Made Deaf Sports In USA What It Is
The late Art Kruger was to deaf sports in USA what George Washington was to USA during the colonial era. He has left imprints on much of the American deaf sporting infrastructure.
He chaired the first national basketball tournament for the deaf in 1945.
He founded the American Athletic Association of the Deaf.
He pioneered the Deaf All-American selections in basketball and football in schools for the deaf.
He greatly expanded on the USA role in the World Games for the Deaf.
He served the national deaf community for fifty years as sports writer.
He was working on a 15-volume encyclopedia of the deaf in sports when he got ill and ultimately passed away.
Marty Willigan, the veteran wrestling coach has summed up Art pretty much neatly, “He wore the hat of maybe 5 or 6 people, doing each of their jobs full time.”
Sports was Art’s whole life. At Gallaudet he lacked the size or the talent to play on the football, basketball and baseball teams, so he got involved as the team manager. In these days the managers, and not the athletic directors, ran the athletic program – scheduling, obtaining funds, purchasing equipment, hiring and firing coaches, and posting tryout notices, etc. This is where Art gained an invaluable education on the management side of sports. This skills would hold him in good stead when he got involved with the AAAD and with the deaf schools programs in later years.
Art did play baseball at Gallaudet, but not being athletically talented he was the last man on the team, and rarely got into games.
While he was still a Gallaudet student he disagreed so strongly with the Deaf Schools Basketball All-American selections made by F. James Meagher, an eminent deaf sports writer in the thirties. As a result upstart Art came out with his own Deaf All-American selections, a practice that he continued for the next fifty years!
His biggest dream was to publish a comprehensive encyclopedia of the deaf in sports. Unfortunately his death prevented the dream from reaching fruition. The encyclopedia, however, has been donated to the Gallaudet University archives for the benefit of deaf sports researchers. Barry Strassler, on a contract with the Gallaudet University Department of Athletics to write a book on 100 years of Gallaudet football, used much of the material stored in Art’s unfinished encyclopedia. His contributions made the Gallaudet football book a hot seller, nearly and quickly depleting its 3,000 book order.
Not everything was so sweet with Art. He was heavily criticized for his autocratic style. In self defense Art argued that if he delegated then not much would be done by volunteers!
So instead of delegating and seeing things fall apart, he would do the work himself and push it through.
The crowning moment of his life took place when Hofstra University conferred him with a honorary doctorate. “It was the proudest moment of my life,” he said, several years before he passed away.
Right up to his death Art spent Wednesdays volunteering his services at the Gallaudet University Alumni House. He was working on an update of The Gallaudet Almanac, an informational reference manual. The original manual was published in 1974 and Art was hoping to do a reprint. Unfortunately it never materialized.
