5.
Howard Hobson caught a break in the late fall of 1935. Bobby Anet, on a scholarship as a quarterback, showed up in Hobson’s office after playing for John Warren in his freshman football season. He told Hobson that varsity football coach Prink Callison was going to refuse to allow him to keep his scholarship if he insisted on going out for baseball in the spring.1 Anet asked Hobson if he could receive a basketball scholarship instead and play basketball and baseball. The Webfoots’ basketball and baseball coach said that would be okay with him. As it turned out, Anet gave up baseball, too, after his freshman year, but the moves were fortuitous for the Webfoots’ basketball program.
As Anet, Wally Johansen, Slim Wintermute, and Laddie Gale were on the verge of becoming eligible for varsity play as sophomores, the Spanish Civil War between those loyal to the Republican government and the Nationalist rebels of Generalissimo Francisco Franco broke out in July 1936. One fear was that with Germany and Italy supporting Franco, and with the Soviet Union backing the loyalists, it could be kindling for additional conflicts in an unstable Europe.
Meanwhile in the U.S., Franklin Roosevelt easily won reelection for a second term on November 3, with Republican Alf Landon, the Kansas governor, carrying only Vermont and Maine and winning only 8 of the 531 electoral votes. It was an endorsement for Roosevelt’s leadership in combating the Great Depression, even if many believed he had gone too far with radical New Deal programs and government intervention. Yet also entering into it was the perception that he was better equipped and qualified to deal with the deepening crises in Europe and around the world. Roosevelt repeatedly declared that his goal was to keep America from being entangled, and that he wouldn’t allow it to happen.
John Dick played for the freshman basketball team and watched as several sophomores helped the 1936–37 Webfoots finish in a three-way tie for first in the Northern Division at 11-5. Laddie Gale showed flashes of stardom early, but he suffered a broken hand and missed most of the season. He scored only 45 points as a sophomore, eventually preventing him from dominating the career scoring lists at the U of O for a long time. Noting the Webfoots’ scrappy play, mostly without Gale, Oregonian sports editor L. H. Gregory—who had called the Astoria boys the “Flying Finns”—nicknamed the sophomore-laden team “alley-cats.” The Webfoots fell to eventual winner Washington State at the outset of a three-team playoff for the Northern Division title. That probably was just as well. In 1937, the Webfoots would have been overmatched in the ensuing PCC championship series against the Stanford Indians and their charismatic, trail-blazing superstar.
* * *
Because league-wide train travel up and down the coast would have been expensive and excessively time-consuming, the PCC had a two-division structure. In that 1936–37 season, when the core players on Oregon’s eventual championship team were sophomores, the dominant team in the Southern Division and the league was Stanford, led by junior forward Angelo “Hank” Luisetti, from San Francisco’s Russian Hill neighborhood. Defying convention and confounding coaches stubbornly wed to the “fundamentals” of careful ball control and the two-handed set shot, most often taken with feet planted together and from a stationary position, Luisetti rang up points with running one-handers. He would end up an All-American in all three of his collegiate seasons, and it was more than gimmickry. Other stars of the mid- to late 1930s, including Gale, utilized the one-hander, too, and the evolution was inevitable, but Luisetti was its most visible pioneer. Still, many coaches groused that it would diminish the game if it were allowed to catch on.
Before the Indians turned their attention to their Southern Division rivals that season, Luisetti took New York by storm with a Madison Square Garden appearance on a national barnstorming tour. On December 30, 1936, a crowd of 17,623 watched as the Indians snapped Long Island University’s—and Coach Clair Bee’s—win streak at 43 games. Luisetti had 15 points in Stanford’s 45-31 victory, and in addition to his flashy shooting, what impressed the New York folks was his extraordinary passing ability, especially for a forward who sometimes also played center. LIU had gone 26-0 the previous season, and the loss to Stanford was the Blackbirds’ first since they’d fallen to Duquesne 30-25 on February 15, 1935, in the Garden.
The Indians were the first team from west of the Mississippi to play in one of promoter Ned Irish’s doubleheaders at the nation’s best-known arena. The “new” Garden, the building’s third incarnation, and the first to not be located at Madison Square itself, opened in 1925 on Manhattan’s Eighth Avenue, between 49th and 50th Streets. Two National Hockey League teams, the Rangers and Americans, played there, and big-time boxing matches and the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus were the other major attractions. Basketball at first was an afterthought. The professional New York Knickerbockers, founded by Irish as a charter member of the Basketball Association of America, wouldn’t begin play in the Garden until 1946. Until then, the college game was the focus, largely because of Irish’s doubleheaders in Madison Square Garden.
Before he hooked on with Madison Square Garden, Irish wrote for the New York World-Telegram. He also became a part-time public relations man for the New York Giants and the National Football League. The degree of his innovation in putting basketball in the Garden often has been overstated, but he certainly was its most influential promoter.
At the request of New York Mayor Jimmy Walker in January 1931, the early days of the Depression, Irish was among the New York sportswriters who helped put on a benefit tripleheader involving New York teams in the Garden. It drew over 15,000, and the proceeds when to unemployment relief funds. If someone didn’t start thinking of the potential to mine the New York college game for profit after that, it would have been a shock. Another benefit card the next year did well, too. Until then, the New York college game mainly was a private act, played in tiny and often overflowing gymnasiums. Irish went along with the oft-told story of how he came up with the inspired idea of putting college games in the Garden when he had to sneak into an overflowing gym through a window to cover a City College of New York–Manhattan game, ripping his trousers in the process. That tale rarely includes mentions of the previous relief fund benefits in the Garden.
In 1934, while still working for the World-Telegram, Irish made his move, consulting with Garden president John Kilpatrick to book six nights during the 1934–35 season in the famous building. Irish knew the matchups of city teams had outgrown the small local college venues, but that they likely wouldn’t steadily pack the much larger Garden, either. So his goal—and this is probably where he was most visionary, influential, and even daring—was to bring in opponents from outside the area to face the New York teams.
In recruiting teams for his doubleheaders, Irish also could emphasize that the playing conditions would be much better than for those at the previous basketball dates in the Garden. Because the earlier games were benefits, the complaints were muted, but those conditions were horrible and produced games considered low-scoring even in the chess match that often was the Eastern game of the time. In the original 1931 benefit tripleheader, for example, the highest point total among the three losing teams was 18. (Yes . . . 18.) The New York Times’ advance story for Irish’s first doubleheader noted that those earlier basketball events in the Garden were played on a makeshift, sagging canvas surface stretched over the stone floor, and that in time for Irish’s doubleheaders, the Garden had acquired a real board floor and innovative glass backboards, designed not to block the view of the fans watching from higher levels behind the baskets.
In that inaugural doubleheader on December 29, 1934, New York University beat Notre Dame 25-18 and Westminster College of Pennsylvania beat St. John’s 37-34. The attendance was 16,138, a college record crowd. So Irish, previously hopeful but knowing nothing during the Depression was a sure thing, exhaled. Called on the carpet by World-Telegram sports editor Joe Williams for spending so much time promoting his upcoming venture, Irish had rolled the dice, quitting his newspaper job altogether, and he also was on the hook for $4,000 rent each night at the Garden. That turned out to be a bargain.
A week later, on January 5, 1935, NYU knocked off the Adolph Rupp–coached Kentucky Wildcats 23-22 in the second doubleheader, and the drama included a controversial foul call on Kentucky at the end. The announced crowd was even better, at 16,500. On the day of the game, too, Rupp mused about an outlandish idea: why not hold a national championship tournament? “At the end of each season, four or five teams throughout the country lay claim to the mythical national title,” Rupp said. “If the leading teams of each section would agree to play a round robin tournament in some centrally located city, like Chicago, a sort of Rose Bowl champion in basketball would be crowned each year.” He went on to say such a tournament would lead to heightened interest in college basketball and perhaps even encourage more uniform rules interpretation across the country. The round-robin aspect of the tournament was unrealistic, unless the field was limited to no more than four teams. Yet it was one of the first times a credible college coach publicly supported the concept of a tournament to determine a national champion.
Four years later, his comments would be rendered ironic.
Irish plowed on with a series of doubleheaders each season. Emboldened, he sought to top himself, and bringing in Stanford to play LIU in late 1936, in Irish’s third season as a Garden promoter, was part of his high ambition. Because a coast-to-coast train trip for one game was impractical, the Indians—with Irish’s help—turned it into one long road trip with multiple games, and that model soon would come into play for the Oregon Webfoots, too.
After beating LIU, the Indians went 10-2 in the PCC’s Southern Division in that 1936–37 season and easily handled Washington State in the championship series. The Webfoots, with Anet, Johansen, Gale, and Wintermute gaining experience as sophomores, took solace that they were making progress, and that Hank Luisetti had only one more season of eligibility.
* * *
The “peace” between Japan and China following their 1894–95 war was tenuous, with “incidents” over the years and periodic fighting since 1931. All pretense of peace was abandoned in July 1937, and the Second Sino-Japanese War started. American newspapers ran news, giving hints of the war’s ferocity and the Japanese invaders’ barbaric conduct, but for the most part it was considered worthy of only minor concern. It was their war.
* * *
Looking ahead to 1937–38, his fourth season in the Garden, Irish was determined to take advantage of Luisetti’s senior year, too. He sold Stanford officials on making another trip to New York and scheduled the Indians for not one, but two, games in the Garden. In the span of three nights in December 1937, the Indians beat CCNY and LIU (again) and looked to be the undisputed best team in America. They even had more balance: Luisetti wasn’t the Indians’ leading scorer in the 49-35 romp over LIU. That honor went to center Art Stoefen, who hit for 20. The much-hyped Indians-Blackbirds rematch drew a Garden basketball record crowd of 18,148, and scribes were offended that “speculators” reselling tickets outside were getting up to 250 percent of the real price of the ticket.
As part of the barnstorming arrangements, the Indians’ next stop was in Philadelphia, and there the Indians lost 35-31 to Temple, which slowed the game to a crawl. The mild upset proved that Stanford and Luisetti weren’t invincible. On the way home, though, Luisetti drew major headlines across the country when he scored an astounding 50 points in a win over Duquesne.
Back in Palo Alto, the Indians stormed through the PCC’s Southern Division, going 10-2 to reach the league championship series again.
This time, their opponent was Oregon.
The Webfoots went 14-6 in the North, beating out Washington by one game. Laddie Gale, also gaining renown for his flashiness, led the division in scoring as a junior. He averaged 12.4 points in all games, 12.5 in conference games only. His ability to palm balls in both hands at once was featured one day in a 1937 “Ripley’s Believe it or Not,” perhaps a day after the world’s largest rutabaga. He also could do something quite rare—not only shoot effectively with one hand, but with either hand.
Slim Wintermute was making eye-popping progress, going from skinny and raw and easily pushed around in his first varsity season and part of his second, to talented big man, still full of potential, by the time his junior season was winding down. “I liked Wintermute from the start,” Hobson said in a 1939 Oregon Journal story that seemed to have indulged in a style of the era and “punched up” his words a bit. “In his way,” Hobson added, “he was willing, and for a big follow he wasn’t awkward. But he was about as aggressive as a fire hydrant and his self-confidence was as low as a bank balance after the 10th of the month. But he was only 17 and he had grown up in a year. He wasn’t even accustomed to his size. He began to acquire the winning spirit in his second varsity year. When I finally managed to convince him that he was unbeatable, he became unbeatable. He had everything else. For all his size, there’s a boy who made a champion of himself the hard way.” Hobson brought up the elimination of the jump ball after every basket for that season and said, “A lot of coaches began to neglect the big fellows. The smaller fellows who mature earlier are easier to coach. But the good big man is still better than the good little man in this game and the coach who has the patience to work with him until he ‘arrives’ will profit.”
Averaging eight points in conference games, a surprisingly mobile Wintermute finished third in Northern Division scoring in 1937–38, behind Laddie Gale and Washington State’s Al Hooper, and just ahead of Montana’s Bill Lazetich and Idaho’s Steve Belko. At the defensive end, Wintermute had become a major force without relying only on his height and legal goaltending to make his mark. “He was in his day the best center in the country,” Hobson said years later. “I’ve always said that he was the best defensive center I’ve ever coached. In fact, he’s the best college defensive center I’ve ever seen.”
As that 1937–38 season wound down, L. H. Gregory, in almost throwaway, off-handed references in the Oregonian, coined what would become the team’s famous nickname. He decided he had a better idea than the “alley-cats” he had made popular the season before. In his “Gregory’s Sports Gossip” column on March 3, 1938, he noted that Oregon still was at the top of the division standings and added: “ . . . and there the tall-fir Webfoots should certainly stay.” On March 5, in a story advancing that night’s game against the Oregon State Beavers, he wrote: “The only way Oregon’s tall-fir basketeers can fumble that basketball title now . . . is to become falling pines at Corvallis tonight, and they’re so far and away the league’s best team that this just isn’t a reasonable thought.” Over the next year, there were a handful of similar references in news stories, almost always without capital letters and usually with the hyphen, and ultimately some “TALL FIRS” mentions in headlines. The truth is, though, they became the “Tall Firs” more in retrospect than they were during their Oregon careers.
As a junior that season, scrappy guard and team captain Bobby Anet cemented his image as the undisputed leader. Coaches couldn’t communicate with the players on the floor and the captain had to call the time-outs. But even more striking was his energy and his pushing of the offensive pace, especially in the first season minus the jump ball after every hoop.
“Anet was an indifferent shot and his floor game wasn’t always the last word in perfection, but his faith in himself and his team was unshakable,” Hobson said. “With him there was never any question whether Oregon could outplay its opponent; it was simply a question of how much. He inflamed every other player. He was our high priest of Oregon invincibility.”
John Dick called Anet “the greatest dribbler I have ever seen. Bobby was a real smart kid, but also a real tough kid. He had short legs, but long arms, and he didn’t have to bend over to dribble, and he could dribble as fast as he could run. And he dribbled so low that I never saw anybody steal the ball from him. He was not a big scorer himself, but when you needed it, he was what you called a money player. He’d find a way to get the ball in the hole.”
With Anet as the leader, the Webfoots were at least competitive against Stanford and Luisetti in the 1938 PCC championship series in the Bay area. In Game 1, Luisetti poured through 20 points in a 52-39 victory in the San Francisco Civic Auditorium.
About when the game ended, on the morning of March 12 in Europe, German Army troops marched into Austria, sealing the Anschluss—the annexation of Adolf Hitler’s native land into the Third Reich.
Luisetti had 26 points the next night in Stanford’s 59-51 series-clinching victory in the much smaller Stanford Gymnasium, but the overflow crowd of around 1,800 gave him a standing ovation when he was replaced late in the game. He was destined to be an All-American for the third season in a row, and the league title also was the Indians’ third in succession.
After that season-ending game for both teams, Anet saw to it that the visitors’ dressing room door remained closed and conducted a team meeting. Hobson, recognizing it was a frank talk among the boys, waited outside. Trainer Bob “Two Gun” Officer, who was allowed to remain, later filled him in on what was said. Anet emphasized to his teammates that the next season, in effect, had started that minute. While the national tournament still was an idea to come, Anet announced to his teammates: “Next year, we’re going to win everything.”
The Webfoots grudgingly admitted to themselves that they had lost to a better team. “After getting past us, had there been a national championship contested in 1938, I have no doubt that Stanford would have won going away,” Dick said.
Dick might have been right. He probably was right. But Stanford’s December loss to Temple always would come into play for those trying to determine a mythical national champion.
Gale and Johansen soon were named to the PCC’s first-team all-star team after the season, and Wintermute was on the second-team, joined by, among others, Idaho’s Steve Belko.
* * *
Meanwhile in New York, the first national invitation tournament was played on March 9, 14, and 16, 1938, so it sandwiched the PCC title series. It definitely was an outgrowth of the regular-season doubleheaders and involved the type of conflict of interest for writers that wouldn’t have been tolerated later. Although Ned Irish’s fingerprints were on the tournament, too, the Metropolitan Basketball Writers Association, made up of New York scribes, founded, sponsored, and promoted it—and promoted it to the point where they sometimes came off as carnival barkers imploring passersby to enter the tent. The writers’ group was founded in 1934, and Irving T. Marsh and Everett B. Morris, both from the Herald Tribune, were its ringleaders. Morris also was the paper’s boating writer.
The plan was to follow Irish’s doubleheader formula in putting together tournament fields, mixing New York–area teams with intriguing squads from other parts of the country. One of the goals was to confirm New York’s primacy in the college basketball world, and the tournament did that, but there was some confusion because nobody seemed to know what to call it. Most often, it was “the national invitation tournament,” with the informality of lowercase letters, but it also was labeled the Metropolitan Basketball Writers’ tournament, the New York writers’ invitation tournament, and several other combinations. Capital letters and/or the NIT acronym didn’t come into play right away.
The participants in that six-team 1938 inaugural invitation tournament were Colorado, Oklahoma A&M,2 and Bradley Tech,3 joining eastern entrants Temple, New York University, and LIU. As those with the farthest to travel, Colorado and Oklahoma A&M had byes, and the writers probably were second-guessing the bracketing that matched two New York teams, NYU and LIU, in the March 9 quarterfinals, which guaranteed the early elimination of one local draw. In a shocker, NYU knocked off Clair Bee’s Blackbirds 39-37. The Blackbirds finished the season with a 23-5 record, disappointing given the expectations and a soft schedule, with the other losses coming to Marshall, Minnesota, Stanford, and La Salle. In the other quarterfinal, Temple beat Bradley Tech 43-40.
Colorado had won the Rocky Mountain region’s Big 7 league, but the Buffaloes were sought because they had the biggest star in the tournament—an event its home-state Denver Post, by the way, called “the first national Invitation Intercollegiate tournament.” That star was a scholarly fellow from Wellington, Colorado. Byron “Whizzer” White was an All-American halfback for the Buffaloes and a solid starter for Colorado in basketball. The New York scribes couldn’t get enough of him, just as they had enjoyed building up Luisetti when he came through with Stanford during the regular season. The Colorado hero was the toast of Manhattan from the time he arrived with the Buffaloes’ traveling party. He had eight points in the March 14 semifinals as the Buffaloes edged NYU 48-47 on Don Hendricks’s late basket. In the other semifinal, the Oklahoma Aggies, coached by 33-year-old Henry “Hank” Iba, lost a 56-55 heartbreaker to Temple. The New York scribes puffed out their chests as they typed, knowing the nip-and-tuck semifinals had been exciting, and hoped for a reprise in the March 16 championship game.
Instead, they and the fans got a stinker. Temple routed Colorado 60-36 to win the tournament title, and Whizzer White bowed out of his college basketball career with a 10-point night. Minutes after the championship game, he again was being asked which he would choose—the outlandish $15,000 contract from franchise owner Art Rooney to play for the Pittsburgh Steelers or a Rhodes scholarship to study in Oxford. “There are about 500 people trying to make up my mind,” he said in the Madison Square Garden dressing room. One way to tell that White already was an extraordinary celebrity was that at least one scribe actually talked to him after the game instead of following the usual procedure of typing eyewitness accounts of the game and not seeking comment from anyone involved.
Temple, the tournament champions, finished the 1937–38 season with a 23-2 record. Many in the east advanced the Philadelphia squad as the nation’s best, and it wasn’t unreasonable. Their head-to-head victory over Stanford, the west’s top team, bolstered the claim. There were scattered references to the Owls as “national champions,” but for the most part, the national attitude—at least among those who noticed in other areas of the country—seemed to be that the Owls had won a new tournament for New York teams and invited guests, no more suited to select the best team in the land than, say, a holiday tournament. It was a tournament for select (and selected) teams, but not a national championship, and Stanford wasn’t there. After beating the Webfoots for the 1937–38 PCC title, the Indians didn’t go anywhere, except perhaps to their homes during spring break. They already had made two cross-country trips to New York and beyond in the previous sixteen months. That was enough.
Considered an experimental venture that first year, the invitation tournament was pronounced a success. The catch, though, was that organizers couldn’t count on having a Whizzer White–type drawing card every year from among the teams brought in from outside the New York area or the East Coast.
Stanford coach John Bunn was one of many in his profession who began to wonder if there might be a way to both combat the national invitation tournament and determine a national champion, perhaps as soon as the upcoming 1938–39 season.
* * *
The week after the 1938 PCC championship series, Webfoots reserve guard Matt Pavalunas, then a sophomore, returned home to tiny Raymond, Washington, during spring break and spoke at a local function attended by a reporter from his hometown newspaper, the Willapa Harbor Herald. “In the last game, I got to check Luisetti for about the last minute of the game, and had to hold onto his pants to keep him from scoring,” he said. “Luisetti is a very modest man off the floor, but he is quite a showman while playing. At one time, during a hushed period, a little boy yelled, ‘Hi, Hank,’ and Luisetti turned and waved to him.” Pavalunas promised his hometown listeners that in 1938–39, the Webfoots would be “even better than this year. Oregon loses but one regular and one reserve and we have two freshman players who will go a long way toward replacing them.”
To his listeners, or those who read the newspaper account, “even better” meant winning the PCC. Soon, though, there was another goal to shoot for—a national title.