Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Malcolm Wiseman moved to Ontario at an early age and began playing basketball in high school, first at Sandwich High School, then the all-boys Windsor-Walkerville Technical School (later W.D. Lowe High School). In 1933 he was captain of the school’s team that won the Dominion Inter-Scholastic Basketball Title in Saint John, New Brunswick. He attended the Detroit Institute of Technology and played on their basketball team before returning to Canada to play for the Windsor Alumni and the Windsor Ford V-8s, as well as coaching Windsor’s Ontario Ladies Basketball Association District second-place team in 1935. It was with the Ford V-8s, however, that he earned his way to the Olympics, as the members of the team were the 1936 Canadian Senior Men’s Basketball Champions. In six games played at the 1936 Olympic basketball tournament, he scored 12 points and helped the Canadians earn a silver medal. Over the next four years, he was a member of four Ontario championship teams: the Windsor Alumni in 1937, 1939 and 1940, and Moose Lodge in 1938. In 1937 and 1939, the teams were also the Eastern Canadian Champions.
In 1948, Wiseman took up coaching in Windsor and began his path towards becoming a well-known basketball official. In 1963, the year of his retirement, he earned the Detroit-Windsor Freedom Festival Award for his contributions to the sport and in 1975 obtained a Merit Award from the National Association of Basketball Coaches. In 1961, he was made a member of the Naismith Museum’s Canadian Basketball Hall of Fame, along with the rest of his 1936 Olympic team, received lifetime membership at the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1981, and was inducted into the Windsor/Essex Country Sports Hall of Fame in 1995. He was for a long time President of the Windsor & District Referee’s Association and also a lifetime member.
Canada