FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Chic Hess (808) 263-3310
Although winning was not his primary objective, Ernest A. Blood was a sportsman who knew how to do just that. He started playing basketball within the first year of the game’s invention. Forty years later, he confessed that, “I took to the game like a duck takes to water.” As a young athletic YMCA prodigy in the pre-basketball years, Blood showed signs of having a knack for the spectacular. Blood’s contributions and accomplishments during his prodigious fifty-four year coaching career (1895-1949) earned him the distinction of being the first high school coach to be inducted into Naismith’s Memorial Hall of Fame.
Prof Blood and the Wonder Teams: The true story of basketball’s first great coach, is not just a chronological listing of the 159 games won consecutively. Hess delivers an in-depth look at the triumphs and setbacks encountered by basketball’s first great coach. From his first exposure to Naismith’s invention, Blood could see the value of basketball when used as a means to an end—the development of character and manhood. Early in his career, Blood developed a comprehensive basketball system that was a generation ahead of its time. “Prof,” as peers and players called him, developed a system that rolled over all challengers. The obstacles that Blood’s system was unable to overcome were represented by jealous school administrators; state athletic association personnel; and an influential, irate parent.
In Prof Blood and the Wonder Teams, we learn how Blood placed sportsmanship ahead of all other pursuits to produce five straight undefeated basketball teams--the Passaic High School Wonder Teams from Passaic, New Jersey. Dick Vitale calls it a brilliant, well-documented story that explains just how dominant Prof’s boys were.
Now for the first time, Prof Blood’s story is told from start to finish with over 100 pictures, 150,000 words, and numerous anecdotes. At last, basketball coaches and fans can learn all of Prof’s secrets to coaching undefeated teams. In the words of P. J. Carlesimo, who wrote Prof Blood and the Wonder Teams’ Foreword, it is “a story that basketball people need to know.”
ISBN 0-9664459-4-5. Price $24.95. Newark Abbey Press, publisher.
For review copies or to request an interview with the author, please call (808) 263-3310 or email chichess@hawaii.rr.com.