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.