Diculous. As I warmed up, the crowd started to notice, you know, there's this strange guy.
And as we started the competition, they kept raising the bar, jumping higher and higher.
More people started to watch and...
I remember the stadium just getting quieter and quieter and quieter.
You gotta go, you know. Changers.
In some cases, like Dix, it's about one person changing a sport forever.
But sports can also change the people who play them, watch them, work in and around them.
We'll hear from people who set records, lost with grace, and had to fight just to be in the game.
The people who chose to flop instead of jump.
And the people who chose to jump when everyone else stayed on the ground.
Kenny, I'd like you to talk about your jump shot.
My jump shot. Yeah. I started shooting my jump shot back in about 1934, 35 probably.
You could say that was the start of it.
Kenny Sailors is the originator of the jump shot in basketball.
Can you spoke with his friend and brand?
The game was a little different back in those days.
Everybody shot two handed shots.
The two handed shot was excellent, but you needed to have both feet on the floor when you shot it.
That meant shorter players like Kenny were at a disadvantage.
So when his big brother introduced him to the sport on their farm in Wyoming in 1935, he needed a way to make up the difference.
I started out learning about the game of basketball and that old farm down at Hillsdale.
With my brother who incidentally was an outstanding ball player, probably that most outstanding one Hillsdale had had up until that time.
He wanted me to play too, and of course I was just a punk kid.
And so he put a basket hoop, he didn't have any net on it.
And he'd work out against me sometimes, even though he was five years older.
And of course, the good lord must have put it in my mind that if I'm going to get up over this big bump so I can shoot, I'm going to have to jump.
It was a matter of necessity, my brother being six five and I was probably about five seven.
Probably wasn't very pretty, but I got the shot off.
And it went in and I think he was as surprised as I was.
Boy, but it says you better develop that.
That's going to be a good shot.
So I started working on it.
The NBA started up in 1946 and I signed up with Cleveland in that day.
Nobody jumps, you see. Everybody had to keep both feet on the floor or the coach would take you out of the ball game.
So I was out there screaming, gender playing around before the season started.
And of course, my first coach was a Dutch dainard, a whole time ball player.
And the old Dutch was on the side.
I saw him sitting over there watching us and when we got all done, he said, sailors, which use get that leap in one hander.
And I said, well, Dutch, I don't know.
I've been shooting that for a long time.
And he says, you've never go in this league with that shot.
Well, I thought, well, my career is over with right now.
That's kind of how it all came about.
And to this day, I guess I'll let it go.
The fighters week is rule.
They ask me questions like, did you really start the jump shot?
What am I going to say? You know, I usually want to write back.
I say, well, Ray Meyer from DePaul, who coached there for a minute and many years, he said it the best, I think.
He said, sailors made it out of been the first player to jump in the air and shoot the ball.
But he developed the shot to be in use today.
That's the way he put it.
I like that. From the father of the jump shot to the person known as the mother of women's judo.
Her name was Rusty Kanakogi.
She was a martial arts champion originally from Kony Island in Brooklyn.
Her daughter, Jean Kanakogi, came to StoryCore to remember the toughest woman she ever knew.
My mom was five foot nine.
Her legs were built like cinder blocks.
And her voice would wrap all around you.
It was gritty. It was booming.
And when she spoke, she was very matter of fact.
You don't have to look like hercules to have strong shoulders.
If your body's strong, your brain is strong, then maybe you can get along in life with everything.
There were no excuses that Rusty would accept.
She's the Kanakogi. It was born Rina Glickman to a Jewish family in Brooklyn in 1935.
And her daughter, Jean, said she had it pretty rough.
She came up in a very tumultuous childhood where her parents would fight.
Her mom, my grandmother, was constantly working in Kony Island in a candy factory.
And my grandfather, her father, he was absent and he was an alcoholic and a gambler.
So he took the family money and he would spend it.
So she learned to be independent.
And she learned to survive on the street.
A lot of people think that her name Rusty was because she had this strong red hair.
Actually, she took the name Rusty from a street dog.
That he picked up from his judo class at the YMCA.
And when he picked me up on his hip like I was a piece of paper, that was it.
This was magic to me. I could always fight, but this was something really different.
The men I worked with at the time, they really didn't know how to take me.
But I think it was my trying spirit that really led them work with me.
And I was one of the people selected to be on the official team from that line.
But she was constantly running into barriers being told no.
Her first judo tournament was in 1959.
It was the YMCA judo championships in Yudica, New York.
Women weren't allowed to compete back then.
So she went with the men that she was training with just to warm up with them.
But then she heard a snap and the loud yell across the mat.
It was one of her teammates.
Her coach came to her and said, Rusty, I need you to take the place of this teammate.
He can't compete. Otherwise we'll forfeit.
So I'm going to she throws this big guy for a full point and wins her judo match.
As she's walking out of the judo venue with her gold medal placed around her neck, the tournament director comes up to her and says, are you a girl?
Girls can't compete in judo.
I need that medal back. She said, no, this is mine.
I want it fair and square.
One being judo. I fell in love with the beautiful judo throw.
One man throwing another man, slow motion.
And I looked at it and I said, wow, how cool would it be if I could throw somebody across the room like that?
I want to learn how to do that.
When I got better, I asked my mother to take me to a local judo school.
Rusty was kind of a mother to you too, as well as a coach.
Well she was a lot to me. The first time I saw your mom, I was between 10 and 11 years old.
I was at a judo training camp and I saw this red headed woman who wreaked power, the strength, the presence.
I said, who the Olympics?
When they told her no because women's judo wasn't internationally competitive, she mortgaged her house and funded the first ever women's world judo championships featuring athletes from all over the world.
But it still wasn't enough.
She thought that women's judo would be a shoe in for the 1984 Olympics, especially since it was in.
She looked at my father and said, I don't intend to.
Finally, after years of trying, Rusty threatened to sue the IOC for discrimination.
And that did it. In 1988, they allowed women's judo into the Olympics for the first time.
Rusty coached the US team and Eve competed under her.
Your mother was such a tough woman to say the least.
The more resistance, the more fight Rusty would have in her.
You fueled her because she wanted you to have that chance.
She wanted her student you to walk in next to her at the 88 Games into that Olympic stadium.
I remember that moment.
The tunnel is kind of dark and you go to the end of the tunnel and you see the light so to speak.
We walked in and you know, it's so big and there's such a large crowd.
You just hear all the cheering and screaming and yelling and they have the American flag up and they're clapping and she stood there, chest out, head up, be with the...
