Sport: Little Rhody

Last week the directors of Manhattan’s Madison Square Garden met to celebrate: they had just paid off a $3,000,000 motgage. For this they could thank hockey and boxing, Garden mainstays for the past 15 years. They could also thank college basketball, built up by a young Manhattan sportswritter name Ned Irish into the Garden’s best crowd-puller.

For six years new Yorkers have seen the best college basketball in the country. They have seen the champions of the Big Six, Big Seven, Big Ten, the best of the South, West, Southwest. They have seen smooth-clicking Kansas (coached by Phog Allen, the Knute Rockne of basketball) and towering Oregon, a team of super-six footers, whose 6 ft. 7 in. centre can reach eleven feet into the air. But the team 16,000 fans turned out to see last week just on the most exciting show in the Garden’s history.

For conservative New England came Rhode Island State, an up-&-coming agricultural college, to make its debut in the Big Time. New York fans had heard fantastic tales about Little Rhody. It boasted the highest-scoring basketball team in the U. S. Its coach Oldtimer Frnak Keaney, taught a razzle-dazzle game based on a simple formula: “Just let the kids shoot baskets— the defense will take care of itself.” One of Keaney’s boys, StanleyModzelewski, had scored a record 509 points in 22 games last year. Little Rhody had lost only twelve games in the last five years, had already won nine straight this season.

Last week in the Garden, Keaney’s sharpshooters played St. Francis College, highest scorers (per game) in metropolitan New York. Keaney’s son, the team’s captain, was rumored to be bigger than the State of Rhode Island. He proved to stand only 6 ft. 4 and weigh only 270 Ib. What he could do on a basketball court looked problematical to most fans. But they soon found out : hovering under the St. Francis basket, young Keaney snatched every ball off the backboard, heaved it the length of the court to his teammates, clustered around their own basket.

In the first four minutes of play the Rhode Islanders scored 12 points, in ten minutes they scored 25. By half time (20 minutes), they led 42-10-28 — a new record for the Garden. In the second half, the Keaneymen, either overconfident or scared of their own feat, missed basket after basket. Nevertheless, at the final buzz they were still in front, 57-10-42.

“Most coaches hate the way we play,” drawled Coach Keaney. “But we play a spectators’ game.” Sixteen thousand goggle-eyed fans agreed.