Sport: Cowboys v. Indians

Basketball’s craziest year wound up with the wildest week in the history of the game.

Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden, high temple of the sport, had jammed in 378,000, smashed all its own records for basketball crowds. But what had gone before was a tranquil June day compared with the March-madness whistled up in the Garden last week by the play-offs for the national championship.

For the eight nights of play 135,000 stormed the Garden. The players staged some of the closest and most exciting play ever seen in a tournament. When, at the final game’s hysterical finish, a Red Cross man appealed for blood donors, a voice in the audience cried hoarsely: “I could use some right now myself!”

The Slim Boys. The outfit that set the crowd afire was Brooklyn’s St. John’s, whose scrawny Jewish-Italian “Indians” looked nothing like a team of destiny until they had fought to the top of the National Invitation Tournament.

The St. John’s player who commanded most of the crowd’s attention was long-necked, jut-elbowed Center Harry (“Big Boy”) Boykoff, 6 ft. 9, the tournament’s tallest. When the Big Boy took wing up-court, he looked like a heron in full flight. When it came to playing basketball, there was nothing awkward about Coach Lapchick’s team—or about the way Boykoff reached above the basket to bat out opponents’ certain scores.*

The Cowboys. After knocking out Rice, Fordham and Toledo in the National Invitation, St. John’s still had to beat the winner of the National Collegiate A.A. tournament—Wyoming’s Cowboys.

Like St. John’s, whose basketball more than supports all other sports, Wyoming is a basketball college and this was its biggest year. To match the Indians’ Boykoff, the Cowboys had 6 ft. 7 Milo Komenich, like Boykoff one of the season’s leading scorers (401 points) and one of the few Eiffel-tower basketballers who can really play the game. The Cowboys also had a supporting cast all at least 6 ft. 3—with one exception. The exception, a little dynamo named Kenny Sailors, made it tough for St. John’s.

The Small Boy. While Giants Boykoff (17 points) and Komenich (20 points) battled each other almost to a standoff, Sailors was all over the court, again & again drove like a P-38 through the St. John’s team to pour the ball through the basket. With two minutes to play, St. John’s, eight points behind, seemed beaten. But it was not quite.

Fighting furiously for the ball, the Indians began to close the margin; with 30 seconds left, fiery little Hyman Gotkin stole the ball from a Wyoming player, passed down the floor and amid the wildest pandemonium the Garden has ever seen, tied the score for St. John’s just before the whistle blew. Big Boy Boykoff picked up Teammate Gotkin in his arms, ran shouting up & down the floor with him.

But in the five-minute overtime period Wyoming anticlimactically picked up the ball and threw in five points to win, 52-to-47. By that time the crowd was beyond all feeling.

*Alarmed because this practice, called “goal tending,” threatens to turn the game over to circus giants, whether or not they can play basketball, the National Basketball Committee last week decided to bar it next season.