Basketball's Big Year

This is basketball's big year. At Chicago's vast Stadium sports-hungry citizens are breaking all attendance records. In New York City six local colleges support their whole sports programs from the proceeds they receive (some $3,000 a night) for playing basketball in Madison Square Garden.

The University of Kansas (where basketball was introduced by its mentor the late James A. Naismith) last week showed the hoop-eyed world something to marvel at. Its team, coached by Forrest C. ("Phog") Allen (Naismith's star pupil), who has won the Conference championship in 18 of the last 25 years, took on three teams in one evening, and trounced all three--the North American Bombers of Kansas City (45-to-36), the Rosecrans Field Flyers (71-to-22), Camp Crowder (57-to-23).

Another story was told by the famed team of little Creighton University, a Jesuit school in the heart of Omaha, which always produces formidable basketball teams. Creighton's 42-year-old Coach Eddie Hickey has chalked up a percentage of .669 during his ten-year term, but last week, in the Chicago Stadium, Hickey's sharpshooters got their first defeat of the season from the Great Lakes Naval Training Station Bluejackets (their supersquad includes twelve onetime college stars).

The Midwest can boast seven of the nation's top ten basketball teams. But the South and Southwest are fast producing some of the most spectacular teams in the country. No ambitious basketball team dares appear in public nowadays without at least one player who towers 6 ft. 4. In the South and Southwest coaches often round up whole teams of that altitude. The Buffaloes of West Texas State Teachers College, self-styled "tallest team on earth," average 6 ft. 5, include a 6 ft. 9 in. freshman named Ray Ellefson.

Buffalo Ellefson is not the tallest college player in captivity. That distinction belongs to the Oklahoma Aggies' Bob Kurland, a 17-year-old who stands 7 ft. Co-champions or champions of the Missouri Valley Conference for six of the past seven years, the Oklahoma Aggies have been one of the most popular headliners at Manhattan's Madison Square Garden.

(Last fortnight during a game with Kansas, Oklahoma's animated oil derricks so annoyed the referee that he took five men out of the game for fouls. After the fifth Aggie had gone, Oklahoma Coach Henry Iba disgustedly refused to send in a substitute, let the team finish the game with only four men on the floor, lost 29-to-36. Next day Phog Allen wrote Iba questioning "the advisability of continuing basketball competition between our schools.")

But the Oklahoma Aggies are outreached in one respect by University of Kentucky's Wildcats. Kentucky has as coach big, burly Adolph Frederick Rupp, a Kansan who learned his basketball from Phog Allen. Under Rupp's tutelage, Kentucky has won the Southeastern Conference basketball championship six times in ten years, last spring defeated mighty Illinois in the Eastern play-offs for the national collegiate championship.

Rupp, realizing that in Kentucky his teams were playing in "feudin' country," set out long ago to make every game a vendetta. He adopted a trade-mark brown suit and a pugnacious air, took to arguing with the fans, bowing deeply to right & left when he was hissed, waggling a finger like a 10-20-30 villain. Soon Kentucky's basketball crowds grew tenfold. The whole countryside now turns out to see the hated "Man in the Brown Suit" and his "pore li'l mountain boys." So far this season, Kentucky has lost only two games: to Ohio State and Indiana.

Rupp's chief Southern rival is Ed Diddle, coach at Western Kentucky State Teachers College. Though playing in a much slower league, Diddle's Hilltoppers last year reached the final of the National Invitation Tournament at Madison Square Garden, defeating among others mighty Creighton and the College of the City of New York. In 20 seasons Diddle's teams have won 262 games, lost 91.

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