As David A. Goldstein details in his recent book “Alley-Oop to Aliyah: African-American Hoopsters in the Holy Land,” Watson is far from the only black basketball player to do these things.

But in 1962, Wade Houston, Eddie Whitehead and Sam Smith became the first Black basketball players to don the ... estate and became one of the first African Americans to own a TV station.

One of his star players called him “more of a life coach than a basketball coach.” Another said he was “simply the best.” One friend called him “a civil rights ...

As a young African-American basketball player at Seton Hall in the 1990s, Shaheen Holloway played against Georgetown teams coached by John Thompson Jr. and struck up a relationship with the ...