A self-proclaimed \u201cone of a kind,\u201d Harvey Pollack at 91 continues to work courtside at Philadelphia 76ers home games. (Hillel Kuttler)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Pollack is the Philadelphia 76ers\u2019 director of statistical information, a paltry title for the unofficial historian of all things throughout the National Basketball Association’s existence.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe word \u2018legend\u2019 doesn\u2019t appropriately describe Harvey,\u201d NBA Deputy Commissioner Adam Silver tells JTA. \u201cHe\u2019s really the heart and soul of the 76ers, a walking encyclopedia of NBA history and a testament to the family nature of this league.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pollack, vigorous at 91, remains a Philadelphia courtside fixture, scrupulously keeping each game\u2019s statistics without so much as eyeglasses to assist. Pollack, in fact, predates the NBA, going back to the Warriors\u2019 Basketball Association of America debut in 1946.<\/p>\n
Not even Philadelphia\u2019s basketball-orphan status during the 1962-63 season — the Warriors moved to San Francisco and the 76ers had not arrived from Syracuse — could interrupt Pollack\u2019s 68-year tenure in pro basketball: That season he handled public relations for NBA doubleheaders.<\/p>\n
He’s on a T-shirt streak, too, never wearing the same one twice and nearly all donated to the cause. When a reporter visited this month, Pollack was on T-shirt day number 3,817. With pride he says the Guinness Book of World Records people told him he\u2019ll own the record — actually no one sought it pre-Pollack — as soon as the streak actually ceases.<\/p>\n
Like his work streak, that\u2019s hardly imminent.<\/p>\n
The native Philadelphian has outlived his wife of 58 years, his four siblings, three basketball arenas, the many newspapers for which he wrote and even Chamberlain. He\u2019s at his 76ers office daily and works every home game, a must greet for referees and opposing coaches, players and trainers. Non-game nights he attends movie screenings and theater performances and visits restaurants for a society column he has penned for decades.<\/p>\n
Lara Price, a 76ers executive, says Pollack goes to nearly every concert — most of them rock and roll — at the Wells Fargo Center, the team’s home. When seats aren\u2019t available, he unhestitatingly noodges the arena\u2019s owner, Ed Snider, for tickets.<\/p>\n
Pollack is a member of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, the Philadelphia Jewish Sports Hall of Fame and several others, but the ultimate tribute may have been the 76ers presenting fans with a Harvey bobblehead a few years back.<\/p>\n
He’s loved sports since growing up with his immigrant parents, Louis and Rebecca, both dressmakers, on Dauphin Street, in the northeast section of Philly, not far from where he now makes his home. The family lived a few blocks from Shibe Park, home of the Philadelphia Athletics, and Pollack and his friends would sneak into the baseball games there with youth groups admitted for free.<\/p>\n
But basketball has been Pollack’s preferred sport since his senior year at Temple University, when he served as the hoop squad’s manager and started logging statistics the coach hadn’t thought to keep.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey call me the last of the Mohicans because I\u2019m the only one left in the league since [the NBA] started,\u201d he says. \u201cThere\u2019s no clone of me hanging around, so I\u2019m one of a kind.\u201d<\/p>\n
Employing Harvey hyperbole is as acceptable for ex-76ers as Pollack\u2019s flaunting prohibitions against staffers asking players for autographs, which he does for his interns.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen you mention \u2018dinosaur,\u2019 you\u2019ve got to put his picture next to it,” says Hall of Famer Julius Erving. “He\u2019s refused to become extinct.\u201d<\/p>\n
Erving\u2019s former 76ers frontcourt mate, Bobby Jones, offers, \u201cPeople say that athletes are freaks of nature, but he may be, too.\u201d<\/p>\n
Larry Brown, the one-time Sixers coach who was inducted into the Naismith Hall with Pollack in 2002, says discussing NBA history with Pollack is \u201clike going to graduate school.\u201d To Jim Lynam, also an ex-76ers coach, Pollack is \u201ca gem \u2026 one of a kind.\u201d<\/p>\n
Moments before a 76ers game earlier this month against the Los Angeles Clippers, Pollack, sporting a full gray mane and slightly stooped over, ambles down the corridor from his cramped office — one littered with papers and paraphernalia — settles into his scorer\u2019s table seat, straps on earphones and a microphone, and goes to work.<\/p>\n
He long ago developed an intricate code to convey information to a colleague across the court for input into a desktop computer.<\/p>\n
The colleague recording the data for statistical posterity? His 67-year-old son, Ron, who has worked with dad since 1962. On the night of Chamberlain\u2019s wondrous game in Hershey, Pa., it was Ron who ran copy to the Western Union desk for transmittal to the wire services.<\/p>\n
Ron\u2019s son Brian, 40, works nearly every game with them from near the basket, calling out turnovers and substitutions. Not even the elder Pollack can monitor everything.<\/p>\n
But Pollack\u2019s basketball work extends beyond courtside. Silver\u2019s \u201cencyclopedia\u201d metaphor is literal, too, since the \u201cHarvey Pollack NBA Statistical Yearbook,\u201d published annually since 1966, remains a staple of offices throughout the league.<\/p>\n
As a player, Jones says he\u2019d open the book and wonder how Pollack conjured such arcana as who had the most 360-degree dunks or the most offensive rebounds in the first quarter of a game — the latter mark belongs to Jones.<\/p>\n
Besides basketball, Pollack\u2019s No. 1 is Reba Greenberg Meyers, a 91-year-old widow known as Ritzi. (One of his T-shirts reads \u201cHarvey is Ditzy When He Sees Ritzi.\u201d). They began dating in 2004, set up by a mutual friend.<\/p>\n
For one with a hard drive\u2019s memory, Pollack hadn\u2019t realized until their first date — at a restaurant in Voorhees, in southern New Jersey, he notes — that she belonged to his Simon Gratz High School Class of 1939.<\/p>\n
Something else Pollack doesn\u2019t know: What became of the iconic \u201c100\u201d sign and the ball Chamberlain used to score his 99th and 100th points that night in a victory over the New York Knicks.<\/p>\n
Says Pollack: \u201cBiggest mistake I made.\u201d<\/p>\n
There haven\u2019t been many.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.crescentcityjewishnews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/Harvey-Pollack-half-time-120913.jpg\" "\\"Harvey")