Loyola Hall of Fame Coach Lenny Sachs

Lenny Sachs was the first professional coach of Loyola basketball, guiding the Ramblers in the program’s infancy, and eventually as Loyola Athletic Director. He won a lot of games. And he is, indeed, in the National Basketball Hall of Fame. But as Paul Harvey might say, there is so much more to the story.

Sachs was a prolific athlete at Chicago’s Schurz High School, and earned 11 varsity letters before he graduated in 1914. He joined the U.S. Navy during World War I, and was named honorable mention on the all-service football team in 1918. Returning to Chicago in 1919, Sachs attended the American College of Physical Education near Diversey and Sheffield. To work his way through college, he coached basketball at Wendell Phillips High School from 1919-1921, and at Marshall High School from 1921-1923. He led Marshall to the city’s basketball title in 1922.

But that wasn’t all. While attending college and coaching high school basketball, the 5’8″, 176 Sachs played Offensive End for the fledgling Chicago Cardinals of the NFL from 1920-1922, and scored the first points in franchise history. In one game in 1920, he blocked three punts in the same quarter, and ran the first back for a touchdown.

Upon graduating from the American College of Physical Education in 1923, he signed on as the basketball coach at Loyola. Sachs’ Loyola teams went 8-11 in 1923-1924, and 4-11 in 1924-1925. Not very impressive. But he might have been a little distracted, because while he was coaching Loyola, he played for the NFL’s Milwaukee Badgers during his first year, and the Hammond Pros in his second season. After a brief NFL coaching stint with the Louisville Colonels in 1926 (they were 0-4-0 before disbanding), Sachs focused his full attention on Loyola basketball.

That’s when the winning really began.

Over the next 17 seasons, Sachs’ Loyola teams went 212-107 (.665). Using a 2-2-1 zone defense that focused on the play of big men, the Ramblers won 31 consecutive games from 1928-1930, and finished a perfect 16-0 in 1928-29. The strategy was so effective that it forced the adoption of the goaltending rule just prior to the 1937-1938 season.

But changing the rules didn’t hinder Sachs’ teams. In 1938-39, the Ramblers were a perfect 21-0 going into the NIT Championship game at Madison Square Garden. They had doubled up three opponents that season, and won their games by an average margin of 14.5 points during an era when dominant teams typically scored in the 40s. But Long Island University– encouraged by the home crowd– manhandled the Ramblers 44-32 in the championship, holding Loyola to its lowest point total of the season.

While at Loyola, Sachs earned a graduate degree, and was hired as Athletic Director upon graduation in 1935. He is often credited with being one of the greatest Jewish athletes of all time, and recognized for taking kids with mediocre talent and turning them into winners through infusing determination and strategy. That philosophy took a struggling basketball program at a midwestern Jesuit Catholic school and turned it into a national powerhouse.

After the heartbreaking loss in the NIT, Sachs began to rebuild the Loyola squad that was depleted by graduation. His squad won only five games in 1939-1940, but improved to 13-8 and 17-6, respectively, the next two seasons.

Longtime Loyola fans know that fate must intervene at some point. And just a month before the 1942-43 campaign was to begin, it did. In addition to his role as Loyola basketball coach and Athletic Director, Sachs coached the all-black Wendell Phillips High School football team. While preparing for a dramatic matchup at Soldier Field with crosstown rival DuSable, Sachs had a massive heart attack just outside the physical education building at Phillips High School.

Leonard David Sachs passed away on October 27, 1942 at the age of 45. John Connelly, one of his first players at Loyola and the coach of Loyola Academy, took over the reigns as coach that year, but the rebuilding Ramblers stumbled to a 12-10 record.

Loyola’s Dean of the college of arts and sciences Rev. William A. Finnegan, S.J., issued the following statement on behalf of the university:
“The news of the sudden death of Mr. Sachs was a terrible shock to the faculty and students of Loyola University. It will be extremely difficult to find another coach of basketball who combines in himself all the qualities we observed in him during the long years of loyal service to the university. We regarded him as the finest basketball coach in the country, one who not only taught basketball to his students and produced many basketball stars, but a coach who exercised a profound influence on the young men who came under his direction. His memory will endure at Loyola as a moulder of men, an excellent Catholic gentleman and a loyola friend.”

The night after Sachs’ death, one of his great basketball stars, Charley “Feed” Murphy appeared on WGN radio to highlight his former coach’s career. Members of the 1939 and 1942 Loyola basketball team served as pall bearers at his funeral at Maloney’s Funeral Parlor at Devon and Glenwood. And at Soldier Field, Sachs was honored at halftime.

Before and throughout his tenure at Loyola, Lenny Sachs coached African-American athletes in the high school ranks. As a coach of a Division I college program that played teams from large and small communities all over the country in the 1920s and 1930s, he may not have had the ability to bring African-Americans onto his teams at the college level, but the committment was certainly there. His legacy was to lay the groundwork for Loyola’s pioneering endeavors in desegregating sports.

The death of Lenny Sachs during the midst of a world war was a major factor in the suspension of the Loyola basketball program from 1943-1945. DePaul, under the leadership of a dynamic young Ray Meyer, kept playing ball throughout the war, and won the NIT in 1945. After the war, Loyola resurrected its basketball program under Thomas Haggerty. And thanks in part to the strong foundation built by Sachs, the Ramblers were back in the NIT final in 1949, this time losing by only one point to a powerful San Francisco team, 48-47.

Nineteen years after his death, before thousands of fans at a Chicago Stadium doubleheader, Lenny Sachs was inducted into the National Basketball Hall of Fame. That season, the Ramblers went on to a 23-4 record, and earned third place in the NIT. The following season, they finished what Sachs had begun 39 years earlier by winning the National Championship with four African-American starters.

Leave a Reply