By Milton S. Katz
University of Arkansas Press. 280 pp. $29.95

As discussion of integration in professional sports reaches a crescendo, an earnest, if not sheltered, young student asks just when the first white player joined the National Basketball Association.

Measured in short-term observation, it might indeed appear that the NBA is and always was an overwhelmingly African American league. Obviously, nothing could be further from the truth, for the NBA - like all professional and collegiate athletic organizations - maintained a system that mirrored America's shame, racial segregation. John B. McLendon, said by Julius Erving to be "the father of black basketball," broke barriers in college and professional sport in the 1940s and 1950s, using a coaching style that demanded exquisite conditioning for players and a pace that fans today still crave: the fast break.

Milton S. Katz, a professor of American Studies at the Kansas City Art Institute, loosens his tie in Breaking Through to introduce many fans to, and perhaps remind a few college basketball veterans of the man whose mentor was Dr. James A. Naismith. Cut from that cloth, it's small wonder that McLendon was one of the most successful of collegiate coaches. But it's a testimony to his strength of character that, born in segregated America, he achieved on the level he did.

McLendon won 12 national championships, including three in a row when he took teams to the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics tournament in Kansas City. The NAIA tournament used to pack the Kansas City Municipal Auditorium to the rafters long before March Madness and the Final Four became the staple of television network sports. What is less known is what McLendon accomplished behind the scenes to stoke that success.

McLendon's student days at the University of Kansas were marred by memories of the staff draining the pool after he swam and completing his degree despite 1930s pseudo-science that sought to explain Jesse Owens' spectacular Berlin Olympics success as blacks' having "a longer heel bone" and a thigh bone that was "a different shape," thereby creating "more jumping ability." McLendon used academic research to conclude that there were no measurable physiological differences across racial lines.

Outside the classroom, as he embarked on a storied coaching career, the 5-foot-6 dynamo found opportunity after opportunity to disprove the flimsy dogma that kept black players off the same court as whites. Perhaps none was more significant or more dramatic than a 1944 game between McLendon's conference championship team at North Carolina College and an intramural team at neighboring Duke University. Why an intramural team? Word was that the Duke varsity squad was good enough to win the Southern Conference championship, but no match for the med-school squad, which featured several outstanding veteran players.

Not only did that clandestine scrimmage take place out of view from the Ku Klux Klan meeting at Durham, N.C., just one week earlier, but the game "broke the law," as one North Carolina College player would tell Ted Koppel during a 1997 Nightline appearance. NCC already had played an integrated game against Brooklyn College, but this game was different. It was in the South, where segregation was rigidly enforced, and it was against a venerable opponent.

The outcome was storybook - NCC won - but was only a preview of the battles McLendon would wage on and off the court to open doors for African Americans. He integrated the NAIA tournament in Kansas City. He integrated the hotels there. He took the Naismith message of basketball and sportsmanship around the world - to Africa, Asia and a frequent-flier book full of stops.

He was the first African American to coach a professional basketball team, the 1959-62 Cleveland Pipers of the American Basketball League, and might be the first coach to tie up with a young Cleveland shipbuilding magnate named George Steinbrenner, the Pipers president. That chapter alone is worth picking up Breaking Through, just to see the Steinbrenner management style taking shape.

The research Katz has done for Breaking Through is outstanding. The book in places is dramatic and exciting; in others it lapses into game recounts that might appeal more to basketball purists than readers interested in this remarkably obscure chapter in American history.

McLendon's mother, who was a teacher, seemed to have had the sanest view of his chosen career when she hugged him after his 1957 Tennessee State team won a historic national championship and said: "I'm so proud of you, son, but I still have my doubts about anybody who would let their whole life be determined by what five boys do with a ball."

But McLendon was motivated by his lifelong struggle to change society. His acceptance remarks at the 1979 Naismith Hall of Fame ceremony told his story:

"It was a struggle to make people recognize that black people were great athletes. We couldn't make the newspapers then. We weren't discovered by the media until the '50s, or by the pros until Jackie Robinson in '47 in baseball." He said his "whole program was to try to get my players and other coaches and their players to sustain the kind of excellence that would qualify those schools and those athletes and black athletes elsewhere - as contenders for athletic national championships and positions."