Sid Hartman, the journalist who 'created' the Lakers, dies

Last Sunday, the day of his death, Sid Hartman published his last column in the

.

He was already 100 years old but until this Monday, due to force majeure, he did not miss his three weekly appointments with the readers.

Hartman wrote a total of 21,235 articles between 1944 and 2020, which would be like having narrated the first goals of Di Stéfano, the last of Messi, and that there was still a whole decade left.

They give for a long 76 years.

To be "the worst vacuum cleaner salesman in the world," write 21,235 articles and be the point man in the birth of the Lakers.

The Lakers' story begins the day Hartman read in the newspaper that the Detroit Gems, a team in the National Basketball League (NBL), were for sale.

Hartman saw the opportunity and convinced two businessmen to organize a basketball game and see if people were interested.

Taking into account that the germ of the BAA, the other great league of the time, was a group of businessmen who wanted to fill the nights off in their ice hockey pavilions, it should not be surprising that one of the men Hartman attended,

, will also dedicate himself to his ice.

The point is, the game was a success, so Chaflen and Ben Berger, the other businessman,

.

Or at least what was left of them, because by the time Hartman got to Detroit with the check, all the players were gone.

Technically they only bought their place in the league and a dozen old kits, although they didn't lose much either: the previous season the Gems had only won four games out of 44.

With Minnesota being the region of 10,000 lakes, the team was called the

.

It's counterintuitive that they kept the name when they moved to Los Angeles in 1960, but it's always a good perspective lesson to remember that the franchise that was born in New Orleans today is called Utah Jazz.

Mikan, the first giant

That year the NBL champion was the

.

The name, by the way, came from its owner's machinery parts company, nothing strange in a league where there were also teams that were named after their owner (the Indianapolis Kautskys) or both, the owner's name and what it made (the Fort Wayne Zollner Pistons, today in Detroit).

In any case, the Gears won thanks to the dominance of the first dominant center, George Mikan.

With the title in one hand and Mikan in the other, the owner of the Gears tried to found his own competition, but there was no room for more leagues and in less than a month he was bankrupt.

And that is where Sid Hartman and the Lakers come into play again: as the team they had bought, the Gems, had come last, they claimed the number one draft with which the NBL franchises were going to distribute to the players of the Gears.

Now they just had to convince

.

Mikan was from Chicago, studying in Chicago and had just married a young woman ... From Chicago, of course.

In addition, the previous year the BAA was born, a league with teams in the big cities of the country and among them the Chicago Stags.

The negotiation to get him out of there was so complicated that he actually failed.

Mikan asked to be taken to the airport and there Hartman threw the rogue: he knew that if he left they would not be able to bring him back to Minneapolis, so he "lost" on the way and the center ended up missing his flight home.

Hartman took advantage of the trip to continue negotiating and the next day Mikan signed with the Lakers.

The thread that unites

leads to George Mikan, the Lakers' first great center.

The dynasty is born

During the first decade of the Lakers' life, Sid Hartman combined his work as a journalist with that of director of the franchise.

That summer of 1947 he laid the foundations of the future dynasty with the signings of Mikan,

, the backbone with which they won their first five titles ... and a sixth that does not enter the history books .

The Lakers won the NBL in their first season (1948) and the following year they went with three other teams to the rival competition, the BAA.

Although formally the NBA was born in 1949 when one league absorbed the other, for the purposes of history the NBA only recognizes the BAA as antecedent.

Therefore, that first championship has been lost in limbo.

Officially, the

.

Sid Hartman, son of a Russian immigrant and a Latvian immigrant (like so many others, his father adapted his original last name, Hechtman to English), was not only key in the birth of the Lakers.

He also worked to get his city back to having a baseball team until in 1961, the year after the Lakers moved to Los Angeles, the Washington Senators were renamed the

.

That same year the Minnesota Vikings began their journey in the NFL.

Such is the magnitude of Sid Hartman in Minneapolis sports that since 2010, near the intersection of Sixth Street and First Avenue, which leads to the Twins and Vikings stadiums, there is a statue of him with a newspaper and a tape recorder under one arm, and a microphone in the other hand.

Not bad for a journalist.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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