11.
Friday, March 3
WASHINGTON—U.S. Army Air Corps brass disclose they’re going to send at least 600 prospective airplane mechanics to “rush” training at Lowry Field in Denver, adding to the bustle at the facility where the Air Corps technical school already is overflowing and overtaxed.
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla.—Young Yankees outfielder Joe DiMaggio agrees to a $26,500 salary for the season and is said to be on his way to Florida. Less trumpeted is the fact that second baseman Joe Gordon, the former Oregon Webfoots star who is coming off a 25-home run rookie season, arrives in St. Petersburg after a cross-country drive from Oregon and immediately comes to terms with the Yankees, too. He attended classes at Oregon through the winter term, completed requirements for his physical education degree, and enjoyed attending Webfoots basketball games.
In Eugene, the chairman of a police committee charged with investigating whether prostitution and gambling were problems in the college town announced that to the best of his knowledge, they were not. But he added that the investigation would continue. That drew quite a few laughs around town as the sports fans prepared to follow the game in Seattle that night.
* * *
Fight!
While closing out their regular season with their 21st consecutive victory, a 28-21 win over La Salle in Philadelphia’s Convention Hall, the Long Island Blackbirds were drawn into or—depending on who was doing the telling—started a fight that turned ugly. LIU was ahead 19-14 with nine minutes left in the game when jostling under the La Salle bucket evolved into a full-scale brawl, with players coming off the bench to join the fray and spectators coming to the edge of the court to at least get a better view. Milton Gross later wrote that Clair Bee was seen “wading like a waterfront brawler through the free-for-all.” Police officers rushed into the melee, trying to help restore order, and when the fighting stopped, both teams were sent to their locker rooms and fans ordered back to their seats. The delay lasted eleven minutes. When the teams were brought back out to the floor, the rest of the game was uneventful.
Stories about the game and brawl also confirmed that the Blackbirds, who had just played their first and only genuine road game of the season, had accepted a bid to the national invitation tournament. That had been a foregone conclusion for weeks, though.
* * *
Washington didn’t sell reserved seats for the Oregon games, and UW officials regretted that decision once it was clear the two-game series would decide the Northern Division championship. With fans poised to scramble for the best seats the second the doors opened, a huge mob was waiting outside the Pavilion as the Webfoots approached in a caravan of cabs. They had to stop well short of the arena, and then get an escort from security officers through the anxious fans.
In front of the overflow crowd of more than 10,000, the Webfoots overcame a rough start and went on to easily handle the Huskies 39-26. A Slim Wintermute tip-in gave the Webfoots an 8-7 lead, and they stayed in control the rest of the way. The Huskies’ fans were primed to go into the night, celebrating a victory that would have set up a Saturday night showdown for the Northern Division title, but instead they left disappointed.
“Oregon virtually ran the Huskies into the checkerboard sections of the court to end the desperate championship drive of Hec Edmundson’s ‘racehorse’ hoopsters,” Dick Strite wrote in the Register-Guard. John Dick later said neither team played well in the game, disputing Strite’s claim that the first half was “one of the greatest exhibitions of modern basketball.”
In the Oregonian, L. H. Gregory allowed that the Webfoots had played better games, but showed considerable grit and poise throughout. He was especially excited about one of Wally Johansen’s baskets in the first half, noting he took a pass from Wintermute on the move and tossed the ball in the hoop backward, over his head, without looking. Occasionally, Strite’s affinity for his former Astoria YMCA players showed through.
It was another night when Anet, running the show on the floor and as the decision maker, made it a matter of pride to avoid calling the first time-out of the game. That was a familiar Anet strategy, one that usually was fine with his teammates and with Hobson. The Huskies caved in first, calling the first time-out halfway through the opening half.
Gregory wrote that the Webfoots made 14 of their 67 attempted shots from the floor, the Huskies 10 of 66. And he couldn’t resist adding: “It was the best officiated game of the year, the officials letting the petty stuff go.”
Laddie Gale had a team-high 11 points, and he at least helped provide some sort of suspense for the Saturday night game. With 172 points in the 15 Northern Division games, he was 15 short of tying the record for a 16-game division season set in 1936 by Oregon State’s Wally Palmberg, who hailed from Astoria and was a hometown hero to several of the Webfoots.1
The potential problem for Oregon was that Anet fell and aggravated a hand injury that had troubled him off and on for several weeks. This time, he suffered one dislocated and two sprained fingers, and when Hobson noticed him getting treatment from trainer Bob Officer after the game, he decided to hold Anet out of the game the next night. The coach remembered how Anet had insisted on staying in the lineup when the hand was troubling him in the final rivalry game of the season against Oregon State. In that game, he used only one hand, and his left hand at that, in making a close-in shot off a drive, then chirped to his own bench: “How’d you like that?” But Coach Hobson could afford to rest his ace guard on the second night against Washington and hope to have him well for the league championship series.
Saturday, March 4
WASHINGTON—Addressing Congress on the 150th anniversary of its first gathering, President Roosevelt brings up America’s sympathy for those who have lost much of their freedom under totalitarian regimes in Europe. He proclaims: “With many other democracies, the United States will give no encouragement to the belief that our processes are outworn, or that we will approvingly watch the return of forms of government which for 2,000 years have proved their tyranny and their instability alike.”
The Astoria boys again followed news that had their hometown in the national spotlight. The Chinese picketers at the Astoria docks “won” a minor victory. They agreed to step aside and allow the union longshoreman to load the Japanese freighter with scrap iron, but they also exacted the promise from port authority officials that no similar shipments would be allowed. The Astoria case was the frame of reference and the precedent as similar protests spread to Portland. About 800 Chinese women and children picketed at the Portland docks near a Greek freighter scheduled to take on scrap metal for transport to Japan. The thinking, of course, was that the scrap metal would be used in armaments manufacture for the Sino-Japanese War, and little or no thought was given to the possibilities beyond that conflict. America’s attention mostly was on Europe.
* * *
Indiana’s collapse was complete. The Hoosiers lost 53-45 at Michigan, while Ohio State manhandled Purdue 51-35 in front of a rec-ord home crowd of 11,184 in Columbus. Buckeyes captain Jimmy Hull scored 20 points and claimed the Big Ten Conference scoring title with 169 points in the 11 games he played in, for a 15.3-point average. He finished 18 points ahead of runner-up Pick Dehner of Illinois, who appeared in one more game. The results left Ohio State, a game out and in trouble only a week earlier, the undisputed champions of the Big Ten at 10-2, a game ahead of the Hoosiers. “Undisputed league champions” sounded a lot better than “co-champions,” and the Buckeyes had their rivals, the Michigan Wolverines, to thank for it. To those who had been paying attention to Olsen’s role in the NCAA tournament process, it seemed obvious that the Buckeyes still had some games to play—and a national championship to seek.
* * *
Surreal in the contrast it presented to the wild atmosphere in the Seattle arena the night before, the Saturday Oregon-Washington game drew only 5,500 fans, and even that official figure might have been charitable. Distraught over the loss that had cost the Huskies any chance at the Northern Division title, many of the Washington fans had better things to do. A few of the UW students probably even studied.
With Anet watching from the bench, Ford Mullen, Matt Pavalunas, and Red McNeeley all got significant playing time in the backcourt as Gale just missed in his quest for the 16-game Northern Division scoring record. He finished the night with 14 points, leaving him (after final tallying) with 186 in division play, one point short of Palmberg.
The Huskies’ George Ziegenfuss said going in that his goal was to shut down Gale, and he also got a lot of help, with the Huskies sagging on the Webfoots’ star. Still, Gale had 10 points in the first half and seemed in good shape, but the Huskies continued to act as if it would be an affront to have the record set against them and Gale had trouble getting off shots in the second half. When he scored with 3:10 remaining in the game, making a running, whirling one-hander from 20 feet out, he was within one of tying Palmberg. But he couldn’t get the ball in the basket again. Gregory was chagrined that only Wintermute seemed determined to get Gale the ball and the record, but it was a nip-and-tuck game, the Webfoots took what was available to them to get the victory, Gale was fine with the strategy, and the scribes seemed to be more concerned with the record. Gregory also noted that Ziegenfuss blocked one close-in Gale shot, saying the Husky “rode the ball as if it had been a Cayuse with a saddle on it.” (It’s a low-quality horse or pony.) The Webfoots ended up winning 54-52, with Wintermute leading the way with 18 points.
After the game, a scribe perhaps sarcastically asked Edmundson if he would stand by his previous statement that this was the best Washington team he had ever had. Four of the Huskies’ five losses in the division had come to the Webfoots. “It still goes. Oregon was just better,” he responded.
Almost as an afterthought, writers pointed out that Gale had scored 249 points in division competition the previous season, but the schedule had been 20 games for that one season alone. Montana had given the league a one-season try, gone 3-17, and dropped out. Strite claimed to have figured out that he had scored 194 points in the 16 games that season against Washington, Washington State, Oregon State, and Idaho, and he accused the big-city scribes in Portland of manufacturing a Gale quest for a 16-game season record he already held. It was a bit surprising, though, that anybody noticed the point totals at all, because the newspapers generally only ran individual box scores and didn’t get around to publishing cumulative statistics until the season was over. Also rare was any mention of a player’s scoring average. In fact, when the “official” Northern Division statistics for the 1938–39 season were released, Gale and Wintermute, with 174 points, finished 1-2. It was a slight improvement over the season before, when they were first and third. If anyone took pencil to paper and did the math, their scoring averages in division play were 11.6 and 10.9, respectively. All 11 members of the Webfoots’ regular traveling squad scored in conference play.
Also on the final night of conference regular-season play, Southern California hammered rival UCLA 56-27 and California defeated Stanford 43-32, leaving the winners tied atop the Southern Division. A single-game playoff would break the tie.
The final PCC standings:
|
NORTHERN DIVISION |
W |
L |
Pct. |
|
Oregon |
14 |
2 |
.875 |
|
Washington |
11 |
5 |
.688 |
|
Washington State |
8 |
8 |
.500 |
|
Oregon State |
6 |
10 |
.375 |
|
Idaho |
1 |
15 |
.063 |
|
SOUTHERN DIVISION |
W |
L |
Pct. |
|
California |
9 |
3 |
.750 |
|
Southern California |
9 |
3 |
.750 |
|
Stanford |
6 |
6 |
.500 |
|
UCLA |
0 |
12 |
.000 |
The ineptitude of one horrible team in each division, Idaho in the North and UCLA in the South, inflated the records of the other teams.
Sunday, March 5
BERLIN—Deutches Nachrichten Buro, a German news agency considered a semi-official voice of the regime, responds to President Roosevelt, saying: “After misrepresentations and curious opinions, Roosevelt turns to flat lies. He lied when he said that in states governed by the people, religion is being persecuted.” The news agency claims that Roosevelt citing the vaunted freedom of the press in America was hypocritical because U.S. public opinion was controlled and influenced by newspapers that “are under pressure from powerful factors which permit them to publish only a distorted picture of the true situation.”
It was the Northern Division winner’s turn to play host to the Southern Division champion in the PCC’s best-of-three series. The original schedule called for games on Friday, March 10; Saturday, March 11; and, if necessary, Monday, March 13. (Playing on a Sunday was out of the question.) To stick to that, the Southern Division playoff game would have to be played during the week, and neither USC nor California wanted to do that.
The early speculation was that the championship series might be moved back a full week, with a possible Game 3 on Monday, March 20. Quickly, though, Hobson and others pointed out the potential conflict with the March 20–21 NCAA Western championships in San Francisco. If that was the playoff schedule, an NCAA spot couldn’t be held open for the PCC winner. After citing the NCAA tournament as a goal all season, Hobson and the Webfoots couldn’t stand for that.
1. Again highlighting the haphazard nature of the scorekeeping process, Gale’s Northern Division point total was listed differently in the Oregon papers during the Washington series. The figures here are what everyone seemed to agree on later, after final tallying.