8.
With Oregon starters Bobby Anet, Wally Johansen, Laddie Gale, and Slim Wintermute returning for the 1938–39 season, the major decisions Howard Hobson faced involved filling out his roster and selecting a fifth starter. As practice began, the top contenders to replace the departed Dave Silver at forward were junior John Dick and senior Bob Hardy, from Ashland. The left-handed Hardy starred as a sophomore, averaging around 15 points a game, at his hometown Southern Oregon Normal School, Hobson’s previous stop, before transferring to Eugene. He missed most of the Webfoots’ 1937–38 season after suffering a broken ankle, but had proven himself capable on the court. Most of the boys indeed considered Hardy a future pro, but in baseball, where he was a flame-throwing “southpaw” pitcher for Hobson’s Webfoots in the spring. The consensus was that Hardy might get a serious look for the starting forward position by Hobson, who generally used seniority as a tiebreaker in lineup decisions, but that Dick, especially dangerous with whirling moves and pivot and hook shots from the low post, would end up in the starting lineup either by the start of the season or before long. The only demerit against Dick was that he was such a serious student with such broad interests, he didn’t consider basketball his first priority, and didn’t even seem upset about not being moved into the starting lineup.
Behind Anet and Johansen, the reserve guards included two more of Coach Hobson’s Webfoot baseball players, both infielders from Washington state and both juniors—Ford Mullen from Olympia and Matt Pavalunas from Raymond.
Mullen, raised at a small resort his family owned on Washington’s Lake Lacey, was a fine infielder, also with pro potential. He was self-effacing about his basketball skill, leading him in later years to good-naturedly claim to have guarded the water bucket. But he was much better than that, and his teammates knew it. They had faith that if Anet ever suffered a significant injury, Mullen, the fine all-around athlete, could step in and run the team. At 5-8, he was a physical duplicate of Anet and could play the same way, meaning the rest of the Webfoots wouldn’t have to change their games. They had similar confidence in the 6-foot Pavalunas, who couldn’t match Johansen’s chemistry with Anet but was considered roughly on a par with Johansen in talent.
Pavalunas’s parents—Charlie, a worker in the shingle mill near Raymond, and Ruth—were immigrants from the Baltic region, and Lithuanian was the first language in their home, including for young Matt. He struggled with English and repeated a grade in elementary school as he adjusted. In high school, he was a four-sport star, in football, basketball, baseball, and in the 440- and 220-yard races in track. His son, Bob, notes that his father’s nickname became “Once in a Blue Moon Boy” when the local paper opined that “an athlete like this comes along once in a blue moon.”
The other three reserves on the usual 11-man traveling squad seemed fairly set, too. Two of them, junior Ted Sarpola and sophomore Earl Sandness, were the additional Astoria Fishermen.
Sophomore Evert “Red” McNeeley was born in Pacific Beach, Washington, but when he was six, his family moved to Portland and his father landed a job with the sanitary department. Red graduated from Portland’s Jefferson High School, where he was a year behind Joe Gordon, but didn’t head straight to college. Instead, with his parents divorcing and no money available, McNeeley worked for two years, including in a gas station, and was playing AAU basketball when Hobson, impressed with his outside shooting, offered him a scholarship to Oregon. He was thrilled to have the opportunity, so he didn’t gripe about not being in the starting lineup as a sophomore. His bright red hair, usually meticulously parted in the middle, inspired the nickname that would stay with him for life. Although only a sophomore, he was 22 when the season started—and the oldest player on the team.
The other nine players, including ex-Fisherman Toivo Piippo, provided practice fodder, kept statistics, and took notes during home games. They hoped to catch Hobson’s attention and perhaps be promoted to the regular traveling roster and/or get in some games.
References to the squad as the Ducks were becoming more frequent, but it was all unofficial. By 1938–39, a Duck cartoon-type caricature was on the Oregon warm-up jackets and in such things as game programs. The makeshift press guide for that season, featuring Anet on the cover, was a combination of nicely printed sheets around mimeographed supplemental information on newsprint, and was called “Duck Dope.” In the guide, sports publicist Bruce Hamby promised “no change this season from the spectacular fast-break style made famous on the coast by Coach Hobson. Oregon’s offensive tactics, in a nutshell, are to beat the defense back down court for a quick shot at the basket. When this is not possible, the Webfoots establish fast-moving set plays.”
Hamby’s guide dutifully listed the Webfoots’ official heights. As often happens on team rosters, the heights weren’t correct. Yet this was a rare case of understatement. The Tall Firs actually were taller than the official roster figures. Dick and Gale both were listed at 6-foot-4, but Dick was just a shade under 6-5 and Gale was about an inch taller than that. Dick later told his sons that Wintermute was at least 6-10.
Why the gamesmanship?
In Wintermute’s case, it was self-consciousness and a desire to avoid being labeled a “freak,” and he was steadfast in his refusal to be re-measured. Slim said he was 6-8 and as far as he was concerned, that settled it.
In general, too, the thinking was that if opponents were “shocked” at how tall players were when they came across them for the first time, that could be a small advantage.
Before heading east, the Taller-Than-Advertised Firs beat the University of Portland 51-24, Portland’s Multnomah Athletic Club 83-25, and Signal Oil 46-34, all in The Igloo. They worked on disguising their defensive strategies, alternating between zone and man-to-man and, with their hands in the air, often causing opponents to only belatedly recognize when they’d switched to a man-to-man.
At Portland’s Benson Tech High School on December 10, 1938, the Webfoots easily handled another AAU team, the Pacific Packards, 54-39, and then filed onto the train the next night and headed for New York. Because of the trip’s length, Hobson expanded his traveling roster. Sophomore forward Don Mabee, who had just finished a standout season as an end for Oregon’s football team, was the 12th man.1
The train berths were made for conventionally sized passengers, and the Webfoots did some re-engineering. In the upper berths, they took the headboards out, turning two berths into one long one.
The boys could stretch out.
* * *
The long trip was going to take the Webfoots out of only one week of classes, and for most of the players, that wasn’t a major problem. Wally Johansen, though, was among about 30 U of O seniors finishing up study for undergraduate LLB degrees in law and was determined to keep up. If he let his work slide, he might hear from, among others, Wayne Morse, who had been the dean of the law school for nine years, but still was only 38 years old. The joke on campus was that the boys studying law kept the tobacco salesmen flush, since chain smoking seemed to be one of the prerequisites for the law curriculum. Not all law students smoked; it just seemed as if they did. The pressure heaped on them as undergraduates was enormous. The law library all along was closed on Sundays, but Morse was among the administrators who noticed how jammed it was on Saturdays and decided to close it that day as well to encourage students to take weekend-long breaks from studying—or at least studying in the library. Morse wanted his charges to have outside interests but wouldn’t excuse away sliding marks for athletes.
* * *
While the Webfoots were on their way to New York, Ohio State coach Harold Olsen in Columbus announced that his National Association of Basketball Coaches committees had roughed together an outline for the first national tournament. Notably, the December 14 Associated Press story about Olsen’s announcement began: “The National Collegiate Athletic Association’s plan to select America’s undisputed college basketball champion advanced a step today . . . ”
Declaring it to be the case, whether from the Ohio State campus or from an Associated Press bureau, didn’t make it so, of course, but it nonetheless seemed significant that the “undisputed college basketball champion” phrase made it onto the national wire without significant qualification or paying homage to New York as the true center of the basketball universe.
Olsen announced plans for two four-team “sectionals,” one for teams east of the Mississippi River and one for teams west of it. In the ensuing months, those events also were called “regionals,” the variations were numerous, and the most common was “Eastern (or Western) championships.” One thing the new tournament and the year-old New York national invitation tournament had in common was a lack of uniformity in what they were called, whether in print or anywhere else.
The Ohio State coach said those NCAA sectionals would be played on March 10–11 or March 17–18, in New York or Philadelphia in the East, and in Kansas City, Denver, or Los Angeles in the West. Then the two surviving teams would meet for the national championship at an as-yet undetermined site. Also, Olsen said one team from each of eight districts would be in the tournament. His statement gave geographic specifics for each of the eight districts, listed the teams in each one, plus named district chairmen and committees. That much seemed to be straightforward and sensible. It truly would be a national tournament.
Olsen said it was up to each district to select its entrant, and there were no set rules. He indicated it was preferable if each committee could simply select a team as its representative in the eight-team national field, but said they also could hold qualifying playoffs, if they felt it necessary.
So this was the Ohio State coach issuing a statement in Columbus that drew national attention, with the wire stories running in many newspapers.
This was the Ohio State coach bringing up a plan that almost certainly would involve the Big Ten champion—if not the Buckeyes, then someone else from the league.
It’s inconceivable that the Buckeyes players didn’t get wind of this.
Yet . . .
More on that later.
Eventually, Olsen named John Bunn, in his first months as Stanford’s dean of men, as chairman of the tournament’s Pacific Coast district.
Because there were some “play-in”-type games when the tournament was played the next March, it’s at least misleading to call the inaugural tournament an eight-team event. Later, that most often was brought up by those trying to say the NCAA tournament was no more inclusive than the national invitation tournament. That’s not true. The committee’s mistake arguably was not formalizing the “play-in” process and making it the same in all eight districts, essentially making the NCAA tournament a 16- or 32-team event from the start. That would have flaunted how much more national and democratic it was than the New York writers’ tournament.
Again, it’s amazing that so many of the NCAA tournament details, including the sites, still were up in the air three months before the tournament began. Even those vague plans changed considerably before the first tournament began. At the time, Olsen’s Buckeyes had played only one game, beating George Washington in Columbus, and were preparing to make a cross-country jaunt of their own.
* * *
After arriving at Manhattan’s Penn Station on the morning of Thursday, December 15, 1938, the Webfoots checked in at the Hotel Lincoln on Eighth Avenue between 44th and 45th Streets. It had an athletic pedigree: the 1936 U.S. Olympic teams had convened and stayed there before heading over to Berlin.2
The Webfoots went through what nominally was a practice at the West Side YMCA, at 63rd Street and Central Park West. With the Garden still trying to sell tickets and get attention, the session was little more than a glorified press conference, with Irish making sure the Webfoots wore their white game uniforms and spent most of the allotted time in the gym posing for the newspaper photographers and parading for the scribes, who mostly watched and didn’t dream of actually trying to interview any of the Webfoots.
The next morning, or still on the day before the game, the Webfoots got prominent play in the New York papers. Across the top of its lead sports page, the Times ran a large picture of the Oregon starters, each dribbling a ball. Significantly, the five Webfoots shown were Wintermute, Gale, Hardy, Johansen, and Anet. At that point, Hardy still was starting. The headline on the story below the picture noted:
COAST GIANTS HERE
FOR C.C.N.Y. GAME
Oregon Five’s Workout Augurs
Busy Night for Beavers
On Garden Court
On the front of its sports section, above Everett B. Morris’s story, the New York Herald Tribune ran a huge picture of Coach Hobson speaking to the 12 Webfoots at the YMCA practice. An indication of how little the Webfoots got done at the YMCA was that Hobson also lined up the Manhattan College gym for an afternoon full practice, complete with a long intra-squad scrimmage. He hoped to allow the Webfoots to shake off the cobwebs and heavy legs caused by the long train trip. Bringing up the Astoria angle, Morris wrote that in the Columbia River town, “basketball rivals salmon fishing as the leading industry.” He also had a reaction that was surprisingly typical of scribes watching the Webfoots in practice for the first time: He was most impressed with the ball handling of flashy junior reserve Ted Sarpola, another of the Astoria boys. Morris raved that the flashy Sarpola “could do more tricks with a basketball than Thurston could do with a rabbit.” (Howard Thurston, a renowned magician of the era, had died in 1936.) He added: “If Sarpola could only shoot as well as he can do interesting but less important maneuvers, he would be phenomenal.” Morris went to the full practice at Manhattan College, too, or at least pretended to have done so. He provided a scouting report of the Webfoots’ style, remarking on their “terrifically fast break” and their tendency to alternate between zone and man-to-man defenses.
At some point during the New York stay, too, Wintermute and Gale met New York Daily News columnist Ed Sullivan, who tried to arrange a picture of one sitting on the shoulders of the other and dunking a basketball.
Several of the players went to Radio City Music Hall, which had opened in 1932 and still looked and felt new, to watch the leggy Rockettes perform in conjunction with the showing of the new movie The Duke of West Point, starring Louis Hayward and Joan Fontaine. Hayward played the title character, a chap from an American family who was raised in England and attended the U.S. Military Academy because it ran in his family. The Cadets’ football and hockey teams were part of the story, but not the basketball squad. The Webfoots probably didn’t mind basketball’s exclusion; they were thinking about the Rockettes’ precision and Fontaine’s magnetism on screen. New York University law professor John MacGregor was a former Oregon student-body president, and he acted as the Webfoots’ guide, also lining up Broadway show tickets. Among the choices were Raymond Massey in Abe Lincoln in Illinois, Helen Hayes in Victoria Regina, plus musicals Hellzapoppin and The Boys from Syracuse.
At least two Webfoots—Hardy and Mullen, Hobson’s baseball standouts—were thrilled when Hobson arranged a visit to Yankee Stadium and they were able to stand on the mound and gawk at their surroundings. The stadium, which opened in 1923, was the House That Ruth Built, where Lou Gehrig and Joe DiMaggio, among others, played for the world champions. As the Webfoots played sightseers and imagined playing on the diamond someday with the Yankees’ stars, they couldn’t have known that Gehrig would play only eight more games with New York because of his as-yet undiagnosed illness.
As always, the “new” Garden was busy during the week of the Webfoots’ visit. On December 15, their first night in town, Welshman Tommy Farr, the British Empire heavyweight champion, was the marquee name on a boxing card. He came in with consecutive decision losses to Joe Louis, Jim Braddock, and Max Baer, but he was popular because he was game and put on good shows. He lost again this time, on a 15-round decision to young Californian Lou Nova, but it was a spectacular and much-cheered fight, with both boxers barely able to stand at the finish. That’s what “regular,” or non-championship, Garden boxing cards were supposed to be about. On December 16, the arena’s two National Hockey League teams, the Rangers and Americans, played to a 1-1 tie in front of 13,955.
On the morning of the Oregon-CCNY game, the Times jumped aboard the Astoria angle bandwagon. Respected sports writer Arthur Daley, then 34, substituted for regular columnist John Kieran to pen the “Sports of the Times” piece, and he noted that the Fishermen had won the Oregon state high school championship in seven of the ten previous seasons. He obviously took someone’s word for it, and whoever it was either deliberately exaggerated or got it wrong. The actual count at that point for Astoria High was four championships in nine seasons.3 Like Everett B. Morris, Daley also made it sound as if every street in the little Oregon fishing town was turned into a court with hoops, which also was a bit overdone. Nonetheless, it was a nice tribute. His column in “relief” of Kieran came three years after Daley became the first Times sportswriter sent to Europe to cover an event—the 1936 Summer Games in Berlin.
Herald Tribune columnist Richards Vidmer reprised the tale of Ned Irish tearing his pants sneaking in to cover a game (he didn’t specify that it was CCNY vs. Manhattan) in a “small hall that bulged at the seams after a few hundred people had entered through the door. The mishap preyed on Mr. Irish’s mind and he carried around the idea that if people didn’t have to tear their trousers climbing through windows, more of them would come to see basketball games. So, four years ago, he took his proposition to Madison Square Garden, sold them the idea and since then he has been bringing the better teams of the country to the Palace of Play.”
Vidmer pointed out that the Webfoots’ appearance would come as Irish began his fifth season of doubleheaders, adding: “From the very beginning the crowds came pouring in and the average over four seasons has been something more than 12,000 a night. This is much higher than the average attendance at hockey games and there aren’t many fights that bring that many customers to the Garden. Jai Alai, indoor polo, squash and other indoor sports don’t come even close to such figures.”
Ned Irish still had a hit on his hands.
1. At one stop on the barnstorming swing, the wire service scribe assigned to the game listed Webfoots reserve Toivo Piippo in the box score, but he wasn’t on the trip. Piippo was No. 16 on the preseason roster in the Duck Dope, but that jersey was assigned to Mabee for the eastern swing.
2. It’s now the Milford Plaza.
3. Under John Warren’s replacement as the Fishermen’s head coach, former Oregon State star Wally Palmberg, Astoria also won state titles in 1941 and ’42. The ultimate haul, then, was 6 state titles in 13 seasons.