Blue White Illustrated

asketball at Penn State is practi- cally a lost art," declared the open- ing sentence of the sports editor's column in the student newspaper, The Daily Collegian. The young writer then quoted Web- ster's Dictionary to support his theory by defining the word "lost" as "offered without making an impression… ruined or destroyed physically… wasted… squandered." "That's exactly how we feel about basketball on campus," wrote the sports editor. Not much has changed, I thought, as I typed those paragraphs on my computer for this BWI column. Yes, those were my words, 56 years ago. There was no women's varsity team back then. It was strictly a men's game. In the intervening decades, the men's team has gone to five NCAA tourna- ments, reaching the Sweet 16 in 2001; played in the NIT 10 times, winning the championship in 2009; and posted win- ning records in 27 of 56 seasons with seven different head coaches. At the same time, no player has followed Jesse Arnelle as a first-team All-American and only six have been singled out as honorable mention All-Americans while just seven players have made it to the NBA. Talk about wasted and squandered. Don't take me wrong. I am a Penn State basketball fan, a season-ticket holder since 1997 after returning to State College. I want the team to make annual trips to the NCAA tournament and go to the Final Four. I want it to win the Big Ten title and be up there every year with conference power brokers Wisconsin, Michigan State, Indiana and Michigan. I want it to fill all those damn seats behind the black curtain in the upper level of the Bryce Jordan Center. I want the Penn State student section to be as intimidating as Michi- gan State's and Wisconsin's, harassing not only the opponents but those in- consistent referees who are too often either incompetent or biased. And most of all, I want those hard-working kids wearing those blue and white uniforms to leave Penn State as winners, not perennial losers. But after all these years, I'm not sure basketball will ever make the big time at Penn State. Maybe we're simply the In- diana of football. The legacy of great basketball at IU dates back to the early 20th century, just like Penn State's football legacy. IU football? Just think about it. The Hoosiers are the doormat of the Big Ten. Indiana has been a Big Ten member since 1900, and its only outright foot- ball championship was in 1945 when it finished 9-0-1. That team, featuring future Philadelphia Eagles All-Pro end Pete Pihos, is considered the best in school history. But those Hoosiers didn't even get invited to the Rose Bowl in 1945 or the other three postseason bowls then in existence. That was two years before the Rose Bowl began lock- ing in the Big Ten and Pac-8 champions for its annual New Year's Day game. At the end of the '45 season, Alabama played USC in the Rose Bowl. Indiana did earn a piece of the 1967 Big Ten championship, sharing the crown with Minnesota and Purdue at 6- 1 in conference play. With a 9-1 overall record and No. 4 ranking in the Associ- ated Press poll, those Hoosiers repre- sented the conference in the 1968 Rose Bowl. They lost to No. 1 USC, 14-3, as the Trojans sealed the national champi- onship. I root for the IU football and basket- ball teams except when they play Penn State. My oldest daughter met her hus- band at Indiana, and one of the players on the Hoosiers' 1967 Rose Bowl team, David Evans, became a friend of mine in Washington when he was a practicing attorney. My son-in-law and Evans are from the same hometown, Warsaw, Ind., between Fort Wayne and South Bend. They bleed cream and crimson like I bleed blue and white. We have a similar quandary. I want Penn State basketball up there with the big boys, and they want IU football up there, too. Frankly, back in the late 1950s, I didn't know how good we Penn State basket- ball fans had it. The Lions had made one NCAA appearance in 1942 before coach Elmer Gross took them to the tourna- ment in '52 and then to the Final Four in '54, upsetting highly ranked LSU and Notre Dame to get there. Gross's assis- tant John Egli succeeded him the next season, and Penn State was back in the NCAA tournament before losing to No. 2 Kentucky in its third game. That's pretty heady competition, then and now. Egli's second year was Penn State's first losing season since 1950-51 at 12- 14. A 15-10 record followed in 1957 and 8-11 in '58. When my "lost art" column was published on Feb. 19, 1959, Egli's team was 8-6 with six games remaining. The Lions would eventually split those games and finish with an 11-9 record. What I didn't realize then was how lit- tle financial assistance basketball had been getting from the athletic adminis- tration. It's still difficult to believe that many of the basketball players in the 1950s were on football scholarships, including Arnelle, the greatest player in school history. My friend Herm Sledzik, cap- tain of the 1953 team, was the first bas- ketball player to receive full financial aid as a freshman in 1949-50. He called it a scholarship, but I'm not so sure it was, Seeking victory in Penn State's perpetual uphill battle B

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