Blue White Illustrated

A teaching moment... and a lesson learned ���Basketball at Penn State is practically a lost art.��� I wonder if anybody reading this column disagrees with that statement. This is not a criticism of Penn State coach Patrick Chambers and the gutty players on his hard-working 2012-13 team. Those were the exact words I wrote more than 54 years ago, and there have been times over the years when I think nothing has changed. I was then the sports editor for the student newspaper, The Daily Collegian, and that was the opening sentence in my column on Feb. 18, 1959. It created one helluva lot of controversy. My column even sparked my peer at Penn State���s bitter rival, Pitt, Murray Chass, to write something similarly critical of his school���s basketball team in the form of an open letter to me. What I wrote in my column a few paragraphs after that lead sentence was even more critical: ���The quality of the basketball that we have seen in the last four years seems to have no more finesse and smoothness than a donkey basketball game... on the whole, Penn State basketball is not worth the floor it plays on.��� Wow. Just writing that now, I am still wondering why the players didn���t barge into the Collegian office and kick the crap out of me. They sure wanted to, as I found out a couple of days later, and was told again a few years ago by the star player of that 1958-59 team, a sophomore named Mark DuMars. Keep in mind that six years earlier, when I was a junior in a high school 90 miles away, Penn State went to the Final Four and finished third. No one knew it at the time, but the Lions would never go back to the Final Four. (They haven���t been back since, anyway.) In fact, Penn State has been in the NCAA tournament just nine times since 1942, and their past seven appearances were in 2011, 2001, 1996, 1991, 1965, 1955 and 1954. What led me to write my blistering column back then was not only the success of the 1953-54 team. I was also thinking back to the NCAA tournament teams of 1952 and 1955 and the moderate success the team enjoyed from 1950 through 1957, with just one losing season in that span. But after coach John Egli guided the 1955 team to an 18-10 record and an appearance in the regional tournament in his rookie season, Penn State went 12-14 in 1956, 15-10 in 1957 and 8-11 in 1958. The fans had shown their disgust, as crowds dwindled to about 1,000 at Rec Hall while the winning gymnastics and wrestling teams were drawing 4,000 to 5,000 on a regular basis. When my column was published, Egli���s team was 8-6, but many fans like me thought they played a bad brand of basketball. It was not only ���slow-moving and deliberate��� on offense and overly reliant on a zone on defense but also inconsistent and prone to frequent mental errors. This is how I described a game against Rutgers a few days earlier: ���It was a sloppy, hap-hazard, wild, clumsy and disgraceful exhibition. There were mistakes galore ��� i.e., bad passes, missed layup shots, wildthrowing, long set shots, dropped passes, double dribbling, steps, and above all an infinite number of mental errors.��� Ironically, in reading that today, I think the description would aptly fit a couple of the games I watched this season at the Bryce Jordan Center. But that is the subject for another day. Oh, I forgot to tell you. Penn State beat Rutgers, 75-56, and the 1959 team would go on to have an 11-9 record. So, what was I complaining about, right? ���Where can we put blame for basketball���s sad state on campus?��� I wrote toward the end of my column. ���Maybe it���s in John Egli���s coaching... Or maybe it���s the quality of players that come to State. We���re not knocking the current crop of Lions for their devotion, time and energy spent out on the court. But let���s face it, how many of them have the potential or reached the potential of play for a basketball power such as Kentucky, North Carolina State, West Virginia, etc.? And a University our size ��� 11th enrollment in the nation ��� should be up among the country���s best in sports. What we must need then, is either more scholarships or a new coach ��� maybe both.��� I went on to point out that only DuMars had close to a full scholarship. The others received partial aid, and the team���s second-best player, Wally Collendar, even had to pay out-of-state tuition. ���If it weren���t for the fraternity aid on housing, the scholarship program would be practically nil,��� I wrote. ���The fraternities pay part of the athletes��� room and board ��� the University pays the other half.��� And therein was the fundamental problem back then. Almost all the athletic scholarships went to the football team, and the other teams got the crumbs. It had been that way since 1949 when scholarships were reinstated after a 20-year drought.

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