SPORTS
GOLDIE!
What's in a nickname?
Respect,
if it belongs to
Julius Goldman.
•••■•■•
RICHARD PEARL
Staff Writer
Goldman was his school's student-athlete of the half-century.
T
he coach should have
known better.
He shouldn't have put
young Julius Goldman on the
spot like that — making him
stand up before his basketball
teammates and choose be-
tween them and the hockey
team.
Though he was a good stu-
dent, the Windsor-
Walkerville Technical
School officials had feared
his grades would suffer if he
kept up his rigorous
schedule: hockey practice at
6:30 a.m., school until 3:30
p.m., basketball practice,
home for dinner, then indoor
baseball practice at the
Windsor Armory.
So they decided he should
drop a sport. And although
Goldie loved basketball best,
the coach's methods were all
60
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 5, 1990
wrong. Trying to cow Julius
Goldman would never work
— not then, not ever.
"Now, boys, Goldie here is
going to choose basketball.
Isn't that right, Goldie?"
boomed the coach.
"I think I'll play hockey,"
said the sturdy but quiet
young athlete with the
wavy, dark hair.
"He was always in control,
never explosive," recalls Bill
Hertz of Southfield, one of
the many young athletes
Goldie would coach during
his long tenure at Detroit
Institute of Technology
(Detroit Tech). "If he had a
problem — say, if we were
down by two points with 30
seconds to go — I could just
look over at him on the ben-
ch, see it working in his
mind. He was very intel-
He lettered in four sports at Detroit Tech.
ligent, always devising stra-
tegies."
"He had a fast tongue and
a sharp mind," says Al
Glanz of West Bloomfield,
who idolized Goldie. "Even
today, I don't like to collide
with him in a battle of
words."
"I have nothing but
respect for him, his intel-
ligence, his abilities and (for
his being) a mensch," adds
Hertz.
The story of Southfield's
Julius "Goldie" Goldman is
that of an outstanding all-
around athlete and student
from humble beginnings
whose worldwide impact has
largely escaped notice
"because he didn't go to the
right college," says Glanz.
"He didn't have the money.
"He was a class act and a
gentleman. He was a very
quiet, minding-his-own-
business, earn-a-living kind
of guy."
Consider this:
• Julius Goldman was the
assistant coach of the Cana-
dian Olympic basketball
team that won the silver
medal in the 1936 Games
held in Adolph Hitler's
Berlin.
• He became a father of
modern basketball at those
same Olympic Games by
getting the rules committee
to eliminate the jump ball
after every field goal.
• Goldman's mathematical
abilities would later haunt
Der Fuehrer — an engineer
by education, Goldman de-
signed the 155-millimeter
howitzer anti-tank shell
which routed the Nazis'
heretofore invincible Tiger
Tanks in 1944, turning the
tide toward the Allies in
World War II.
• He was a four-sport
athlete at Detroit Tech —
five letters in basketball,
four in football, two in
baseball, three in track —
and was a national col-
legiate basketball scoring
leader, bettering totals by
players at all Michigan
schools.
• Acclaimed the finest
athlete ever at Detroit Tech,
he later became its most suc-
cesful basketball coach, with
a record of 143 victories and
75 losses for a .656 winning
percentage.
• As an athlete, he has en-
joyed 36 individual or team
championships.