It was late on the night after Joe Fulks died from a shotgun blast to his neck when Eddie Gottlieb’s phone rang. As the hours passed on Sunday, March 21, 1976, word snaked out over the national wire services that Fulks, 54, was dead and that the cause was, in all likelihood, foul play. In the newsroom of The Philadelphia Daily News, a diligent reporter named Phil Jasner called Gottlieb to get his reaction. The Daily News had witching-hour deadlines then. Gottlieb was 77. It’s possible that Jasner woke him up.
Gottlieb had coached Fulks with the Philadelphia Warriors during the era of professional basketball when Fulks, an angular 6-foot-5 forward with what one writer described as “a slow southern drawl that suggested a deep calm,” was the greatest scorer in the still-nascent sport. Wielding an innovative tool that he helped to popularize, the jump shot, Fulks had scored 63 points in one game, a record that he set in February 1949 — the NBA wasn’t even called the NBA then; it was the Basketball Association of America — and that stood for 10 years.
The Warriors had won the BAA championship in 1946-47, when Fulks was a rookie, and he was the league’s leading scorer that season and the next before averaging a career-high 26.0 points in his third. In 1971, five years before authorities entered a mobile home in western Kentucky around 4 a.m. and found blood puddling around his body, Fulks had been one of 10 players named to the NBA’s Silver Anniversary Team. Bill Russell , Bob Cousy, and Paul Arizin were also among the honorees.
