Basketball Player, Innovator. With basketball still in a defining mode, he revolutionized the game by introducing and popularizing the running-one handed shot. He gave west coast basketball respectability while making the game more appealing with excitement and interest which at that time was simply boring. In 1936, Hank Luisetti leading the Stanford Indians, ended Long Island's 43 game winning streak and brought the beginning of the end for a game shackled by the traditional two handed set shot. During those days, entire teams seldom scored 50 points. However, in a Cleveland gymnasium, Hank did what no college basketball player had ever done. His 23 field goals and four free throws against Duquense on New Years Day in 1938 made him the first 50-point scorer in history. The son of Italian immigrants, Angelo Enrico Luisetti was born on June 16, 1916, in San Francisco. His father, Stefano, had arrived shortly after the 1906 earthquake and earned a job clearing rubble from the fires that resulted. Eventually, he owned an Italian restaurant on Market Street. Hank grew up in the Telegraph Hill area of San Francisco, an Italian-American neighborhood. As a boy, he honed his one-handed shot on the cities playgrounds. Luisetti attended Galileo High School leading the school to two city championships. A scholarship to Stanford quickly turned around a basketball program that had endured five straight losing seasons. He scored 1,596 points in four years, a national record at the time. He fouled out in only one game (four fouls-not five was the rule). During World War II, he joined the Navy but was discharged after developing spinal meningitis which also ended his playing days. In his post-life after basketball, Angelo coached on the amateur level for a time then settled into a career in the travel business. He died of a heart attack at the age of 86 after a short illness and was cremated. Honors and legacy...In 1938 he played opposite Betty Grable in the movie 'Campus Confessions.' In 1950, the Associated Press named Lusetti the second-best player of the first half-century. A bronze statue was dedicated in 1988 and literally stands in the seating section at Maples Pavilion, the home of the Stanford (Now Cardinal's) basketball team. Hank was inducted into basketball's Naismith Memorial of Fame, a 1959 charter member. He was a three-time All-American basketball player at Stanford University and was named the Helms Athelic Foundation Player of the Year in 1937 and 1938. His most recent honor was his selection in the inaugural Pac-10 Hall of Honor in March 2001.