How could the selection committee leave out Kansas State?
Anybody know which Loyola that is? Chicago? Baltimore? New Orleans? Does it matter?
How could I be dead in the water already . . . in all 27 of my pools?
Could you believe that shot?
Think the boss noticed the three-hour lunch to the sports bar? Oh, he was there, too?
Where’re we watching the championship game?
Before the NCAA Basketball Tournament became a mega-dollar, mammoth affair captivating the nation, there had to be an inaugural event that started the tournament’s evolution . . . and the sport’s revolution.
It came in 1939.
The first championship team—the University of Oregon Webfoots, coached by Howard Hobson and ultimately called the “Tall Firs” because of their towering height along the front line—was part of my early sports fascination. I was raised in Eugene, and my father, Jerry Frei, was on Oregon football coaching staff from 1955 through 1971, serving as an assistant under the legendary Len Casanova for 12 seasons and then as head coach for 5 before moving on to a long coaching, scouting, and administrative career in the National Football League. Early in his stay at Oregon, he helped coach the freshman basketball team, too . . . because that’s what young coaches did then. The football coaching offices were in a wing attached to McArthur Court, the Ducks’ home arena. I visited my father on the job often enough to be able to now conjure memories of smoke wafting through the darkened back room and the 16-millimeter projector loudly whirring as “Cas,” my father, and the other assistants, including John McKay; and then my father and his staff, including John Robinson, George Seifert, and Bruce Snyder, watched the black-and-white game films. After the switch from the on-campus Hayward Field to the new off-campus Autzen Stadium for football games in 1967, the Ducks still practiced on fields near what we all called “Mac Court.” The dank football practice locker rooms, with rickety plumbing that made the players wonder if the pipes were going to explode any minute as they showered, were in the arena basement.
My older brother, David,1 and I spent many hours in the ivy-draped arena, attending Oregon basketball games and the on-campus Casanova sports summer camps for boys aged 9 to 14, hanging around, or even playing in recreational games with coaches and their families. (We knew where the light closet was . . . and how to get in it.) For the Oregon basketball games, our tickets were for the first row of the overhanging balcony’s section 2-R, where I felt as if I could have spit down on John Wooden’s dynastic UCLA Bruins if I had chosen to do so. I admit I was tempted.
The display cases on Mac Court’s floor level were history courses, touching on all Oregon sports programs, including football and legendary coach Bill Bowerman’s track and field teams. Hobson and the Tall Firs had honored spots, and we were indoctrinated in the lore. To some, the men on that 1938–39 Webfoots team were an answer to a trivia question; to many of us, they were heroic, bordering on the mythic. I could name Hobson’s five starters: guards Bobby Anet and Wally Johansen, forwards Laddie Gale and John Dick, and center Slim Wintermute. I also knew that one of the Webfoots, a former flyer in World War II, was a high-profile career Navy officer who periodically visited his alma mater, was a booster in the good sense of the world, met my father, and probably was one of the few who knew the part of the Oregon football coach’s life that never was mentioned in his press guide biography, that Jerry Frei had been a decorated P-38 fighter pilot in the Pacific Theater.
When I attended the 1965 NCAA championship game in Portland with my father, many of the 1939 Webfoots, then in their late 40s, were introduced and drew applause, and a two-page feature on the first champions in the official program included a Tall Firs team picture. Princeton’s Bill Bradley scored 58 points in the third-place game against Wichita State before left-handed senior guard Gail Goodrich had 42 points to lead UCLA past Cazzie Russell and Michigan for the Bruins’ second straight national title. I realized only later that the Bruins’ guard was Gail Goodrich Junior, and that Gail Goodrich Senior in 1938–39 was the University of Southern California’s star guard, competing with the Webfoots in the Pacific Coast Conference.
As I immersed myself in sports and school, I also was a voluminous reader. In elementary school, one of my favorites was the Chip Hilton Sports Series, from the same publisher—Grosset and Dunlap—as the famous Hardy Boys detective stories. My brother started the family collection, and I added to it as new books came out. On the back of the Chip Hilton dust jackets, I was told that the author, Clair Bee, coached “many winning basketball teams at Long Island University” and that he “knows what makes boys tick!” When the books began being published with picture covers rather than dust jackets, the Clair Bee mini-bio on the back eliminated any mention of LIU. Many years later, I had a better understanding of why that was.
The Oregon Ducks, in all sports, were my “real” teams.
Chip Hilton’s teams—the Valley Falls High School Big Reds and the State University Statesmen—were my fantasy teams . . . before the term meant something else. Chip was an All-American in three sports, a gentleman and scholar working his way through college while refusing to accept a scholarship tied to his sports prowess. For 23 books and re-readings, I was Chip’s teammate.
At some point, I became aware that Bee had coached LIU to the championship of the 1939 national invitation tournament in New York, and that some Eastern partisans considered that accomplishment to be as significant, and perhaps even more so, than the Webfoots’ NCAA championship. Heck, although they were coached by Chip Hilton’s creator, which for that reason alone made them worthy of salute, I considered ridiculous the thought that any team could be better than the Tall Firs. (And in my cynical adulthood, my conclusion is . . . well, you’ll see.)
I left Oregon when I was a junior at South Eugene High School. But in the mid-1980s, after living in Colorado for 13 years and beginning my professional career with an 8-year stint at The Denver Post, I became a sports columnist for the Oregonian in Portland. I was reintroduced to Tall Firs Coach Howard Hobson, beloved and almost always called “Hobby,” and was fortunate to get to know him better in his final years.
I wrote a whimsical column about Chip Hilton and Bee’s series in The Denver Post in the early 1980s, and a similar one later in the Oregonian. Both drew considerable “me, too!” reaction. I became known as one of the most enthusiastic Chip Hilton nuts out there, and many of my media brethren shook their heads when during a Portland Trail Blazers’ playoff series in 1992, I spent what seemed to be hours talking about Chip with Jack McCallum, who had written a landmark tribute to the books and Bee in Sports Illustrated in January 1980. I became friends through correspondence with Bee’s daughter, Cynthia Farley, and her husband, Randy, when they were teaching in Indonesia. When they teamed to update the Hilton stories as paperbacks for Broadman & Holman in the late 1990s and early 2000s, I wrote an afterword for them. The full afterword ran in the 13th book of the series, Fourth Down Showdown, and a snippet was included on the back-cover copy on many of the other new versions. In fact, if you search for my name and my book listings on Amazon.com, Fourth Down Showdown is among the books that show up.
I covered several NCAA Final Fours, including at Kansas City in 1988. The NCAA considers the number of tournaments and not year anniversaries, so in 1988, the Tall Firs were among those honored at events commemorating the 50th tournament, which culminated in the Larry Brown–coached Kansas Jayhawks knocking off league rival Oklahoma for the championship.2 At the gala, master of ceremonies Curt Gowdy said: “The first college championship was won by Oregon. There was no network radio, no TV, not much press. But these were the men and coaches who laid the foundation for what has become the Final Four.”
When the Webfoots won the first championship, the sport wasn’t yet a half-century old and still was evolving from James Naismith’s original peach-basket game of nine players per side, unveiled at the International YMCA Training School in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1891.3 In 1939, Dr. Naismith attended both the national invitation tournament and the NCAA tournament, being a good sport and proud parent, but also expressing skepticism about what his “basket ball” had become after a half-century of “progress.” That “progress,” of course, has continued, in part because of integration but also advancement in training methods, equipment (e.g., basketball shoes), and facilities. Judged with today’s standards, both the game and the players of that era were slower and far less athletic. But that type of judgment can be made for virtually every other sport, too—yes, including baseball—and as clichéd as it is, evaluations of teams and individuals have to be framed within the context of their eras. Plus, it wasn’t easy to shoot a basketball then. The ball still had laces, adding to the awkward feel and making it more difficult to dribble than in future years. The first ball without laces was manufactured in 1948.
Officiating wasn’t “good” or “bad” as much as it was a mystery, with different interpretations from game to game and, especially, region to region. Consider that this was the definition of a foul in Naismith’s original rules, published in 1892: “No shouldering, holding, pushing, tripping, or striking in any way the person of an opponent shall be allowed.”
Even on outside shots, usually launched with two hands, players often aimed for the backboard. Part of it was conventional wisdom and geometry, but on rare occasions, shooters were trying to keep the ball out of reach of a “goaltender.” The few men tall enough and athletic enough to jump and get a hand above the rim could swat away shots on their way down. Yes, goaltending was legal. Shooting percentages were barely mentioned and not considered much of an issue, but 30 percent could be a good night. Tossing up a shot and, if it didn’t go in, hoping to get it back off the carom for a closer-in shot was a legitimate strategy. The center jump after every basket had been eliminated before the 1937–38 season, changing the game’s tempo and giving an advantage to coaches, including Howard Hobson, who emphasized pushing the pace in a patterned fast break, trying to get down the floor quicker than the defenders, even after opposition baskets. And if the Webfoots didn’t get a fast-break bucket, their set plays also were run at a breakneck pace. Players who could do such things as palm the ball, maneuver, run rather than lope, and accurately shoot one-handed on the move were revolutionizing basketball. The Webfoots, with All-American and virtually ambidextrous one-handed-shot wizard Laddie Gale, were at the forefront.
That Oregon team was and still is in the NCAA tournament programs and historical listings, first among past champions. In 2013, when the Dana Altman–coached Ducks won two games in the NCAA tournament before falling to Louisville in the Sweet 16, broadcast crews several times pointed out that Oregon was the first NCAA champion, offering grainy, black-and-white photographic evidence. They even amusedly noted that Oregon’s official nickname then was Webfoots, not Ducks.
The tournament the Webfoots won in 1939 was new and considered a risky financial undertaking by the sponsoring National Association of Basketball Coaches. The NCAA, while lending its name to the proceedings, regarded it with wariness. The nation’s major press outlets—newspapers, magazines, wire services, and radio networks—weren’t sure how seriously to take it. About all they knew was that the event began as a response to, and a rival for, the six-team national invitation tournament in New York’s Madison Square Garden. Later, retroactive comparisons of the two tournaments often created the mistaken impression that the NIT was deeply entrenched when the “upstart” NCAA tournament was founded. Actually, the New York tournament, sponsored for its first two years by the Metropolitan Basketball Writers Association (by sportswriters!), began in 1938 . . . only one year earlier than the NCAA tournament. Yet primarily because of the successful regular-season doubleheaders staged in the Garden beginning in 1934, New York unquestionably had become the showcase venue for the college game. Many prominent national college coaches took advantage of that in the regular season, bringing their teams into Manhattan. They didn’t want New York to have an uncontested claim to primacy in the postseason, too. So they put together their own national tournament.
The undisputed powerhouse New York team of that period, and a powerful draw in the Garden in both the regular and post-season, was Clair Bee’s Long Island University Blackbirds.
In that 1938–39 season, the Webfoots and Blackbirds each won a national tournament.
They remain linked by history.
In 1939, both March tournaments—the NCAA’s first, the national invitation tournament’s second—were played as drumbeats in Europe became louder and war fears heightened. The players of that season were born either during or shortly after the Great War. They knew the toll, including about 117,000 American dead, was horrifying. They also knew that many Americans had come to believe that France and Great Britain, or profit-driven American bankers and industrialists, or all of the above, maneuvered the U.S. into unwise and costly intervention in what became known as World War I. That view especially came into vogue thanks to the advocacy of isolationists in the U.S. Senate, including Republicans Gerald Nye of North Dakota and William Borah of Idaho. The North Dakotan chaired the infamous Nye Committee, which in 1934 held hearings and, with self-fulfilling prophecy methodology, concluded that America indeed had been, essentially, suckered into the war. By early 1939, as on-campus forums and fraternity living room discussions of the ominous events in Europe and the issue of U.S. involvement continued to be part of the ongoing debates, many young Americans and their elders tried to ignore the events on the other side of the Atlantic and, secondarily, in the Second Sino-Japanese war, which had broken out in 1937. Many optimistically assumed we’d manage to stay out of the rest of the world’s squabbles this time. Some wanted to make sure of that, arguing for nonintervention as official, or even legislated, national policy, except in the case of an attack on the U.S. That sentiment, in formative stages as Hitler’s aims and evils became more obvious, would lead to the founding of such groups as the America First Committee and the League of American Writers’ Keep America Out of War Committee after Great Britain and France declared war on Germany following the invasion of Poland. The young men on these 1938–39 basketball rosters, and the young people in the bleachers and on their campuses, at least subconsciously wondered as the season progressed: Could we be drawn into war again? And could we have to fight it?
Basketball and sports could be diversions, but this was a month when world events became harder to ignore, even on campuses where goldfish swallowing was an escapist craze.
On more than one level, then, theirs was an eventful and even tumultuous March.
A March before the Madness.
1. David, who also has worked in college and pro sports, now is familiar to many as a fellow author and the longtime television analyst on the Westminster Kennel Club and National Dog Shows.
2. It can be confusing. As documented in Horns, Hogs, and Nixon Coming, the NCAA celebrated 1969 as the centennial season of college football, saluting the 1869 Rutgers-Princeton game as the first played. In basketball, the 75th anniversary of the first tournament is 2014. If you were married in 1962, the 50th anniversary came in 2012, right?
3. Now Springfield College.