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Howard Hobson was young enough—35 at the time of the 1938 National Association of Basketball Coaches (NABC) convention where the idea for a national tournament was hatched—for him to feel deferential, allowing the veterans of the business to take the lead in setting up what became his career-defining accomplishment. Also, he had been the Webfoots’ head coach only since 1935, after advancing through the ranks to land the job at his alma mater in his home state.
Hobson was raised in Portland, Oregon’s largest city, at the confluence of the Columbia and Willamette Rivers along the Washington-Oregon border, and at the north end of the fertile Willamette Valley. “I grew up with a basketball in one hand and a baseball in the other,” he wrote in his 1984 book, Shooting Ducks: A History of University of Oregon Basketball.
Characteristically for the humble Hobson, that book was an omnibus work about the Oregon program from its inception to the early ’80s and only scratched the surface of his own background and involvement, even with the championship team. Fortunately, he passed along more details about his upbringing and life to his sons, including David Hobson, and in a taped June 1982 interview conducted by Linda Brody for the oral history archives at the Oregon Historical Society in Portland.
His father, George Edwin Hobson, was a bookkeeper, the sort of human adding machine who could have a long column of figures dropped in front of him and, without taking pencil to paper, come up with a sum almost instantly. Howard’s mother was a much-feared figure, even under her own roof, as a Portland Public Schools truant officer. Money was tight, but Hobson later said that one of the most important dates in his life was December 12, 1915, when at age 12, he played in his first basketball game at an athletic club. His coach challenged him to stop the opposing team’s top scorer, and he did it clumsily. The collision left Hobson minus two teeth, which got him in trouble at home. On the spot, he told himself that if he were going to play the game, he would learn to play it with skill and the proper technique, rather than simply rely on his precocious athletic talent.
At Franklin High School in southeast Portland, Hobson played football, basketball, and baseball and was on the track team. When he fell asleep in class one day, the teacher joked, “Don’t bother him; he has a game tonight.” And he probably did. His reputation, justifiably, was as a serious, intelligent, and intense young man, but his mischievous sense of humor showed when he called the star of an opposing high school team on the telephone, identified himself as a sportswriter doing a story on an upcoming game, and told the opponent, “You better watch out for this Hobson guy; he’s a star.” The opponent didn’t catch on that it was Hobson.
As a Franklin senior in 1921, he was captain of Oregon’s state championship basketball team and president of both the student body and senior class. He headed to Eugene, 110 miles south at the head of the valley, thinking he would study law at the U of O and become an attorney. The exact timetable is unclear, but either right after high school or after his freshman year, Hobson took a year off from school to make and save money to go toward his college expenses. Regardless, the system at the time called for students to move to begin studying for a bachelor degree in law (LLB) after their sophomore years. For Hobson, that was after he earned the first of his three letters with the Webfoots’ basketball team in the 1923–24 season. The dean of the law school, mindful of the time demands involved, told Hobson he could play only one sport from then on if he was studying law. Hobson said he considered that ultimatum to be the same as asking him which arm he should cut off. He switched his major to economics and stayed with both basketball and baseball. Playing for Coach Bill Reinhart, young Hobson was captain of the Webfoots’ basketball squad his final two seasons, 1924–25 and 1925–26, and also a baseball star, majoring in economics while also taking enough education courses to qualify for teaching and coaching accreditation.
Reinhart also was an assistant football coach, and Hobson said he and his teammates essentially practiced on their own in the fall until football season was over and the coach joined them. With Hobson as the pseudo-coach, the boys tinkered with a new offensive approach and Reinhart embraced and refined it. “We spent many, many hours together figuring out a new system, and a new strategy for the games,” Hobson said. “Reinhart was a great teacher and a great fundamentalist and the system we finally decided on was more of Piggy Lambert’s than anybody else. We settled on the short-pass, fast-break offense.”
Ward “Piggy” Lambert was the head coach at Purdue at the time, and he would end up serving in that role from 1916–46, with one season off to serve in World War I. From 1929–33, one of his players was John Wooden.
By Hobson’s later college years, in the mid-1920s, he earned his spending money running and working in the commissary at his fraternity, Phi Delta Theta. “We sold candy and cigarettes,” he said. “We had punchboards [lottery-type cards] and various inducements for the brothers to help me along. I did very well in that venture. . . . I think I averaged about $80 a month on it, which was adequate.”
Eligibility and amateur rules were loose, so Hobson didn’t cause any problems when he played what amounted to semi-pro baseball for company-sponsored teams in the summer. The money, relatively speaking, was very good, and the players usually were considered nominal company employees as they played for the teams.
He was a big man on a small campus. When he arrived in Eugene, the U of O still was relatively young for a U.S. university, having opened in 1876, starting with one building, Deady Hall, and expanding. Oregon didn’t have an on-campus gym suited for games in Hobson’s playing days, after the program outgrew the Men’s Gym. Hobson and his Webfoot teammates played in the City Armory, increasingly inadequate each season. The students lobbied for a new arena and agreed to an additional student fee designated to pay for it. “McArthur Court was built by the efforts of the students—not the administration, not the alumni, not the townspeople,” Hobson declared proudly.
Construction on the new arena began on the southern edge of campus during the 1925–26 season, when Hobson was the senior team captain. Under Reinhart, the Webfoots went 10-0 in the Pacific Coast Conference’s Northern Division, but then lost to California 32-17 and 29-23 in the best-of-three league championship series. There was an asterisk, though: during the week after the Webfoots finished the regular season with a 25-15 victory over Oregon State, Reinhart jovially ordered Hobson, his captain, to take his fellow starters to dinner. With the coach apparently taking care of the bill, the boys had a good time, topping it all off with mountains of ice cream. But the Webfoots’ top scorer, junior Swede Westergren, ordered his favorite dish, Crab Louie, and by the next morning was terribly ill with ptomaine poisoning. He wasn’t able to make the trip to Berkeley. The Webfoots might have lost anyway, but without Westergren they were in over their heads. Regardless, the excitement that team generated on campus was important for the program, setting the stage for the move into a new arena the next season.
Later, the lore was that during construction, its detractors claimed it “looked like an overgrown Eskimo ice house,” giving rise to its nickname of “The Igloo.” Whether that was true or otherwise, “The Igloo” became an affectionate term, not a scornful one, in use until “Mac Court” supplanted it as the nickname. The building was officially named after Clifton “Pat” McArthur, the U of O’s first student body president and first athletic manager (when the term essentially meant athletic director), who also was a four-term Republican U.S. Congressman from 1915 to 1923. He died in late 1923, and he was honored in part because he had helped raise money to keep the university afloat during tough financial times in the early years of the 20th century.
“At that time it was probably the greatest basketball pavilion in the Pacific Coast Conference, if not the entire nation,” Hobson said of McArthur Court. Its seating capacity was 6,000, with 1,700 in bleachers and 4,300 in permanent sections. (Second- and third-level balconies wouldn’t be added for many years.) The university’s enrollment was 3,600, and Eugene’s population was about 18,000, so it was quite an accomplishment to fill The Igloo.
When the new arena opened, Hobson was in his first of two years of coaching and teaching at Kelso High School in southwest Washington. His young wife, Jennie, also taught there and the couple was happy. But then Hobson decided to seek his master’s degree in physical education at Columbia University in New York, and he and Jennie moved to Manhattan. They loved the life there, attending—at Hobson’s count—57 Broadway shows and keeping the Playbill magazines, enabling them to refer to them over the years.
On the side Hobson played for the Brooklyn Bushwicks semi-pro baseball team. Ex-major leaguers sometimes appeared in the Bushwicks lineups as drawing cards, and the team also played off-season exhibition games against teams of big leaguers. Hobson drew interest from major-league organizations, but Jennie Hobson made it clear to her husband that she wouldn’t be happy with him stepping away from the coaching and teaching career path to embark on the minor-league baseball life with only a long-shot chance of making the major leagues, where the financial rewards were minimal for all but the greatest players, anyway. Hobson also played basketball for the Montclair Athletic Club in the Eastern Athletic club league. The post-graduate life was enjoyable but expensive, and the Hobsons ran through their savings as Howard obtained his P.E. master’s degree. He and Jennie both accepted teaching positions at Cortland State Teachers College, 215 miles from New York City. But Wall Street’s October 1929 disasters came early in the school year and the picture changed dramatically. The next spring, they headed back to Oregon. “I thought with a master’s degree from Columbia University I could choose my spot, but the stock market crash had come on and things were very tight,” Hobson said.
With artful strategy in the interviewing, he caught on to teach and coach at Portland’s Benson Tech High School.
“What do you teach?” the principal inquired.
“What do you need?” Hobson asked.
“General science.”
“That’s my specialty,” said Hobson, the economics major.
He joked that he stayed a chapter ahead of his students in his two years at Benson, where the Hobson-coached basketball team dominated the Portland league. With that on his résumé, he stepped up to the college games, moving to Southern Oregon Normal School (SONS) in Ashland, near the California border. There, he was adaptive, too, coaching multiple sports. He accepted that his teams had to use a junior-high gym in basketball and a hilly gravel field for football. He said that there was only enough hot water for the first player into the shower at the “shack” they called a dressing room. Conferring with the editor of the Ashland Daily Tidings, Coach Hobson pleaded for coverage of his basketball team, but was told the newspaper didn’t have the staff or budget to do much. The editor told Hobson if he wrote the stories, the paper would run them, and Hobson jumped at the offer. He later labeled it “the best press I ever had” and didn’t once claim to have been misquoted. At first he taught only physical education but soon added economics. As if he didn’t have enough to do, he played semi-pro baseball in the summers. He was busy but called his time at Southern Oregon “a wonderful three years,” and he drew a lot of attention because his small-school basketball teams went 6-2 against the Reinhart-coached squads from Oregon. Reinhart had backed off the fast-break approach, running more of a pattern offense again, and Hobson couldn’t understand why.
Reinhart left in March 1935 to become the coach at George Washington University, and that turned out to be significant not only because it opened up the Oregon job for Hobson. At GW, Reinhart went back to the fast-break approach and one of his players, Arnold “Red” Auerbach, ended up coaching virtually the same system to his Boston Celtics.
Hobson got the news of Reinhart’s departure and the multiple-sport opening at Oregon for a basketball and baseball head coach when he was in Denver with his Southern Oregon team, competing in the national AAU tournament. A friend told Hobson he was recommending him and urged him to send a wire assuring Oregon decision makers he was interested. He did that immediately. Technically, the Associated Students of the University of Oregon (ASUO), the student body organization, did the hiring. Hobson dealt with Hugh Rosson, the graduate manager of the university, discussing salary and other issues, and his selection was approved and confirmed at the April 1, 1935, meeting of the ASUO’s executive and athletics councils. In making the announcement, Rosson said: “We feel that in Hobson, we have selected a young man who is thoroughly grounded in coaching work, is an inspirational leader, and one who will most capably handle both basketball and baseball assignments.”
Hobson said he was “tickled to death,” but noted that not only was he the head coach in two sports, he also had agreed to be an assistant coach in football and teach up to a half-load of classes. His salary was $3,000.1
He was the new coach of the Webfoots.
Oregon’s athletic nickname had nothing to do with a bird. A group of fishermen in Massachusetts who served the American cause during the Revolutionary War were called “Webfoots,” referring to their footwear, and some Oregonians claimed to be their descendants. So the original Webfoots nickname in U of O sports was intended to honor fishermen.2 Connecting it to Ducks in Eugene, though, was inevitable, and students gathered up various live ducks, all nicknamed “Puddles,” from the industrial, man-made Millrace waterway near campus and brought them to games. Headline writers also jumped on the shorter “Ducks,” and it came to be used as an alternative in stories and in informal conversations. In line with a 1932 student referendum, though, Webfoots remained the official nickname.
Hobson quickly disowned Reinhart’s tendency to court and accept out-of-state players, from as far away as New York, as the foundation of the Oregon roster. Perhaps because he was from Portland, and he was embarrassed that the Oregon State Beavers had more Oregonians on their roster and often seemed more popular within the state, Hobson sought to land more players from the state’s high schools. When he went beyond the borders, it usually was to southwest Washington. Eventually, after he had made over his roster, all five starters on the 1938–39 team were born in Oregon. Also, both starting guards plus two reserves from the usual 11-man traveling squad all were from the same historic fishing town.