Basketball Bounces Back

The gambler who knowingly played against a crooked roulette game, "because it was the only wheel in town," had nothing on the diehard U.S. basketball fan. Last week at Madison Square Garden, scene of sport's biggest scandal, precisely 18,485 fans, just eight short of the alltime Garden basketball record, jammed their way in to see the final of the National Invitation tournament between Philadelphia's La Salle College and the University of Dayton. Basketball, contaminated by fixers and dumpers a year ago, was certain of its clean bill of health from the fans when a Garden official announced happily --and somewhat incredulously: "We could have sold 7,000 or 8,000 more tickets if we had them."

The fans' frantic interest stemmed, in part, from a standing U.S. tradition: love of the underdog. Both Dayton and La Salle, unseeded and unsung, had reached the final round after a series of startling upsets. Dayton, thanks to the prodigious scoring of lanky (6 ft. 7 in.) Don Meineke (71 points in three games), had humbled New York University, St. Louis and St. Bonaventure. La Salle, thanks mainly to aggressive teamwork rather than an individual star, had whipped Seton Hall, St. John's and top-seeded Duquesne. La Salle's problem: to stop Dayton's Meineke.

The smaller (by an inch) La Salle team started badly. Meineke hooked in a basket within the first ten seconds of play. But from that point on, dogged La Salle handcuffed the giant by double-and even triple-teaming him, i.e., guarding him with a cluster of two or three players. The Dayton men thus left unguarded showed what canny La Salle Coach Ken Loeffler had already suspected: a weakness in sinking long shots. By half time, with , Meineke held to 9 points, the La Salle tactics had paid off with a 38-30 lead.

In the first minutes of the second half, Dayton's determined surge brought the crowd to its feet as it cut La Salle's leading margin to two points. At that stage La Salle gave Dayton a lesson in teamwork. The next ten points, all La Salle's, were scored, almost in perfect rotation, by each of the five men of the La Salle team. Final score: 75-64. The La Salle victory was doubly sweet. It meant a chance to play in next month's Olympic elimination tournament, and it confounded the selectors for this week's N.C.A.A. tournament, who had carefully chosen beaten Dayton, St. John's and Duquesne, as the teams most likely to succeed.

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