The Game Changer

"Hank, the nimble; Hank, the quick; Hank, the human corkscrew; Hank, as fast as light; Hank, the rubber-boned man," wrote Roy Cummings after seeing a 19-year-old Hank Luisetti perform for the first time in 1936. Cummings sat alone in a deserted gym trying to describe to his readers what he had just witnessed on the basketball court. Luisetti, who learned the game to a background chorus of fog horns and seagulls on San Francisco Bay, would quietly and furiously shock New York's basketball legions into the era of the jump shot. Now Philip Pallette has created a riveting account of the basketball life of this eminently shy and decent young man who transformed Stanford basketball from a group of fun-loving dabblers into unofficial national champions. The Game Changer rediscovers the long-forgotten adulation basketball fans felt for Luisetti's journey through boyhood on his way to becoming basketball's first matinee idol and the man who changed the game forever.