Sport: Basketball, Pfd.

West Virginia University has a funny-looking basketball team. In a sport where height pays off, it has only one player over 6 ft., Rudy Baric, right guard. Roger Hicks, left forward, is little larger or huskier than a jockey, while Scotty Hamilton, the other forward, is a real fat boy. Compared to most, Center Dick Kesling is virtually a runt. The team’s gold-and-blue shirts have white jersey half-sleeves like those worn by British track athletes and give the impression that they were run up by the players’ mothers or that the boys forgot to remove their underwear. Coach Dyke Raese is a dead ringer for Hollywood’s Humphrey Bogart.

But there is nothing funny about West Virginia’s performance. In the National Invitation Tournament at Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden which ended last week, little Hicks whisked in shot after shot from mid-floor, fat Hamilton tore around like a wide-open fire engine setting up plays in rich profusion, Kesling was superb at swooping through and sinking layups, and at tournament’s end the assembled coaches voted Baric the most valuable player on any of the eight teams competing.

West Virginia knocked over Long Island University, last year’s winner and this year’s favorite, in the first round. Meantime Omaha’s Jesuit-run Creighton University had eliminated the giant skygacks of West Texas State (TIME, Feb. 16) and were in turn eliminated by Coach Uncle Ed Diddle’s Western Kentucky State boys, who had already put out the smart metropolitan champs from the City College of New York. Seven of the eight games in the tournament were upsets.

The finals were a race between two completely dark horses. Outsped, outreached, outbrawned by Western Kentucky, West Virginia trailed at half-time 32-24, stayed behind for 35 of the 40 minutes, though never by more than eight points. But where they were short on sinew the Mountaineers more than made up with heart. With the score at 45-all and 20 seconds left to play, little Hicks sank the winning foul shot. As the timekeeper’s buzzer went off, Hamilton was fouled and sank another.

Great Day for the Irish. The twitching, pop-eyed fans who shrieked through that final game numbered 18,251; for the tournament’s four nights of doubleheaders: 70,070. Tickets sold from 75¢ to $2.50. Madison Square Garden stages a couple of dozen games a year, 18 intercollegiate doubleheaders. Crowds always average better than 15,000. Last year 241,000 paid to get in.

Dreamer-up and director of this big business is bald, bespectacled Ned Irish, a mild, well-mannered, colorless man of 35, who looks more like a high-school Latin teacher than the spittoon-bombarding type of promoter. Ned Irish never owned a camel’s-hair coat. After graduating from Penn, he wrote college sports first for Philadelphia newspapers, then on the World-Telegram. Assigned in the early ’30s to cover a basketball game in Manhattan College’s minuscule gym, he found the doors locked when he got there and such a crowd outside he couldn’t even get to the doors to pound. Filled with a cub’s do-or-die spirit, he climbed through a window and tore his pants. That clinched it. Why shouldn’t basketball get a better break?

When in 1932 the Garden was approached with the idea of staging two basketball games for the Mayor’s Unemployment Relief Fund, the boys were baffled. In their book, basketball was something played by girls in bloomers. But that winter New York’s streets were filled with shivering men peddling apples, so Ned had his innings. When he sold $15,000 worth of tickets, you could have knocked the boys over with an apple core. In 1934 he put on his first big-time fixture: N.Y.U. v. Notre Dame, and the customers have been coming ever since.

By a fortunate coincidence, just about the time Irish got basketball going at the Garden, a West Virginian named Clair Bee took over basketball coaching at Brooklyn’s Long Island University. L.I.U. basketball teams have always been excellent, sometimes terrific; they have won the Invitation Tournament twice and played two seasons undefeated. Bee’s boys, with their tremendous local draw, have been a solid anchor to windward for Irish.

Big Ten teams have played at the Garden in the past, but this season they preferred to keep in their own bailiwicks. The Ivy League does not play in the Garden, considering that the game is overemphasized there. Overemphasized or not, they are fine shows that Ned Irish produces. This year, while the finals were being played, a lady in a box narrowly escaped being slugged by her husband because in her excitement she tore handfuls of mink from her mink coat.