2-sport Hall of Famer? Meet the most famous Penn State athlete you’ve never heard of

Most Penn State sports fans know the story of Wally Triplett, the first Black man to ever start for the football team in 1945. And every basketball fan who’s cheered for the blue and white should be familiar with Jesse Arnelle, the program’s all-time leading rebounder.

Their importance extended beyond sports. Triplett played in the first interracial bowl game, the 1948 Cotton Bowl, after players voted all of them would play — or none of them would play. Arnelle publicly rejected Penn State’s first annual Alumni Association Award in 1968, excoriating the university for failing to recruit more Black students and faculty members, before becoming the first Black member of the board of trustees a year later.

Those trailblazing alumni have etched their legacies in Happy Valley and beyond — but one Black pioneer is often overlooked, even if he did spend just two years at Dear Old State. And that’s Cumberland Posey, the only man to be enshrined in both the National Baseball Hall of Fame and the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.

Posey, who died in 1946, is often credited as being the Nittany Lions’ first Black student-athlete and second Black student in 1909. His accomplishments are dizzying. He reportedly addressed integration with the Brooklyn Dodgers’ owner a year before Jackie Robinson, he was known for being one of basketball’s first outside-shot specialists, and he was revered by former Pittsburgh Steelers owner Art Rooney Sr.

By all accounts, he was one of the greatest basketball players — Black or white — of his time period. And he was a brilliant businessman, arguably the best in the Negro Leagues, who owned the Homestead Grays and often outdrew a nearby MLB team at the peak of his league’s popularity.

“Posey and his teams showed what the African-American community was capable of achieving during some pretty hateful times when segregation and theories of racial supremacy were the norm,” Pitt history professor Rob Ruck once told the Post-Gazette. “His teams beat all comers, white and Black. They did so with athletic skill, with intelligence and dignity.”

Who was Posey?

Posey’s legacy is more well-known in western Pennsylvania than central. Although he made a national impact, he grew up in Homestead on the banks of the Monongahela River — and most of his sports accomplishments came there.

At Penn State, he played on the freshman basketball (1909-1910) and baseball (1910) teams. And he competed for just one season — in 1910-1911 — on the varsity basketball team. Few accounts of those years remain readily available, but he appeared to leave the university toward the end of his sophomore year due to poor grades.

He enrolled in Pitt in 1913 and then played for Duquesne, where he led the basketball team in scoring for three straight years. Some say he graduated from Pitt with a pharmacy degree; others say he never received a single college diploma, as he wasn’t a stranger to missing class and preferred athletics.

But whatever he didn’t learn in college, he gathered from life experience and sheer talent. Coming from a wealthy and prominent family didn’t hurt either.

When it came to basketball, he shined as a speedy 5-foot-9 point guard who specialized in outside shooting, six decades before the NBA adopted the 3-point line. Claude Johnson, founder of the Black Fives Foundation, a nonprofit that preserves pre-NBA history, once referred to Posey in an interview with Andscape as “easily the grandfather of Stephen Curry.”

Not only did Posey found and operate the Loendi Big Five, the era’s most dominant basketball team, but he was also mentioned in the same breath as the best Black athletes of the day, such as football star Paul Robeson. Posey won five Colored Basketball World Championships, including four straight from 1920 through 1923.

“He was at once a ghost, a buzz saw, and a shooting fool,” wrote a journalist from the Pittsburgh Courier, a national Black newspaper.

He retired from basketball in 1925 so he could focus on a lucrative career as a baseball executive. He started in 1911 as an outfielder for his local Homestead Grays, before eventually rising to become manager, booking agent, business manager and then owner.

By most accounts, he was a “good” or “fair” center fielder. But it was his business acumen that made him famous — and earned him a spot in Cooperstown, as he’s now one of 40 executives in that Hall of Fame. He paid players a salary, didn’t allow gambling and wasn’t afraid of innovation.

In one case, to skirt a Pittsburgh law that didn’t allow Sunday games, he and another local team agreed to play at 12:01 a.m. on a Monday. (The game ended at 2:40 a.m. and saw a larger attendance than the Friday or Saturday contests.) He also welcomed night games, years before the MLB held its first in 1935. And, at one point, his squad boasted more than a half-dozen future Baseball Hall of Famers, including the “Black Babe Ruth” in Josh Gibson.

His plaque in Cooperstown refers to him as “an aggressive talent scout.”

“Some may say he crushed the weak as well as the strong on the way to the top of the ladder,” a journalist wrote in the Pittsburgh Courier. “But no matter what his critics say, they cannot deny that he was the smartest man in Negro League baseball and certainly the most successful.”

He won nine straight Negro National League pennants, from 1937 to 1945, and won three Negro League World Series. He also managed a 1931 squad that finished with a 163-23 record, which included barnstorming games, and is widely regarded as one of baseball’s best-ever teams.

Legacy & death

Thanks to his reputation and penchant for dealmaking, Posey struck an agreement with the Pittsburgh Pirates to use their home field — Forbes Field — for games when they were away. By 1940, and with a large Black population in Washington, D.C., Posey’s Homestead Grays struck a similar deal with the Washington Senators, so the Grays ended up playing home games in two locations.

A 1942 game between the Grays and Kansas City Monarchs drew more than 28,000 fans in D.C. (The Senators’ average attendance that year was 5,240.) And, in 1942, another Grays game became the first Negro League game to be broadcast over radio.

“The Grays’ popularity and on-field success transformed Washington into the front lines of the campaign to integrate major league baseball,” author Brad Snyder wrote in his book, “Beyond the Shadow of the Senators,” pointing out the irony of the best Black team playing on the same field as the worst white team wasn’t lost on fans.

It wasn’t unusual for the Homestead Grays to outdraw the Washington Senators. And Posey wasn’t shy about letting people know about his team’s financial success either.

“I read in the papers that the Cincinnati Reds lost $30,000 last year,” Posey told the Pittsburgh Sun-Telegraph in the 1940s, referring to the equivalent of nearly $500,000 in today’s money. “Any time the Grays made less than $30,000 a year we considered it a poor season. That gives you some idea of the big business Negro baseball has become.”

Posey was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006, and is now one of 40 executives to earn the honor. Ten years later, in 2016, he was enshrined in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame as a player, joining a class that also featured NBA legends Allen Iverson and Shaquille O’Neal. The Hall of Fame referred to him as “the greatest African American basketball player of his time.”

He died of cancer at the age of 55 on March 28, 1946 — 11 months before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. Rooney was an honorary pallbearer at his funeral, and his hometown declared it a school holiday.

“Posey is honored as one of the most significant African American sports personages of all-time,” Penn State historian Lou Prato said, “and the only man, Black or white, enshrined in both the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown and the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield.”