The Legend of Fred Crawford
A former Buffalo Braves guard, this St. Bonaventure legend did more than just hoop — he helped his community
Fred Crawford was in his dorm room at St. Bonaventure’s one night when his phone rang. The call was from Ed Donavan, the coach of the university’s basketball team. It was about Crawford’s roommate, Tom Stith. Stith had recently undergone a medical examination to determine why he’d lost 15 pounds during his senior season, and in the process, discovered that he had been diagnosed with tuberculosis.
Crawford’s first response, naturally, was concern for Stith. They had spent the last two seasons sharing a room and travelling across the country playing for St. Bonaventure, helping advance the team to №2 in the nation. Crawford had been simultaneously chasing Stith and supporting his plays since he arrived at the university. Stith had averaged 23 points a game over the course of his three seasons with St. Bonnies, and had twice led the teams to the National Invitation Tournament. When Crawford entered as a Freshman, he broke Stith’s all-time Freshman scoring and rebounding records. In their latest season, Crawford and Stith both made the All-East/All-American Team. When they faced off against the №1-ranked Ohio State that season for the Holiday Festival at Madison Square Garden, St. Bonnies might have lost the game by a single point, but not before Crawford put 26 points on the board to Stith’s 35.
Just five weeks before Crawford answered his phone, Stith had signed a two year contract with the New York Knicks after they selected him as their second draft pick in March, 1961.
Crawford hardly had time to process what he heard before the Coach Donavan told him that it would be best, since the two had been sharing a dorm room, that he get tested for TB, too. The next day, a chest X-ray revealed two quarter-sized holes in Crawford’s lungs, and a sputum test confirmed a diagnosis of pulmonary TB.
Suddenly, Crawford felt his own athletic career begin to slip away. An antibiotic drug regimen for tuberculosis in the early 1960s was just coming into widespread use, and consisted of new lines of promising but experimental drugs with the potential for debilitating side-effects. Crawford’s doctors, his fellow students and his friends were skeptical of any chance at a future back on the court. As a player whose rise could only be described as meteoric, it was a devastating setback. But Crawford was no stranger to adversity, and he was determined to apply the same determination that got him where he was, to overcoming his illness.
Born in Harlem Hospital in 1940, Frederick R. Crawford Sr. grew up in the afterglow of the Harlem Renaissance and on the verge of the Civil Rights movement. Growing up, the conversation around the dinner table would revolve around Dr. King’s church sermons and what Malcolm X was preaching on the street.
Crawford was a heavy kid, and it was largely his desire to not be picked last that compelled him to push as hard as he could on the court. He spent his free time running drills, practicing free-throws and lay-ups, and getting in on any scrimmage game he could.
Crawford happened to come up around the time that Holcombe Llewellyn Rucker was acting as New York City’s Playground Director. In 1946, Rucker initiated a three-on-three basketball tournament at the 138th Street Playground next to St. Mark’s Catholic Church. The success of those tournaments led to his organization of the summer basketball five man full-court league, a program that would turn out to be both a haven to keep youth out of trouble, and an incubator for generations of professional ball players in New York.
Crawford honed his skills in those tournaments, and translated them from his street game to high school athletics when he began playing on for the Samuel Gompers High School team. By then, he had garnered a reputation for keeping a cool head and a calm disposition. Combined with his acumen on the court, he was an easy choice for team captain, graduating in 1959 with All-City Honors. With offers coming in from numerous universities, he ultimately went with St. Bonaventure.
The transition from the city to the small private catholic college in the upstate town of Allegheny was a culture shock, and when he arrived in 1960 the student body was almost entirely white. Just two years earlier, Tom Stith had been selected as the first black player on the basketball team. The frozen winters and the change in culture could have been overwhelming, if not contentious, But Crawford found the environment to be supportive. He found that the nuns on campus treated him like any student, pushing him in his academic pursuits just as his coach pushed him athletically. One cold morning, when Crawford tried to sleep in to wait out a winter storm instead of going to class, he heard a pounding on his door and opened it, only to find the one of the sisters, who forced him to get dressed and get to class. As for his teammates and peers, who were predominately Italian and Irish, he would often spend holidays and weekends with them and their families.
To say that he was made comfortable, that he was accepted, was not to say that the Black players on the team weren’t ever met with hostility. It just tended to come from the world outside St. Bonnies. In 1961, Crawford and the team were in North Carolina for the N.C.A.A. East Regional when they went out for a team meal. At the restaurant, Crawford, Tom Stith, and the two other Black players on the team were told to go back and eat in the back room. When the players took their food into the back, they were followed by their white teammates and their coaches.
That camaraderie, and Bonnies’ formidable roster under the leadership of Coach Donavan, was what propelled the team to their no. 2 rank — and among the most impressive forces on that roster were Tom Stith and Fred Crawford.
Stith was on his way out when he was diagnosed with TB, but his collegiate record was secure. For Crawford, two seasons in, it seemed inevitable that his career as a college player would flounder, and that the watchful eyes of pro scouts would begin to drift away from him.
In the spring of 1961, Crawford was admitted into a sanitarium in Mt. Morris in upstate New York. For five months, he endured a regimen of tongue-twisting drugs including Streptomycin, and the latest entrant into tuberculosis treatment: the novel ethambutol. The side effects of treatment included intense vertigo, nausea, joint pain, with the potential for permanent damage to visual acuity, and in some cases it could even lead to loss of hearing. There was also the risk that, even in the event of a full recovery, Crawford might never hope to regain his peak physical condition.
There were times of despair, when being bed-ridden and hospital-bound, away from life and from the game, seemed overwhelming, but Crawford had resolved to recover and get back on the court. When he was finally discharged, he was determined to pick up where he had left off. He returned to St. Bonnies midway through the fall semester and was allowed to return to the game on a special diet with a restricted activity program. In theory, that meant that he was limited to playing ten minutes per game, gradually increasing his playing time as his condition improved. And in part, that’s how things went, from ten to fifteen, fifteen to twenty. But the limitations frustrated Crawford, and it wasn’t unusual, when the stakes were high and a game was in crunch time, for him to push beyond those limits. And through his perseverance, he ended the year with an impressive points per game, leading the team in rebounds. Crawford finished his final year at St. Bonnies as team captain with first team All American honors.
Crawford went on to a notable career in the NBA, initially following once again in Tom Stith’s footsteps when he was drafted to the New York Knicks, fortifying the backcourt with nimble drives and precision jump shots, ultimately helping to lead the Knicks to the NBA Eastern Division Playoffs with the Boston Celtics, where he averaged 18 points per game. Over the course of his career, he helped the Knicks, Lakers, 76ers and the Bucks make the playoffs, even making it to game 7 in the 1968 NBA championships, playing alongside Bill Russel, Wilt Chamberland and a whole roster of legends.
It was in his time with the Bucks that he played elder statesman to a young Kareem Abdul Jabar. For Jabar and Crawford, it was something of a reunion. The two had come up playing ball on the same Harlem courts. Their parents were friends from the neighborhood.
Of course, Kareem wasn’t the only ball player that Crawford encountered who had come from the same world as he had. Those Harlem courts had become an internationally recognized proving ground for young talent, and its influence on pro rosters nationwide was undeniable. Crawford certainly recognized it, and it was for that reason that, in 1965, he turned his sights back on the place that made him.
In 1964, Crawford opened up a small venture, Appletown Sporting Goods, whose main merchandise was athletic shoes. It was similar to any sporting goods retailer, but their suppliers soon took note of the impressive volume of product they moved. Nike representatives and those from other outfits paid Crawford a visit to understand what he was doing so well, but there was little secret to his success. Not only was Crawford himself a former NBA star, but the store was frequently visited by the likes of Kareem Abdul Jabar and Bob McCullough of the Cincinnati Royals. Kids from the neighborhood would linger for hours for a chance to catch a glimpse of their heroes, and the aura of legends moved a lot of product.
The store reconnected Crawford with his community, but a tragic turn of events would present Crawford with an opportunity to transition from commercial enterprises to public service. In March 1965, Holcombe Llewellyn Rucker died of cancer. For twenty years, Rucker had helped shape the the lives of aspiring ball players on the streets of Harlem, including Fred Crawford. In part to pay tribute to Rucker’s contribution, and to allow the institution to continue, Fred Crawford and Bob McCullough created The Rucker Pro Tournament. A few years later, in 1969, Crawford and McCullough successfully lobbied New York Mayor John V. Lindsay officially name the park at 155th Street and Frederick Douglas Boulevard Rucker Park. To this day, the Holcombe Rucker Square sign attracts more than 100,000 visitors from around the world each year.
Beneath Crawford’s work, he was also making a quiet statement. A stigma around basketball had persisted, where players were perceived as rarely giving back to their communities. This belief was perpetuated in part by the public’s misunderstanding of the financial viability of a career as a professional athlete, and it often had the potential to ostracize former players when they returned home, or to disapprove of them if they didn’t. Crawford began looking to a career as a public servant as a way to simultaneously disprove that myth, while also serving as a model for other players to see what life after the big show could be like.
Over the coming decades, Freddie acted as a representative on Harlem’s school board 10 and on the local Housing Board, where he often found himself at the center of roiling debates over the right to equal education, and the community’s efforts to beat back waves of gentrification.
These efforts yielded successes, failures and compromises, and Crawford weathered those experiences and came out with a deeper understanding of the community that made him. Crawford went on to get a masters in Public Administration, and through that he discovered what would be the next act of his career, in the Visiting Nurse Service.
