Angelo “Hank” Luisetti was born in 1916 and attended Stanford University where he was an All American basketball player.
At the beginning of the 1938 Basketball season in their first important game of the season a strong Olympic Club team lost to Stanford. The Indians would be Pacific Coast Conference Champions that year and were ably led by Hank Luisetti. But Olympians are patient, and after a three-year lay off from Basketball Luisetti joined the OC.
As forwards he and All-American Toddy Gianini together with guards Kenny Meitz and Clarence Anderson they formed an exceptional team. This was the team to beat in 1941 and it is significant to note that the Olympic Club, chiefly because of Angelo Luisetti, shattered all attendance records for San Francisco.
When the Olympians and Luisetti made their debut for the 1940-1941 season, 9500 persons jammed the Civic Auditorium, the largest crowd to ever witness a basketball game in San Francisco, and 1500 more fans, who had braved a deluge of rain, were turned away. Stanford, hotter then they had been in a year, eked out a two point win.
In the 1941 AAU Nationals the OC lost to Athens Club when Luisetti, after an hour on the surgeon’s table for an infection caused by a giant corn, could only score 15 points, limping with a hole cut in his shoe to ease the pain from the injured toe!
Hank held the nation’s greatest scoring records to date in that era. In 27 games, five of them in the nationals, he scored 541 points. He weighed 15 lbs less at the end of the 1941 tournament that at the start! In 1941 he was selected All-American and most valuable player. When Luisetti left the Bay Area in 1941, Giannini and Anderson went to work at the Golden State Milk Company and signed with the Oaklanders, a local professional team.
