In 1919, basketball was known as “basket ball.” It was played in a cage. And for good reason.
The latest book by New Hampshire author Thomas Tosi, “The Cagers,” tells the fictional story of early twentieth-century socialite heiress Madeline Bancroft Lancaster, who flees an arranged marriage and her privileged life only to find herself managing a team of cagers, barnstorming warriors in the bare-knuckled birth of professional basketball.
“The game was different then,” Tosi says, “because the rules were different. Think of early basketball as being more like modern-day hockey. Maybe worse. It was not unusual for brawls to break out on the court and in the stands. For example, until the mid-1910s, when a ball went out of bounds — say into the bleachers — the rule was that possession went to the first player to touch the ball. Imagine players stampeding into the crowd, knocking aside fans like ten pins.”
At that time, there was no one national league. Regional leagues such as the New York State League, Eastern Basketball League, Interstate Basketball League, and Pennsylvania State Basketball League rose and fell. As did teams like the Camden Skeeters, Germantown Geraniums, and Paterson Silk Sox. Games were played in church basements, YMCAs, and National Guard armories.
“In at least one case,” Tosi said, “a National Guard armory restricted the use of the facility to guard members. Players would arrive at the venue only to discover they had to join the National Guard to compete in the game. And the crazy part is, they often did.”
Tosi is quick to point out, however, that his book (a complete four-episode limited
series screenplay) is an historical drama, not a documentary.
“It was a turbulent time. World War I, the Spanish Flu, and the legality of drinking alcohol were all ending. Add to that women winning the right to vote, racial violence erupting into the Red Summer of 1919, and the outbreak of the Irish War for Independence,” he said. “I was intrigued by the notion of placing disparate disenfranchised people (an heiress still controlled by societal expectations, Black basketball players of the Harlem Knights, white Irish immigrant players of the Trenton Trents) all together on a barnstorming bus, stuck until they either killed each other, became friends, or maybe even fell in love.
Tosi writes his books, the first drafts anyway, on manual typewriters made in the 1950s. Though his oldest machine is a 1937 Royal Model O, he prefers a 1956 Remington Quiet Riter and a 1951 Smith-Corona Silent.
“I’ve gotten too used to the creature comforts of the 1950s,” Tosi said. “This typewriter approach is all the more daunting on ‘The Cagers’ due to the strict formatting requirements of screenplays. Why typewriters?”
Tosi said that staring intently at computer monitors for long periods bothers him.
“Besides,” he said, “a typewriter is free from distraction and forces me to slow down. Calling the process of creating a book writing is a misnomer. It should really be called thinking. Fingers tapping on a keyboard is only the physical recording of the real work, sifting through and shaping the ideas that come from staring off into space. It’s the thinking that’s important. And I don’t think all that fast. I need to take time.”
Thomas Tosi is a writer/filmmaker whose novel “Six Thousand Doughnuts” won
the New Hampshire Literary Award for middle-grade fiction and reached number one
on the North American Children’s Audiobook Bestseller list. Film Threat called his
feature film “Dribbles,” which he wrote and directed, “a spiritual sibling to Hoosiers…a
story of tenderness on the road to triumph.”
“The Cagers” launched on September 15.