Sport: Basketball & Baseball
Born: January 30, 1902
Died: September 16, 1979
Town: Hoboken, New Jersey
Matthew J. Hickey was born January 30, 1902 in Hoboken, NJ. A fine all-around athlete, the boy everyone called “Nat” starred in baseball and basketball, earning all-state honors twice in high school before playing basketball professionally at the age of 18. Nat stood 5’11″ and was a superb two-way player. He starred for independent teams in New York and New Jersey in the early 1920s, including Eddie Holly’s Majors, a team assembled by popular baseball personalities Al Schacht and Nick Altrock.
In 1925, the American Basketball League began play. The Cleveland Rosenblums recruited Nat and he quickly established himself as one of the top players, along with Honey Russell, on the ABL’s best team. He averaged 10.7 points in the playoffs as Cleveland won the 1925–26 league title. Two other stars on the club were New Jerseyan Carl Husta and Dave Kerr, the team’s defensive enforcer. Nat played five seasons with the Rosenblums and was among the ABL’s leading scorers every year. Cleveland won the ABL championship again in 1928–29. In 1929–30, Nat was traded to the Chicago Bruins.
During the 1920s and 1930s, Nat kept busy in the summers as a minor-league baseball infielder and manager. He was a .306 lifetime hitter and was Stan Musial’s first manager, in 1938, with the Class-D Williamson Colts.
The ABL folded after the 1930–31 season. Nat’s star power led to a job with the barnstorming Original Celtics. He joined the game’s most celebrated cast of characters, playing for the Celts on and off for a decade. He also served as a player-coach in the National Basketball League, the top level of the pro game during the Depression, right into the 1940s. Nat helmed the NBL’s Indianapolis Kautskys and Tried-Cities Blackhawks (forerunner of the Atlanta Hawks) in the postwar years.
In 1947, Nat was hired to coach the Providence Steamroller of the Basketball Association of America. Near the end of his less-than-successful tenure there, he inserted himself in two games as a player, a couple of days short of his 46th birthday. He is still considered the oldest player in NBA history.
In 1951, while coaching a minor-league basketball team in Pennsylvania, a car Nat was driving slid off an icy road and killed one of his players. That was his last coaching job in the sport.
Nat passed away in Johnstown, Pennsylvania in 1979 at he age of 77.