Basketball

The inventors of most games are as anonymous as the inventors of the candle or the wheel. Not so the inventor of basketball. He is Dr. James A. Naismith, director of the department of physical education at Kansas University. At McGill University he was the best athlete in his class (1887). From McGill Theological Seminary he went to Springfield Y. M. C. A. College to teach. Amos Alonzo-Stagg went there the same year to coach football and Dr. Naismith played centre on Stagg's team. In 1891, he was assigned to design an indoor game for a gymnasium class. He knocked the bottoms out of two peach-baskets, nailed them to the gymnasium wall, handed a soccer ball to a group of undergraduates and taught them a set of rules which he had improvised. In its essentials, basketball remains as Dr. Naismith manufactured it. It was played first with seven men on a side, later nine, now five. It is played in Germany, France, Turkey, India. China, Syria. In South Africa men consider basketball effeminate but women play it with enthusiasm.

Had Dr. Naismith patented some of his paraphernalia he might now have an income that would free him from the chores of teaching Kansas freshmen how to stand up straight. Basketball is the most popular winter team game in the U. S. In many colleges, next to football, it is the most profitable. By last week the principal leagues in the U. S. had reached their crucial games.

East, When Princeton beat Columbia 35 to 24 last week, it became nearly certain that the Eastern Intercollegiate League championship would be decided by a play-off between Princeton and Yale, which last week completed its schedule by beating Cornell, 46 to 22. There have been five play-offs since the league was formed in 1902; Princeton has been in all of them. Last year an underrated Princeton team thrashed Columbia for the title. Experts have not underrated Coach Fritz Crisler's long lean forwards, Ken Fairman and John Seibert, this season. They are the high scorers of a team which often plays lazy basketball but which beat league-leading Yale 46 to 26 last fortnight.

Yale--league champion unless Princeton beats Penn in its last scheduled game this week--has a steady, well-integrated machine built around Bob O'Connell. captain and centre, rather than Earl ("Chubby") Nikkei, its leading scorer. Nikkei--more stockily built than the picture of a star basketballer--is not so fast as O'Connell but he has a disconcerting soft throw that on his best night this season piled up 22 points against Penn. Yale's coach, Elmer Ripley, was a crack professional on the Celtics before 1929. Since he went to New Haven--possibly also because famed Albie Booth was on his 1931 team--bas-ketball has grown so popular at Yale that the 2,200 handsome chairs in the new Payne Whitney Gymnasium are not enough for the crowds. Next year the chairs may be taken out to make room for enough benches to seat 3.500.

Southeast-Kentucky, a perennial runner-up in the Southern Conference. was the team to watch at Atlanta last week where the 13 teams in the new Southeastern Conference played their first tournament. Mississippi State, a dark horse in the upper half of the draw, got to the last round but the final was so one-sided--46 to 27 for Kentucky--that Ralph McGill, sport colyumist for the Atlanta Constitution, put all five Kentucky basketballers on his Conference team. Less enthusiastic observers agreed on two-- Ellis Johnson, stocky, cat-footed guard, who fed the ball to Kentucky's 6 ft. 3 1/2 in. forward, Forrest ("Aggie") Sale.

South. At Raleigh, N. C., the Southern Conference championship was really settled in the semi-finals of the tournament. Five South Carolina sophomores, four of whom played together at Athens, Tex. High School, led by a tall clever forward named Benny Tompkins and his left-handed high-scoring brother Freddy, ran up a lead of 15 to 6, then loafed until North Carolina caught up and passed them, 18 to 15 at half time. 'South Carolina, completely upset, failed to score for 20 minutes; then scored six points to tie in the last four minutes, won the game 34-32 in the second extra period, beat Duke 33 to 21 for the title.

Midwest. Ohio State's two games with Purdue this year have been the most exciting of the Big Ten season. In the first, an Ohio State player committed a foul which seemed to Purdue's wiry, black-haired Coach Ward ("Piggy") Lambert so dastardly that he rushed out on the floor to protest. Purdue got two free shots but Ohio State got one for Coach Lambert's indiscretion. Purdue's two throws tied the score; Ohio's broke the tie and won the game. Last week there was talk of "severing relations" between Purdue and Ohio. After their second game, which Ohio won 29 to 17, police had to shield Ohio State's Bill Hosket from a Purdue crowd.

Upset in their last game, 40-28, by Indiana's erratic team, Ohio was forced to share with Northwestern the Big Ten championship after most observers had practically conceded them the title.

Coach Lambert, so excitable that he frequently feeds himself five sticks of chewing gum at once, has been at Purdue since 1916; in the last seven years Purdue has won or tied for four championships, never been below second place till this year. This may make Piggy Lambert the ablest coach in the Midwest; if not, the ablest is probably Dr. Walter E. ("Doc") Meanwell of Wisconsin, a stocky, irascible theorist who never played basketball. He now directs practice from a tall perambulator which assistant managers push around the floor. His teams, more than usually adept at blocking and feint dribbling, play smart defensive basketball with one guard always well behind the middle of the floor to break up quick, unexpected advances.

High scorer in the Big Ten this year is Joe Reiff, Northwestern forward, who helps pay his way through college by sweeping out the lobby of Patten Gymnasium at 40-c- an hour. In last week's closing game against Minnesota that later gave Northwestern its tie with Ohio State in the Conference, Reiff's 20 points brought his record for the season to 167--13 more than the Conference record of 154 made by Purdue's Johnny Wooden a year ago. Ohio State's 6-ft.-4-in. Centre Hosket is a less spectacular player but he has had plenty of time to polish plays with his two forwards. Brown and Colburn, who played with him in high school. Last fortnight Ohio State and Iowa drew a conference record crowd of 9,500 at Iowa City; at Iowa, basketball outdrew football this year 95,000 to 66,000.

An all-star team in the ("Big Six") conference, selected last week by the United Press after Kansas had nosed out Oklahoma for the title:

Forwards Johnson (Kansas)

Beck (Oklahoma)

Center Wagner (Missouri)

Guards Browning (Oklahoma)

Hokuf (Nebraska)

West. Oregon State, leading the northern division of the Pacific Coast Conference, needed one more game to earn the right to meet Southern California, southern division champions, in the playoff. It looked easy: the last game was against University of Oregon, division tailenders, who had won only two games all season. In the middle of the second period, at Corvallis last week, Oregon was leading 21 to 20. Two minutes before the game ended, Oregon State, trying desperately to catch up, had slipped farther behind, 26 to 23. Red MacDonald. State guard, holed a long basket, but 20 sec. before the final gun Oregon was still a point ahead. Stevens, Oregon guard, fouled MacDonald; MacDonald sank the penalty shot to tie the score, gave Oregon State the chance it needed to win, 32 to 27, in the extra period.

The victory took the title away from the University of Washington for the first time in five years. Oregon State's 6-ft-5-in. captain and centre, Ed Lewis, league record-breaking scorer, had a week to get ready for the tip-off against the next best centre on the coast, Southern California's Lee Guttero and U. S. C.'s crack forward, Jerry ("Little Nemo") Nemer.

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