Basketball: Season's Climax

There was one minute left to play. The score at the half had been Purdue 24, Minnesota 14. Now it was Purdue 32, Minnesota 31. Would Minnesota's rally --five baskets in six minutes--win? Or could Purdue hold its tiny lead until the whistle?

That, at Lafayette, Ind. last week, was the crucial moment of the most exciting game of the liveliest week in the country's major intercollegiate winter sport. On the sidelines, Purdue's Coach Ward ("Piggy") Lambert, who puts a stick of chewing gum into his mouth whenever he is perturbed about his team, gnawed a wad the size of a golf ball. In their seats around the court, 5,500 wildly excited spectators watched the players go to their positions for the tip off. In the next few seconds, things happened almost too quickly for the crowd to follow. First, Purdue's forward, Johnny Sines, drove through the Minnesota defense for a close-up shot that put his side three points ahead. Then Minnesota's Kundla took the ball at the backboard, dribbled down the court floor, stumbled, recovered, and made an incredible shot that all but canceled Purdue's advantage. A moment later, both were ready for the centre toss when the game ended with the referee's whistle, Purdue 34, Minnesota 33.

Big Ten basketball is of the best in the U. S., the most effective as a crowd attraction. If Minnesota had won last week, its team would have been the only one in the Big Ten not defeated more than once this season, and likely to win Minnesota's first. Conference basketball championship in 18 years as compensation for the unexpected failure of its football team to go through the year undefeated. For Purdue, Big Ten Champions for the past three years, the victory meant an approximate quadruple tie with Illinois, Minnesota and Michigan, at the top of the Conference standing, a good chance to equal a classic Conference record by winning its fourth basketball championship in a row. The deadlock, in the tightest Big Ten basketball season in years, did not last long. Two nights later, Illinois, which had played one more game and won more than the other leaders, held its advantage with a 48to-31 victory over Wisconsin. The same evening, while Minnesota was thrashing Iowa, 44-to-25, Michigan put Purdue apparently out of the running by a surprisingly one-sided beating, 31-to-16.

With almost a month of the season left, experts last week made Minnesota, coached by Dave MacMillan, favorites for the title with Illinois second choice and Michigan third, on the grounds that its late schedule is the hardest of the three. Backbone of the Minnesota team is a Martin Rolek, a small and slippery running guard, who plays with several yards of tape wound round one of his feet to take the place of a bone removed from it after an injury several years ago. If the Big Ten title goes to either Minnesota or Illinois, Purdue's Coach Lambert will at least have the consolation of knowing that both teams use variations of the fast-breaking, shifty game which Purdue has specialized in so effectively as to win nine titles in the past 18 years. Purdue is also likely to have the satisfaction of possessing the Big Ten's leading scorer, Forward Jewell Young, who last fortnight equaled a Conference record by making 29 points in a single game, against Illinois. Bigger than most of the other league-leading teams, Michigan has this year capitalized an airtight defense, headed by its 6 ft. 9 in. captain, Johnny Gee, which last week held Young's total for the game to five points.

Last team to win four Big Ten basketball championships in a row was Chicago, from 1907 through 1910. Currently, Chicago is setting a record of another sort-- 24 defeats in a row. Shuffling about near the bottom of the standing are Wisconsin, Iowa and Northwestern, which lack speedy offensives. Indiana, which usually wins the title in the years when Purdue does not, last week headed the lower half of the standing with five victories and five defeats, a notch behind Ohio State.

Between three and four million people in the U. S. play basketball. About 15,000,000 will have seen some 10,000 college basketball games when the 1937 season, basketball's biggest, ends next month. Because basketball games cannot individually draw as big crowds as football, there are fewer intersectional games, more localized rivalries. By last week, the 1937 season was far enough advanced for experts to have some notion of how sectional standings would look when it was over.

East. Though basketball was invented in 1891 by Physical Instructor James A. Naismith at the Springfield, Mass. Y. M. C. A. College and though Cornell had one of the first teams, with 25 men on a side, only lately has basketball in the East begun to equal the game's importance elsewhere in the U. S. In 1934 a onetime sportswriter named Ned Irish began promoting games in New York's Madison Square Garden. Since then, Garden crowds have almost equaled basketball's record-- held by Peiping, China, where the games in a 1931 national tournament drew an average of 23,000 spectators each. Less compactly organized than basketball in the Midwest, eastern basketball's closest equivalent to the Big Ten is the Eastern Conference. Last week, while the Conference leader, Pittsburgh, was being beaten 29-to-18 by Notre Dame in an outside game, Temple kept second place by nosing out Penn State 28-to-26. In the Eastern Intercollegiate League, mostly made up of "Ivy" colleges, pacemaker thus far is Pennsylvania which, undefeated by a league member, last week lost a traditional game to Syracuse, 39-to-35.

Most sensational team in the East last year was the one that represented Long Island University, started eleven years ago in a disused factory, which ran up a string of 43 victories in a row. Last week, Long Island got ready for the crucial game of New York's metropolitan season, against Manhattan this week, by nicking St. Thomas, 33-to-25. Other major games of last week: Navy 42, Army 40, at Annapolis; Harvard 37, Columbia 30, at Cambridge; Fordham 31, N. Y. U. 19, in New York.

The South, for basketball purposes, is divided into two conferences: Southern, which includes colleges in most of the Atlantic Coast States, and Southeastern, which includes colleges in the deep South and the Mississippi Valley. In each the championship is decided, not by the round-robin of scheduled games, but in a post-season tournament among the Conference leaders. Last week Washington & Lee beat North Carolina 29-to-19, a game that was important since both are sure to be in the Southern Conference tournament at Durham, N. C. March 5-7. Southeastern Conference's major game of the week was Tennessee's 36-to-23 victory over Sewanee. Last of the season for Tennessee, which has lost only to Kentucky, it established Coach Blair Gullion's team as favorite in the Southeastern tournament at Knoxville, Tenn. this week.

West. A relic of the days when basketball rules as well as basketball rivalries were purely local are conventions of play like the Pacific Coast Conference system whereby each team plays its rivals four times, twice on each one's court. Last week Stanford, apparently the best team in, its Conference and one of the best in the country, beat California at Berkeley, 36-to-32, in a game featured by the fact that its 6 ft. 3 in. forward, Hank Luisetti, whom Coach John Bunn calls the greatest player in the history of the game, was held to 15 points. In nine Conference games, of which Stanford has lost only one, to the University of Southern California, and in a preConference transcontinental tour, on which Stanford won seven games in a row, broke Long Island University's winning streak and scored 369 points to its opponents' 210--Luisetti brought his total points for the past two and a half years to 1,072. He needs only seven more in three more games to break the Conference season record of 186. The Pacific Coast Conference is divided into a Northern and Southern section. If Stanford holds its lead in one more game against California, two more against U. S. C., which has lost only two Conference games this year, its opponent from the Northern division in a two-out-of-three-game series for the Conference championship is likely to be either Oregon or Washington State, which last week was tied for the Conference lead in spite of being defeated by Washington, 37-to-34, at Seattle.

In the Rocky Mountain Conference, also divided into two sections, last week's biggest games were Colorado, Eastern division leader all season, v. Colorado College. By winning twice, 39-to-31, 35-to-32, Colorado got a chance to clinch the division title against Denver this week. Western division winner is sure to be either Utah or Utah State which also play each other this week, in Salt Lake City.

Midwest. Besides the Big Ten, the Midwest has a major basketball league in the Big Six--Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State, Missouri, Nebraska, Oklahoma-- with Notre Dame, whose victory over Pittsburgh was its eighth in a row, as a powerful independent. Last week, Kansas, which has won the Conference title five years out of eight and only once finished worse than second, strengthened its position as Conference leader with a smashing victory over Oklahoma, 39-to-19.

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