Clarence “Fats” Jenkins Hall of Fame Enshrinement Profile
By Claude Johnson
The enshrinement for the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame’s Class of 2021 is this coming weekend, September 10-11, 2021 in Springfield, Massachusetts, and New York Renaissance star Clarence “Fats” Jenkins will be one of the inductees, selected by the Early African American Basketball Pioneers Committee.
I’m honored, proud, and humbled to share that shortly after Jenkins was selected for enshrinement back in March, the Hall asked me to write his official profile for their 2021 Enshrinement Weekend Program, a high-quality annual publication that always becomes a collector’s item for those in attendance.
Here is a version of that write-up.
Clarence “Fats” Jenkins was a breathtakingly talented guard who played amateur, semi-pro, and professional basketball with numerous teams during four different decades before retiring in 1943.
Born in New York City in 1898, Jenkins was best known for being the long-time captain of the New York Renaissance Big Five a.k.a. New York “Rens,” the first Black-owned, fully professional African American basketball team, founded in 1923 by West Indian immigrant Robert “Bob” Douglas. The 1932-33 version of the Rens won 88 games in a row, shattering the New York Original Celtics’ previous pro record of 44 consecutive wins, and was enshrined as a unit into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1963. Douglas was enshrined in the Naismith Hall in 1972, becoming the first individual Black inductee.
“I think that I shall never again see, a basketball team as electrically rhythmic, as stylish, as magical as the outgone New York Renaissance used to be,” wrote long-time Pittsburgh Courier sports columnist Eric “Ric” Roberts in 1972. “They literally set a basketball court a fire, with countless spot passes, spinning bounces, and bullet fast deliveries.” Roberts, an African American writer, had been with the Courier since the 1930s. “Both ball and players moved with such speed, under such exact delicate timing, that the full-court press, the man-to-man, the zone, or almost any kind of defensive technique ever devised, was useless.”
Standing at 5-feet, 7-inches, and weighing 165 lbs., some believed Jenkins was the greatest athlete of all time, so good at basketball that his baseball skills as “one of the surest and fastest outfielders of them all” were often overlooked by the media. But his peers on the field knew what was up. In 1948, Negro Leagues baseball star Satchell Paige named Jenkins to his all-time lineup along with future National Baseball Hall of Fame members John Henry “Pop” Lloyd, William “Judy” Johnson, Martin Díhigo, Oscar Charleston, Biz Mackey, Smokey Joe Williams, Louis Santop, Josh Gibson, and Buck Leonard, among the most outstanding baseballers ever to play the game. With a .334 lifetime batting average, his contemporaries insisted Jenkins would have played in the Major Leagues if its color barrier had come down sooner.
Jenkins attended high school at P.S. 89 on West 135th Street and Lenox Avenue in Harlem and joined the St. Christopher Club youth organization as a teenager. While playing basketball there during the mid-1910s with the St. Christopher junior team, he was spotted by Black basketball pioneer Will Anthony Madden, the St. C. manager, who predicted the youngster would “in a few years become one of the greatest basketball players in the country.” Jenkins, who had been given his nickname “Fats” to distinguish him from his older and skinnier brother, Harold “Legs” Jenkins, was a one-of-a-kind talent with exceptional quickness, speed, agility, and leaping ability as well as brilliant ballhandling skills, shooting range, court vision, and basketball intellect.
When he made the “big” St. C. team, Jenkins played opposite Paul Robeson at the other forward spot. “I was fast for a big six footer,” Robeson recalled of his St. Christopher days, “and played near the edge of the court while little Fats Jenkins dribbled them silly.” Jenkins would eventually play for the New York Incorporators, Loendi Big Five, and Commonwealth Sporting Club before joining the Rens in 1923 as a founding member. He became the team’s captain in 1925 and would hold that title until leaving the team in 1939 after winning the inaugural World Championship of Professional Basketball that year. He would later play for the Chicago Crusaders and Chicago Monarchs before his retirement from pro basketball.
On the court, Jenkins, a lefty, was called “genial but tricky.” He was not only fast but also quick. In addition, his tremendous court sense and leaping ability combined with his deadly shooting accuracy made him one of the most dangerous players in basketball. Jenkins often jumped center while being the smallest man on the team. This was crucial since there was a center jump after each field goal in the early days.
“This flashy colored youth is one of the heroes on the famous Renaissance basketball five,” wrote the Hammond Times (Indiana) newspaper in 1937. “Jenkins gets away from a standing start at bullet-like speed,” the Angola, Indiana Herald wrote in 1935. “Once underway, he leaves a trail of scorched boards behind him.” There were few athletes more disciplined in their approach to the game, as he didn’t “drink, smoke or chew” and maintained excellent physical conditioning his entire career. The man became a basketball immortal during his own time, with White sportswriters even suggesting he was “regarded by the colored race as their Babe Ruth.” And the Troy Record said he was “the most liked Negro basketball player the game ever has known.”
During his time with the Renaissance, their toughest opponent, and biggest rivals through the mid-1930s, were the New York Original Celtics, a team that featured future Naismith Hall of Fame members Nat Holman, Joe Lapchick, Henry “Dutch” Dehnert, Johnny Beckman, and Bobby McDermott.
“From 1916 to 1943 my life was professional basketball,” Jenkins wrote in a 1943 newspaper column, saying that his biggest thrill was winning the World Pro title in 1939. In that championship game, Jenkins recalled, “we were as near perfection as a basketball team can get.” The key to their success, he said, was that they focused on teamwork instead of individual play. “We always tried to work as a machine.”
There was another reason that title was so meaningful. “The New York Celtics had been recognized the champions for years, despite the fact that we beat them time and again when they were at their best, but we never were recognized,” Jenkins added. That’s because the newspapers determined the champions back then, he said, “and the Celtics usually got the nod.” Yet, during the 1930s, Jenkins, Holman, and Beckman were reported to be the highest-paid players in all of basketball. He was also an excellent judge of talent and discovered William “Wee Willie” Smith in 1931 as a 19-year-old while watching him dominate during a preliminary game prior to a Rens matchup with the same Original Celtics squad in Cleveland.
Image: Celebrate the enshrinement of New York Rens star Clarence “Fats” Jenkins with this Rens short sleeve tee shirt available from the Black Fives Online Fan Shop.
Even with all the outstanding Renaissance talent over the years, owner Bob Douglas still called Jenkins his “most sensational player.” And despite all the Harlem Globetrotters exceptional players over the years, their owner Abe Saperstein said, when asked, “The best little man I’ve ever seen? – that’s easy, Fat Jenkins, wonder guard of the old Rens.” Yet, with all the praise he was showered with, Jenkins still humbly listed future Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame member Cumberland Posey, Jr. as “the greatest individual player I ever played against,” adding that the Pittsburgher had “the greatest drive of them all, and when the pressure was on, Posey was at his very best.”
Their successes didn’t mean that Jenkins and his teammates had it easy, as they faced racism on every road trip. “We had trouble when we first started with all these White ‘All Americans,’ and when we first started playing them, damn near every night we had to knock one or two of them out,” the Rens road manager Eric Illidge said in a 1989 interview. “And we kept doing it until everybody respected us.”
The long-time California Eagle sportswriter Lester Granger remembered in 1960 that the Rens players also had a cure for unruly spectators. When a fan “got offensive with his language or actions,” Granger shared, “they move the ball in that direction (and if you’ve never had a chance to see Saitch with Fats Jenkins and Thursday and Cooper doing their stuff, you’ve never seen basketball and it’s pure form) and then ‘accidentally on purpose’ one of Fat’s passes would go wild.” By coincidence, the ball always found its target. “Naturally, smack in the mug of the offensive one.”
Jenkins was also successful in business after retiring from the game, running a dry cleaning operation, a beer distributorship, and the James Hotel, “one of the neatest and most comfortable hotels in Philly.”
Black basketball’s first true superstar also received just as much praise for his contributions off the court. Jenkins mentored kids at the Philadelphia YMCA, where he was, “trying to do what I can to help develop more young men to carry on the record of the Renaissance, and at the same time teach them how to be real citizens.” Jenkins also shared that his greatest future thrill of all would be if one of those youngsters he guided became good enough to join the Rens one day, and then people would say, “Why, that kid’s greater than Ricks, Jenkins, Yancey, Smith and all the rest of ‘em.”
Well, anyone taking one look at today’s African American basketball stars can see that Jenkins certainly got his wish.
Clarence “Fats” Jenkins, Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame member, passed away in Philadelphia in 1968.
For more on Jenkins, please visit his player profile on this site.
(For the full publication, you may have to purchase tickets to attend Enshrinement Weekend directly from the Hall of Fame: https://www.hoophall.com/events/enshrinement-2021.)