26.
As various organizations named their All-American teams for 1938–39, there were some surprising and even a bit strange variations. Laddie Gale, the Webfoots’ best player and a first-team choice on the NEA All-American team, didn’t end up on the NCAA’s eventual and official consensus All-America list—which included first and second teams—for that season. After the tabulating, Slim Wintermute was designated the consensus first-team center, Bobby Anet a second-team guard.
While minor debates continued over whether Oregon or Long Island deserved to be considered the best team in the land, Webfoots fans were relieved when it was announced in mid-May that Howard Hobson had been granted a $1,200 raise, taking him all the way to $5,000 annually.
The Associated Press had a football poll at the time, but the wire service’s basketball poll didn’t come along until the 1948–49 season. In the aftermath of the 1939 tournaments, there were a few judgmental references, including by an Associated Press writer or two, to Long Island as national champion, ahead of Oregon. But that didn’t come from an official poll. And, yes, as former New Yorker Dick Strite had implied, much of the pro-LIU sentiment seemed to come from the east. The Webfoots also had their advocates.
In 1942, when the Helms Foundation of Los Angeles began selecting its own national champions, it also retroactively went back to 1901 and declared its choices for each year. As part of that, it named LIU its 1939 basketball champion, and that distinction still is listed in such places as the Blackbirds’ modern-era media guides.
The choice of LIU was (and is) defensible, of course.
The choice of LIU also was (and is) wrong.
Yes, the Blackbirds were undefeated, and their conquests included a handful of high-quality teams at Madison Square Garden.
Oregon and LIU played only two common opponents, Bradley Tech and Canisius. The Blackbirds beat Bradley Tech 36-32 in the invitation tournament semifinals in Madison Square Garden, and the Webfoots fell 52-39 to the team from Peoria during the marathon December road trip. Both teams handled Canisius by 12 points—the Blackbirds at home, the Webfoots on that eastern trip. Then and since, many seemed to overlook the fact that the Blackbirds played only one legitimate road game, weren’t in a conference, and played only soft touches in their “own” arena. The Garden games were their only real tests. As impressive as the Blackbirds were there, and as great of a coach as Clair Bee was, the Garden was their quasi-home floor and the out-of-area opponents often were weary from the marathon travel it took to get to New York.
The Blackbirds were undefeated, but not completely tested.
There’s an irony here, too, again involving Ohio State: the heroes of Third Down and a War to Go, football’s 1942 Wisconsin Badgers, defeated the Buckeyes 17-7 that season. The Buckeyes, at the time, but also especially later, said they had gotten tainted water on the trip and that many players were ill during their loss to the Badgers. (Sound familiar?) Wisconsin finished 8-1-1, Ohio State 9-1. AP voted the Buckeyes No. 1—sportswriters!—and the Badgers No. 3. Just getting started in the business of naming champions of its own at the time, the Helms Foundation also selected a football champion for that year, and it made the right call on this one, making Wisconsin its national champion.
Today, it has become tiresome to hear the reflexive “East Coast bias” argument advanced for everything from the minor—say, the order of the highlights on SportsCenter—to the major. It’s undeniable that there often is an East Coast perspective apparent in national coverage, but much of the talk is overblown. Still, think of what it was like in 1939. Chicago and St. Louis were considered the western outposts of major-league baseball. The Big Ten also was known as the Western Conference. Some in New York probably thought the Oregon Webfoots, isolated outside the major West Coast cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and perhaps Seattle, tied their horses at hitching posts when they went to class.
With the New York scribes often overlooking or completely ignoring the quirks of the New York basketball scene, including LIU’s strange scheduling, evaluations could be skewed. There was no question that the Oregon press had been as partisan as were the New Yorkers arguing LIU’s case. The laughable part of that, though, was that at least the folks in the Pacific Northwest didn’t pretend to be completely objective.
Who would have won an Oregon-Long Island matchup in March 1939?
It depends.
If they played in McArthur Court, Oregon would have won, perhaps easily, in part because the Blackbirds would have traveled across the country and weren’t accustomed to playing on the road at all. Oregon was playing its best basketball as the season wound down. The Webfoots were a different team than the one that passed through New York in December, and peaking at the right time was, and still is, a test of college basketball greatness, most notably in the NCAA tournament.
If Oregon and LIU played on a neutral floor—in, say, Evanston, Illinois, after the Blackbirds made it through the NCAA Eastern championships—Oregon would have won that one, too.
If they played in the national invitation tournament in Madison Square Garden, sure, LIU probably would have won.
Plus, of course, Ned Irish could have headed off much of the debate by matching Oregon against LIU instead of CCNY in the first Garden doubleheader of the season back in December. LIU would have had the home-court advantage and wouldn’t have traveled, but it would have been difficult to argue against allowing a head-to-head matchup settle the debate over which post-season tournament champion was better that season. Judging by how poorly the Webfoots played against CCNY, they might have had problems with LIU, but there’s no guarantee of that. Playing against a confirmed national power would have changed the dynamic for the Webfoots.
The bottom line: The Webfoots’ tournament was part of a sincere effort to pick a champion from all regions of the country. League champions or co-champions that turned down bids to the regionals or play-in games—including Colorado and Missouri in the West and Kentucky in the East—and chose to end their seasons, had to live with those decisions. The only one of those three likely capable of challenging the Webfoots was Kentucky. The NCAA event began as a response to the national invitation tournament, absolutely, but its creation was inevitable with or without the NIT. Ned Irish and, secondarily, the Metropolitan Basketball Writers Association did the college game huge favors by providing the impetus, but it was going to happen sooner or later.
Before the Madness, Oregon was the first NCAA champion. They beat programs from three prominent schools and leagues with ease, and that came after virtual championship tournament atmospheres for their pairs of games against tough PCC opponents Washington and California helped toughen them.
They deserve their spot in history.
They were the first national champions.
In one way, though, the head-to-head matchup of the NCAA tournament and the national invitation tournament at first was a complete rout for the NIT.
That was at the box office.
Still designed to be a New York–centric event with invited guests joining the locals, the Metropolitan Basketball Writers’ Association’s tournament drew terrific crowds to Madison Square Garden. (It’s possible that attendance figures were exaggerated, but even then, the true figures would have been impressive.)
The first NCAA tournament, at neutral sites—San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Evanston—with only Villanova as a “local” attraction in the Eastern championships, drew disappointing crowds.
So in the box-office sense, absolutely, the invitation tournament was “bigger” than the NCAA tournament in 1939 and for the next decade or so. At least at the outset, though, the NCAA tournament never was envisioned to be a box-office bonanza, but rather a competition to select a true national champion.
A couple of funny things happened after the 1939 tournaments, too.
In New York, as the offer to turn over the tournament rights in conjunction with the possible formation of a New York league hinted, the Metropolitan Basketball Writers Association was apparently eager to unload at least official control of the tournament. The New York–area basketball league wasn’t formed, but the writers agreed to pass along the tournament to an association of New York basketball-playing schools. From 1940 on, the writers’ stake in the tournament was indirect.1 Absolutely, after the New York tournament expanded to eight teams in 1941, after the war years changed the picture considerably, and until a 1951 scandal led to a rearranging of the college basketball landscape, it was more reasonable to argue that the NIT was the better and more prestigious tournament. That argument was often overstated, and a countering one could be made for the NCAA tournament, but the point is, the New York tournament’s alleged superiority in 1939 doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
In the wake of the 1939 tournament, the National Association of Basketball Coaches tallied up the ledgers for the first NCAA tournament and swallowed hard. The losses, which they were expected to cover as part of the deal for the NCAA’s approval, were $2,531. But the NCAA agreed to pay that off in exchange for taking control of the event. In 1940, the NCAA tournament became truly the NCAA’s tournament.
For $2,531 . . .
It was a better deal than $24 for Manhattan.
* * *
On September 1, 1939, under the pretense of reacting to a concocted attack from Polish forces, Hitler ordered his troops into Poland. Two days later, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany.
World War II had started.
1. In 2005, after several years of contentious litigation, the NCAA bought the rights to the pre- and post-season NIT for $40.5 million plus $16 million in legal fees. The NCAA now puts on those tournaments for both men and women.