http://www.dailybruin.ucla.edu/db/archivedarticles.asp?ID=952&date=7/24/2000
I am writing in order to clear up a large omission in regards to integration, sports and the NBA. Wat Misaka was picked in the first round of the professional draft in 1947 by the New York Knicks after playing for the University of Utah, the 1944 NCAA champion team.
Imagine what this guy went through. Playing for Utah in 1944, while WWII was going full force. He played for a Utah team, my Alma Mater, and won the NCAA national basketball championship. A Japanese American man in the height of WWII and then to go on to the NBA three years later! The very first non-white to do so. Amazing sports history.
GO UTES!!!
ESPN sports link
http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/print?id=1375733&type=story"Kill that Jap!" That's what the crowd chanted. Focus, focus, he told himself. Don't let them get into your head. Block them out. Focus. Just play through it. Focus. Just block them out. And play. Somehow, he did.
All that Japanese-American Wat Misaka could do in 1944, in the middle of World War II, was play. Put up and shut up. Prove them wrong. He served two years in the Air Force. He led the University of Utah to two national championships. He broke the color barrier in professional basketball in 1947, playing three games with the Knicks before Sweetwater ever suited up. But 58 years later, the memory of that one game at Utah State is burned into Wat Misaka's skull.
"We grew up with prejudice," Misaka says. "That's just how it was."
One thing though, and even though this is ESPN, I have to say, I'm pretty sure that 1944 was the only year that the Utes won the NCAA basketball championship, so there should be a correction there.