Ralph Kaplowitz, Player in Knicks’ First Game, Dies at 89

Ralph Kaplowitz, who appeared as a member of the Knicks in the National Basketball Association’s first game in 1946, when Jewish players were often showered with anti-Semitic catcalls, died Feb. 2 at his home in Floral Park, Queens. He was 89.

The cause was kidney failure, said his daughter Barbara Kaplowitz.

“My father often told us that the first Knicks team, which had other Jewish players on it, was broken up because fans, especially on the road, would often chant nasty things,” Barbara Kaplowitz said. “But my father was too self-confident a man to ever let stuff like that bother him.”

On Nov. 1, 1946, the Knicks and the Toronto Huskies, both members of the Basketball Association of America, the forerunner of the N.B.A., squared off at Maple Leaf Gardens before an estimated crowd of 8,000.

Kaplowitz, a 6-foot-2-inch guard from the Bronx who had starred at DeWitt Clinton High School and later at New York University, joined a lineup that included Ossie Schectman, Sonny Hertzberg, Jake Weber and Leo Gottlieb. They beat the Huskies, 68-66.

“Ralph was often called one of the great Jewish players of his time,” said Lou Bender, who starred at DeWitt Clinton a decade earlier and went on to play at Columbia and throughout the 1930s for the Original Celtics, a barnstorming team from New York, and later with the American Basketball League.

“But why not just call him a great player?” Bender, who is 98, said in a telephone interview Friday from his home in Longboat Key, Fla. “What does being Jewish have to do with it? Ralph was a great scorer and a great all-American, and had as good a reputation as a person.”

Kaplowitz joined N.Y.U.’s varsity team as a sophomore in 1939-40 and led the Violets in scoring the next season with 193 points. An all-American at a time when the Violets were among the nation’s elite, Kaplowitz was named team captain in 1941-42 but entered the Army as an aviation cadet before the season.

He returned to N.Y.U. in 1946 to complete a degree in education, then joined the Knicks at the age of 27. Midway through that first season, he was acquired by the Philadelphia Warriors, with whom he would win the league’s first championship, finishing with a scoring average of 7.1 points in 57 games.

Besides his daughter Barbara, his survivors include another daughter, Marsha, and a grandchild.

He was inducted into the New York City Basketball Hall of Fame in 2000.