Most Popular Game

Everybody in Lynd, Minn. (pop. 218) wanted to see the Lynd High boys play in the state basketball finals at Minneapolis. But some had to stay home to do the chores. A. H. Roloff, the postmaster, took over the telephone exchange from Ole Larson, the town barber. At 9:30 one night last week, Roloff got good news to relay to the 18 other stay-at-homes: Lynd had won the first game.

The fever at Minneapolis, where a record 14,751 jampacked University of Minnesota's fieldhouse, was a measure of the epidemic spread of schoolboy basketball's popularity in virtually every Midwest town. At the final game of Illinois' state tourney, scalpers charged $60 for seats. When Anderson High won the Indiana state championship before a wildly cheering crowd, school closed for three days. Until tiny Danbury (Iowa) High (15 boys) was eliminated last week, R.F.D. Mailman Jack Colbert twice drove 300 miles to Iowa City in his jeep to see Danbury play, sped back to get to his mail route at 8 a.m.

Wisconsin had the fever worst of all. Thousands of small-towners crowded into Madison, to find themselves out of luck for hotel rooms or basketball tickets; 32 players had to sleep in the city jail. Aggressive little Reedsville High (44 boys) upset Eau Claire in the final, and every one of Wisconsin's 260 little high schools cheered the victory as its own.

Top team in the U.S. is Champaign (Ill.) High, whose boys start learning their peculiar brand of fire wagon play in the city schools' fifth grade. When Champaign brought home the state championship, the team was mounted on fire trucks, driven down streets crowded with fans.

Scholastic Sports Institute, a new non-profit promotion group, surveyed 26,000 U.S. high schools, discovered that basketball is played even more than baseball and football combined. Says S.S.I.: more than 17,000 U.S. high schools have basketball teams; only 7,500 have football or track; and 6,000 baseball.*

* Next: Tennis, 3,500; softball, 2,000; wrestling, 1,300; swimming, 800; golf, 700; hockey, 250.

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