Indiana-Purdue Deadlock

Of the 500 best basketball players in the U. S., 100 come from Indiana. To that State, flat as a huge gymnasium floor, basketball has an overwhelming, universal appeal, like skiing in Norway, hockey in Canada. In the backyard of almost every Indiana house where children live is a basketball court of some sort, often with bottomless peach baskets instead of nets.

From Indiana high schools, the cream of the U. S. basketball crop is skimmed every year by the Western Conference, still the major league of U. S. college basketball. First pick goes to Indiana's Big Ten representatives--Purdue and Indiana University. Last autumn when the Conference season started, it looked as if these two and five others--Northwestern, Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa and Ohio State --were all about evenly matched. By last week, when the season drew to a close, it was once more manifest that "Hoosier" basketballers play their best for "Hoosier" schools. Indiana finished after winning eleven games, losing one. The only other teams that had a chance of getting through with less than five defeats were Purdue, which needed only a victory over Michigan to tie Indiana's record, and Michigan, which had already lost four times. In that last game of the season Purdue looked like a high-school team in the first half, then scored 17 points while Michigan was making two, won the game in the last two minutes, 38-to-37.

This year's deadlock for the Big Ten title thus became as complete as possible. Both Indiana and Purdue had played much the same schedules. Indiana had split two games with Ohio State but Purdue had split two with Northwestern. Purdue had beaten Ohio State twice but Indiana had done the same thing to Northwestern.

Purdue won most of its games by a wide margin, thanks largely to its tall, dark, ugly forward, Bob Kessler, whose left-handed circus shots were most spectacular in the last moments of the Iowa game which Purdue won, 40-to-39.

Indiana usually builds its teams around a tall centre. This year it is Fred (''Reach") Fechtman, 6 ft. 7 in., who usually takes a position under the basket while two forwards, from positions on each side of the court, move across the floor in a figure 8. Most of Indiana's scores were closer than Purdue's but the team obviously had a more smoothly coordinated offense and stronger reserves. All but four members of both squads came from Indiana. C.

P:This year's individual scoring honors in the Conference went to Purdue's Kessler, with 160 points. Second was Chicago's Bill Haarlow who, with a team that failed to win a game, rolled up only nine less.

P:Biggest crowds--100,000 for twelve games--watched Wisconsin, which won only four times.

P:Total gate receipts for all Conference games: $300,000.

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