basketball education on the playgrounds of Harlem, helped the Rens defeat the Oshkosh All-Stars of the fledgling National Basketball League, 34-25, in the first world professional championship game, in 1939 in Chicago.

By 1943, the great Renaissance teams had all but disappeared, and Mr. Isaacs joined another all-black team, the Washington Bears. That year, he led them to the world professional championship, a 43-31 victory over Oshkosh.

By the time the National Basketball Association was formed in 1949, Mr. Isaacs was past his professional prime.

With his pro career over, Mr. Isaacs began grooming young players. Some went on to successful basketball careers. In an interview Thursday, Cal Ramsey, a Harlem native who starred at New York University before joining the Knicks as a player in 1959, recalled “young guys like me and Satch Sanders playing ball in the neighborhood with older guys like John Isaacs and Pop Gates.” Mr. Sanders went on to play for and coach the Boston Celtics.

“We really learned a lot from those guys,” said Mr. Ramsey, now a community-relations representative with the Knicks. “They were the first great basketball stars to come out of the metropolitan area.”

Another player Mr. Isaacs inspired was Chris Mullin, the former St. John’s star from Brooklyn who became an N.B.A. All-Star. He is now the executive vice president for basketball operations for the Golden State Warriors.

“He worked with me at a lot of basketball camps when I was a kid, and it wasn’t until I got older that I realized his historical importance,” Mr. Mullin said Thursday.

Throughout the years, whenever anyone mentioned to Mr. Isaacs that the Knicks were the first basketball team to bring a championship to New York, in 1969-70, his eyebrows would sail north and his booming voice would rise a few decibels.

“Pardon me,” he would say, “but it was the Rens, not the Knicks, who brought home New York City’s first official pro basketball title.”