Harvey Pollack, 76ers' legendary stat man, dies at 93

Harvey Pollack, a statistical savant whose highlight in a lifetime of compiling and inventing complex sports data came one night in 1962 when he hurriedly scrawled a simple round number on a piece of paper, died Tuesday at age 93.

The longest-tenured employee in the NBA, having worked for the 76ers and Warriors since the league's founding in 1946, Mr. Pollack had been hospitalized since January when he was injured in a Center City car accident.

A lifelong Philadelphian whose passion for work was as remarkable as his facility with numbers, Mr. Pollack leaves behind an enormous statistical legacy, an output that revolutionized record-keeping and informed the more detailed analysis of the computer age.

He delighted in the arcana he could extract from an athletic contest. He found statistics where none had existed and in doing so earned a lifetime achievement award from the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2002.

"Our hearts are heavy as we mourn the passing of a true NBA legend, Harvey Pollack," Sixers CEO Scott O'Neil said. "He may never have laced up his sneakers, but few have done more to advance the game, in the NBA or Philadelphia basketball, than Harvey."

A workaholic, during his 67 years as a public-relations man and statistician with the 76ers and Warriors, Mr. Pollack also charted the action at a variety of other sporting events. He started a statistical service that still employs his son and grandson and found time between games to write for a variety of neighborhood newspapers.

He compiled statistics for Big Five basketball games at the Palestra and for the home games of all the city's Division I collegiate basketball teams. In the one season between the Warriors' 1963 departure and the 76ers' arrival, he kept statistics for the Philadelphia Tapers of the defunct American Basketball League. He did them for nearly forgotten teams like the Philadelphia Bell, Philadelphia Wings and Philadelphia Foxes.

"Harvey was an original in every sense of the word, a unique character who was part of the league since its first game in 1946," former NBA commissioner David Stern said. "His job was to keep track of the stats, but he accomplished so much more. Harvey embodied our league's great history and its extraordinary aspirations."

Baggy-eyed and disheveled, Mr. Pollack was a Runyonesque character. He smoked cigars, spoke with a thick Philadelphia accent and rarely sat still. As a writer for several neighborhood publications, he often used hard-bitten pseudonyms. He was Curly Diamond when he wrote about baseball, K.O. Battle when the subject was boxing. He reviewed restaurants, casinos, and movies, everything composed on the old typewriters he never abandoned.

"You ought to see me go," he said proudly of his typing. "One hundred and ten words a minute, and I only use two fingers. It ain't the cleanest copy, but they got people at these places that retype the stuff."

His obsessive nature spilled over into other areas. He kept statistics for more than three dozen Mummers Parades. And he was extremely proud of the fact that until his hospitalization, he had worn a different T-shirt for more than 4,500 consecutive days, a streak that began shortly after his wife's death in 2003. In the last few years, many of those shirts were donated by charitable organizations he supported and by the sports celebrities he had befriended.

But numbers were his love. So thorough and entertaining were the stats he compiled that the NBA adopted most of them and the 76ers media guide, chock full of them, became a must-read around basketball.

"There has never been an NBA without Harvey Pollack, who has been part of the NBA family since he was tracking statistics for the Philadelphia Warriors during the league's inaugural season," NBA commissioner Adam Silver said. "He documented NBA history for nearly 70 years with passion, curiosity and a relentless work ethic. Harvey has been a true caretaker and ambassador of the game, and he will be sorely missed."

As his longevity added to the legend, more and more visiting players and journalists sought him out whenever they visited Philadelphia.

"Harvey Pollack," said former Sixers general manager Pat Williams, "is an absolute legendary figure."

Mr. Pollack was born in Camden but his family moved across the Delaware River when he was 6 months old.

Growing up at 19th and Dauphin Streets, just blocks from Shibe Park, he became an avid sports fan, one who enjoyed a good argument almost as much as the statistics that he used to win many of them.

As a Temple journalism student, Mr. Pollack kept stats as the manager for three varsity teams before graduating in 1943.

"That's still a Temple record," the man who ought to have known liked to point out. "No one before or since has managed three teams."

Always a hustler, he found work as a Philadelphia Bulletin sportswriter and then, for 20 years, as a public relations man for the city's Recreation Department.

In 1946, when the Basketball Association of America - a league that later morphed into the NBA - began play, Philadelphia Warriors Eddie Gottlieb owner hired Mr. Pollack as his all-purpose aide, a job that entailed scorekeeping.

Mr. Pollack quickly grew dissatisfied with the bare-bones box scores that had been basketball's norm. Early on, he began to record minutes, rebounds, blocked shots and assists. Later he devised categories like double- and triple-doubles, turnovers, points off turnovers and much, much more.

Some were revelatory. He discovered that Oscar Robertson, for example, was the only member of the "800-800 Club", having accumulated that many rebounds and assists in the 1961-62 season. Others were esoteric. "The Trillionaires Club," for example, consisted of those players whose numerical contribution to a box score was minutes played followed by a long row of zeros.

As the years passed, there would be more - lists of unusual nicknames and middle names of NBA players, numbers on who won game-opening taps, the frequency of national anthem singers, the history of team uniforms.

He even kept track of the distance of each of Shaquille O'Neal's 592 field goals in 1995-96.

"When the Lakers were in, I found Shaquille and showed him that stat. I said, 'See, you had more layups [168] than dunks,' " Mr. Pollack said.

And what, he was asked, did O'Neal say?

"He said, 'Hey, man, get a life.' "

For decades, NBA teams sent Mr. Pollack detailed play-by-play sheets from every game. He liked to say that he spent at least eight hours a day poring over them.

"He is just so much into it," his son, Ron, said in 1999. "He lives and dies statistics."

He labored behind the scenes for most of his career, but Mr. Pollack's moment in the spotlight came by accident on the night of March 2, 1962.

It wasn't unusual then for newspapers and wire services to hire the team's PR man to write game stories. That night, for a meaningless contest between the Warriors and Knicks in Hershey, there were virtually no sportswriters or photographers present. Mr. Pollack, in addition to performing his duties with the Warriors, had agreed to provide game stories for The Inquirer, United Press International and the Associated Press.

It turned out to be the night Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points.

"Who knew?" Mr. Pollack said in 1997. "I was keeping a play-by-play and the box score and writing copy. . . . The game ends, and the first thing I did was write a one-paragraph lead for The Inquirer. 'Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points, blah, blah.' Then I told them to use the copy I had already sent them. Then I sent out the box score. Then I went to the phone and called UPI and AP and dictated stories to them."

Soon, newspapers across the country were clamoring for photos from this historic event. A photographer asked the harried Mr. Pollack if he could get Chamberlain to pose for one.

"So I wrote '100' on a piece of paper and gave it to Wilt," he said.

That image of a smiling Chamberlain, clutching that simple sheet of paper, became one of the best known and most frequently reprinted photos in sports history.

Ironically, that makeshift prop would be one of the few paper artifacts from his long career that Mr. Pollack, a notorious pack rat, did not save.

His offices were filled with paper mountains, the various stacks rising like snowy peaks amid the disorder.

In January, after leaving the Mummer's Parade, Mr. Pollack was involved in the accident that left him with a broken hip, pelvis, and jaw, plus broken ribs, in addition to having facial cuts.

"I'm surprised he didn't walk out of the car and brush himself off," Sixers coach Brett Brown said at the time. "He's a stud, an absolute stud."

Mr. Pollack is survived by two children, Linda Gottfried and Ron Pollack, four grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. Funeral information was not available.

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