Star Tars

Bugaboo of college basketball teams this year is not Purdue, Indiana or Wisconsin, but a team of sailors from the Great Lakes Naval Training Station. Last week, before 5,000 screaming trainees who packed the Station's brand-new drill hall, they swamped Northwestern, 47-to-38, for their 14th victory in 16 starts.

Superman athletic teams are nothing new at Great Lakes. During World War I the Station boasted not only a crack basketball team (17 victories in 21 starts), but the No. 1 football team in the U.S. Its roster included four players who have since become famed football coaches: George Halas (Chicago Bears), Jimmy Conzelman (Chicago Cardinals), Charlie Bachman (Michigan State) and Paddy Driscoll (backfield coach for Halas' Bears). Although they played first-rate teams, including one of Knute Rockne's strongest Notre Dame elevens, Great Lakes' fabulous gobs sailed undefeated through the 1918 season, wound up in the Rose Bowl.

Great Lakes is now continuing where it left off a generation ago. Its commanding officers still believe that a star-spangled barnstorming team is a sure-fire way to attract recruits. It also provides entertainment for trainees, money for the local Navy Relief Fund.

To recruit a basketball team, the Station called back into service Lieut. James Russell Cook, one of its 1918 alumni. Unlike Halas, Conzelman, Bachman and Driscoll, Cook--who was a three-letter man at De Pauw University--had chosen basketball as a professional career. For ten years (1920-30) he produced razzle-dazzle quintets at Indiana's Central Normal College; nursed one, composed of five brothers named Reeves, along to the semi-finals of the 1929 National A.A.U. basketball tournament.

With Cook as coach and a promise of petty officer ratings for players, Great Lakes at once attracted the cream of draft-age college basketball stars. It got University of Detroit's Bob Caliban, picked for an All-America basketball team two years ago; Indiana's Ernie Andres, who set a Big Ten record in 1938 when he scored 31 points in one game; Ohio U's Frank Baumholtz, voted the most valuable player in Manhattan's Madison Square Garden Invitation Tournament last year; Stanford's Forrest Anderson, All-Pacific Coast forward; Missouri's John Lobsiger, Big Six biggie; Dartmouth's Bob White, star of 1940's Ivy League champions; and Indiana's Bill Menke, spark plug of the team that won the National Collegiate title two years ago.

Even with limited time for practice (seldom more than an hour a day), these postgraduate sharpshooters have brought the Navy glory galore. Besides Northwestern, they have swamped Notre Dame, Purdue, Indiana, Butler--all traditionally tough under a basket. Among the 14 teams they have still to play are: Minnesota, Nebraska, Drake, Wisconsin, Iowa State. If they can maintain their pace for the second half of the season, Great Lakes' good-will sailors may well be invited to Madison Square Garden's Invitation Tournament, the Rose Bowl of basketball.

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