Ted Strong: Born Here, Gone in Infancy, Great in Two Sports

1917–1978 · born in South Bend

Theodore Relighn Strong Jr. was born January 2 in South Bend — 1917, on the SABR biography's and the Baseball-Reference Bullpen's dating; one widely used reference prints 1914, and the conflict stands here rather than under the rug — and in June of his birth year the family moved to Chicago. The tie is birth, and birth only: Strong was raised in Chicago and schooled at Wendell Phillips High School, and this record claims nothing more for South Bend than the fact it can prove. His father, Ted Strong Sr., had been a lightweight boxer and a Negro league ballplayer and manager.

What Chicago formed was, by the testimony of the men who saw everyone, one of the finest all-around athletes in Black sport. Buck O'Neil called him the best athlete he had ever seen; Cum Posey called him in 1937 the best young player in Negro baseball. Strong played two sports at their top level at once. In basketball he joined the Harlem Globetrotters in 1936, played center, became the team's captain, and was on the side that beat George Halas's Chicago Bruins for the 1940 World Professional Basketball Tournament championship; he was noted for the largest hands in the game. In baseball he hit .321 with 40 home runs in 1,285 at-bats across the Negro leagues — the Chicago American Giants, the Indianapolis clubs, the Kansas City Monarchs and the Indianapolis Clowns — and was chosen for seven East-West All-Star Games. He hit .359 in 1937; the Monarchs took the 1939 league title with him hitting .304; he jumped to the Mexican League in 1940 and hit .332 with eleven home runs for La Junta de Nuevo Laredo. In 1942 he hit .364 — the standard summaries credit him with that season's Triple Crown — and the Monarchs swept the Homestead Grays in the Negro World Series, Strong hitting .316 with a three-run homer in Game 3. That same winter he played for the Chicago Studebaker Flyers of the National Basketball League, among the first Black players in that league — the factory team whose brief, integrated stand the Sports leg records. Pittsburgh's planned 1942 tryouts for Black players named him among the alternates; the tryouts were canceled.

War service interrupted the prime. Strong was a Navy Seabee from 1943 to 1946, decorated with the Asiatic-Pacific and Philippine Liberation ribbons from Majuro Atoll. He returned to Kansas City in 1946, hit .321, and lost a seven-game World Series to Newark; hit .210 in 1947; and closed with the Indianapolis Clowns in 1948. The record also carries the counterweight, from Double Duty Radcliffe by way of the historian John Kovatch: older players believed Strong's drinking and carousing cost him the stature — and perhaps the historic role — his talent promised. He died March 1, 1978. South Bend's claim on him is the first line of his life and nothing after June 1917; the greatness belongs to Chicago and to the Monarchs, and it is recorded here at its true size and its true address.

Sources

1. Glen Sparks, SABR biography of Ted Strong — the South Bend birth and the June move to Chicago, the family, both sports' careers season by season, the Seabee service and the Radcliffe judgment.
2. Sherman L. Jenkins, Ted Strong Jr.: The Untold Story of an Original Harlem Globetrotter and Negro Leagues All-Star (Rowman & Littlefield, 2016) — the 1939 East-West vote and the family record.
3. Baseball-Reference Bullpen and the standard summaries — the 1917 birth year against 1914 in one reference; the 1942 batting title and Triple Crown credits.