6.
Two weeks after the first national invitation tournament, the nation’s coaches gathered for their convention at Chicago’s Morrison Hotel. Stanford’s John Bunn brought up the idea of a tournament involving teams from all areas of the country, with the selections made by men who knew what they were doing. Other coaches joined in the chorus.
In a sense, the tournament idea can be tied to the coaching tree of longtime Kansas coach Phog Allen. Allen was a proponent, too, and so were three of his former players-turned-coaches—Bunn, Adolph Rupp (at least judging from his 1935 comments proposing a national tournament), and Northwestern’s Dutch Lonborg. Also outspoken in support of the idea was Ohio State’s Harold Olsen. These weren’t coaches from obscure programs, in outpost parts of the country, whining about the potential to be overlooked by the New York tournament. These were coaches from prominent programs, wanting to prevent the post-season spotlight from shining only in Manhattan.
Bunn was certain his 1938 Stanford team would have won a genuinely open national tournament, whipping Temple in any rematch, plus any other teams the Indians found themselves matched up against. He was about to give up coaching to become Stanford’s dean of men before the next season, but he remained involved with and passionate about the game.
Because the tournament would stretch from coast to coast, the initial skepticism among many members was understandable. Howard Hobson later said of the membership reaction: “Interest was not great.” The majority of the 205 NCAA programs probably wouldn’t contend for either the national invitation or the NCAA tournament, so they weren’t going to be whipped into frenzies during the debate. The enthusiastic supporters of an NCAA tournament might not have had huge numbers; they had major influence, and others came around.
The NABC membership endorsed passing along the proposal for a tournament to the NCAA. The catch was that the national body then was barely 30 years old after its founding as the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (IAAUS) in early 1906, and it still had limited resources and power. It was formed as part of the response to President Theodore Roosevelt’s call for rules changes in football to protect players—the “Flying Wedge” repulsed him—and his summons of college presidents to the White House for discussion of possible reforms. Sixty-two schools signed up as charter members of the IAAUS in late 1905, and it officially opened for business in March 1906. The name change to NCAA came in 1910, and the organization began sponsoring a national track and field championship as soon as 1921. But that was conducting individual competition among athletes who made it to a single-site meet and then tallying team points, and it was relatively uncomplicated compared to team tournaments involving a series of games. While the coaches could argue to the NCAA that a national tournament wasn’t an unprecedented project for the organization, its scope and ambition certainly were.
The NCAA was wary and officials essentially told the coaches: Let us think about it. Back in Eugene, Coach Hobson at least mentioned the possibility of a new national tournament to the Webfoots. They didn’t get too excited, but they filed it away.
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As the next season approached, the Munich Conference in late September 1938 essentially endorsed the beginning of Czechoslovakia’s dismemberment through the German annexation of the Sudetenland. After returning to London, British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain stood outside 10 Downing Street and declared of the agreement, signed by Germany, Italy, France, and Great Britain: “I believe it is peace for our time.”
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It wasn’t until October 3 that the NCAA went along with the inception of a national tournament, and with a significant caveat. The NCAA agreed to sanction the event, to be held at the end of the 1938–39 season, but declared that the NABC assumed all the financial risk. In addition to not being convinced of the tournament’s financial viability, the NCAA had minimal staff and didn’t want to get in over its head, administering a far-flung national championship on short notice.
Ohio State’s Olsen was named chairman of both the tournament and selection committees. The Wisconsin native and former Badgers star player started his coaching career at Ripon College in his home state, but took over the Buckeyes’ program in 1922, when he was only 27. He was one of the major voices behind picking up the pace of the game through the early 1930s implementation of the rule calling for teams to have no more than 10 seconds to advance the ball past a center-court line. Also, the first tournament was going to be held as part of only the second season without the jump ball after every basket, and already some coaches were complaining that the innovation made the game far too strenuous and even potentially risky for the young athletes.
After the NCAA gave the go-ahead for the tournament, it wasn’t put together overnight. The coaches involved had their own teams to worry about, their own seasons to play, and the first tournament always had a bit of an impromptu, by-the-seat-of-the-pants feel to it. Once that approval came, Hobson and many other coaches made their players aware that while they didn’t know all the details, there would be a new tournament played at the end of the 1938–39 season.
“From that moment on, winning the national title became our primary focus,” John Dick said.
Hobson was all-in on the national tournament concept. That was consistent with his image as an original thinker and a statistics devotee, reflecting his father’s human adding-machine aptitude. He advocated awarding three points for a successful longer shot, two points for anything from medium range, and one point for lay-ins. Hoping to get the game away from the hoop, he also advocated doubling the width of the lane from 6 to 12 feet. Hobson became more public with his recommendations in the late 1940s, but the ideas were percolating long before that. He was all for eliminating the center jump after every basket. In a game of desultory paces and considerable standing around, Hobson, like Ohio State’s Olsen, argued for the wisdom of pushing the ball up the floor with energy and having movement in the offenses. After helping devise a fast-break system as a player at Oregon, he still was in the first wave of coaches teaching the strategy with precision. The outlet pass would go to a forward or, ideally, a guard on the side, then the ball would go to a guard cutting diagonally to the middle to lead the break. The center would trail as the safety net. “It was not a helter-skelter fast-break,” Hobson said. “We had a single and a secondary trailer. It had definite organization to it, so that if we were intercepted, the center, who happened to be the intermediate trailer, could go back to the hole to fend off any fast-break attempts by the other team.”
The key was that the forwards and center could get up and down the floor, too. “I used to kid Anet all the time,” Laddie Gale said. “He was pretty quick, but I’d tell him that if he was so damn fast how come it was that I’d pass the ball out to him and then I’d be down at the other end of the court waiting for him to pass it to me?”
Coach Hobson insisted on keeping track of statistics that went far beyond the sparse summaries, listing for at least in-house consideration assists, steals, rebounds, and turnovers, and he was one of the first coaches to also keep shot charts. The players learned to expect and live with his experiments, including tinkering with the height of the basket and seeing if there might be a more optimum level than the standard ten feet. His original thought about raising the basket was that it might make the misses carom farther, thus leading to more rebounds for the smaller men on the floor. After conducting trial runs, he admitted he was wrong about that. Yet just when the boys thought he was settling down, he’d start talking about those three-pointers and another of his innovative proposals, establishing a time limit on a possession before a team had to shoot—a shot clock, in other words. He wasn’t alone on that: Clair Bee also mentioned the concept and Syracuse Nats owner Danny Biasone later was instrumental in the shot clock’s introduction in the NBA, and many others favored some sort of time limit on a possession before its adoption. But Hobson was among the concept’s first credible advocates.
Later, in a letter nominating Hobson for the Basketball Hall of Fame, Bobby Anet said: “He was the first coach to plot a player’s moves on the court and while at Oregon, and before, had other members of his teams in the stands charting an individual who was playing—where he best reacted, his ‘spot’ to shoot from, and the best style for him to play. This not only involved the player watched, but also taught the ‘student’ various maneuvers and forced his concentration on the game.” So even when Hobson had 20 players on his roster, he found ways to put them all to work, on the floor in practices and scrimmages, and the extras as observers at home games.
By the beginning of Hobson’s fourth season, the Webfoots had gone 63-28 under the young coach, and he had earned respect and tolerance for innovative approaches while settling in as head of both the basketball and baseball programs in Eugene. “He was relatively soft-spoken,” John Dick said. “He was never a shouter, a ranter, or a raver. He was analytical. At halftime, he would analyze the game. He was a great user of charts. He was not the fiery, inspirational, pep-talk type of person. He was very businesslike, and I think that part of his personality carried over to his coaching. I always thought we were better prepared than most teams that we played against, because Hobby was such a student of the game.”
Hopes were high for Hobson’s 1938–39 Webfoots.
He decided they were ready for Broadway.
The Oregon coach had become a part-time area scout for the New York Yankees, and they were grateful for how he gracefully accepted and aided the storied franchise’s signing of his star infielder, Joe Gordon, in early 1936. Gordon had played only two varsity seasons for the Webfoots—and only one under Hobson, the new baseball coach. Gordon, from Portland’s Jefferson High School, also played freshman football before concentrating on baseball. A gifted violinist who had played in the Portland Symphony at age 14, he also was in the U of O orchestra. The Yankees signed him after Southern California–area Yankees scout Bill Essick took a look at him in Los Angeles–area summer league competition, and Hobson had lost the man who was certain to be his best player in 1936.
Gordon spent only two seasons in the minor leagues before joining the Yankees in the spring of 1938 and having a tremendous rookie season, which culminated with a New York sweep of the Cubs in the World Series.1 Game 2 in Chicago was especially notable because Cubs starter Dizzy Dean gave up two-run homers to Frank Crosetti and Joe DiMaggio in a 6-3 New York victory. In the clinching Game 4 in New York, Tommy Heinrich homered and Yankee starter Red Ruffing went the distance, winning 8-3. Gordon, the kid second baseman, hit .400 in the Series, and his former college coach was at Yankee Stadium for the finish. The Yankees paid for Hobson’s trip to New York for the final two games, and then he stuck around after the Series for Yankees organizational meetings. On October 15, he attended the Purdue-Fordham football game to scout Fordham, since the Rams were scheduled to play host to the Oregon Webfoots the next Saturday in New York, in a rare intersectional regular-season football game involving that much travel. As it turned out, his scouting report didn’t do much good: coached by former Notre Dame Four Horseman halfback Jim Crowley, Fordham easily beat the Webfoots 26-0. This was two years after Vince Lombardi’s senior season as one of the “Seven Blocks of Granite.”
During his New York stay, Hobson completed the arrangements for his basketball team to play in New York early in the 1938–39 season.
Although Hank Luisetti had just graduated, Ned Irish at first hoped to bring Stanford in to New York for a third consecutive year. Stanford officials turned down the invitation and recommended their fellow Pacific Coast Conference team, the Webfoots. Hobson said that Irish at first “wasn’t sure that Oregon existed.” It helped that Hobson was able to meet Irish face-to-face in New York, and the promoter came around and invited the Webfoots to play in the season’s first doubleheader, scheduled for Saturday, December 17. It turned out to be Oregon vs. CCNY and Northwestern vs. St. John’s. Another Irish doubleheader was set for New Year’s Eve. The first game would match St. John’s vs. Colorado. The 1938 national invitation tournament runner-up Buffaloes would be making their second trip to New York in nine months, but this time minus Byron “Whizzer” White. LIU would be in the second game, playing Southern California.
As part of the deal to bring in Oregon, Irish made it clear to Hobson that the Garden would want an undefeated team to promote, so while scheduling pre-trip “breathers” at home would be acceptable, the Webfoots would be expected to travel straight to New York from Oregon and only play additional games on the way back. Hobson consented, and the trip ended up resembling a baseball team’s barnstorming excursion. The Webfoots were scheduled to play nine games in 15 days—or ten games in 22 days if you counted a stop in Portland to face the Signal Oil AAU team before the Oregon traveling party continued east.
The commitment alarmed U of O athletic board officials. There goes Hobby again. They made it clear to the young coach that it wouldn’t accept or make up financial losses, so if the trip turned out to be a money-loser, it was Coach Hobson’s Folly and his responsibility. Even local sportswriters, normally aboard Hobson’s bandwagon, wondered if it was wise to have the players on the road that long, for all those games and with limited opportunities to practice, before the conference schedule opened on January 6.
Hobson had faith that the trip would be at least a push financially, but there was more to it. “He felt that the benefits of the trip, educational as well as athletic, would far outweigh any negative impact, and he was right,” John Dick said.
Back home, Howard and Jennie by now had two young sons, Howard Jr. and David. They were too young to hang around practices or sit on the team bench—that would come later—but they hung a play hoop on a door in the family home and did what a lot of kids were doing as the Tall Firs prepared for that season. They pretended to be the Webfoots, playing on that hoop as they, doubling as sportscasters, called out the passes from Anet to Johansen to . . .
Their father’s Webfoots were about to become well known outside Oregon.
1. No, that wasn’t the Cubs’ most recent Series appearance. They made it again in 1945.