College Basketball: Tiger in the Ivy

COLLEGE BASKETBALL

There are old grads who complain that nothing has been the same around Princeton since they started putting up those shiny glass buildings that ivy doesn’t grow on. They were desolated when blue jeans became acceptable attire at Old Nassau’s eating clubs, and they were appalled two weeks ago when state cops broke up a ring of marijuana-smoking undergraduates. But not everything at Princeton has gone to pot. Last week Princeton’s basketball team caged Harvard 90-46 for its twelfth victory in 13 games — and became the first Ivy League squad in 16 years to be ranked among the nation’s top ten.

It was high time that somebody spot ted the tiger in the Ivy. Two weeks ago, Princeton’s Tigers pulled off the coup of the season against previously undefeated, No. 3-ranked North Carolina. Bad weather forced cancellation of their flight south; so the Tigers rode a railroad coach for 101½ hours, arrived in Chapel Hill at 7:30 a.m. on the day of the game. They sank 65.5% of their shots to win 91-81. Coupled with last week’s victory over Harvard, that was enough to earn Princeton No. 7 position in the Associated Press rankings, No. 9 in the United Press International poll.

Tall & Talkative. All that recognition was almost too much for Princeton’s Willem H. van Breda Kolff, 44, although he is the third winningest coach in college basketball. “Butch” van Breda Kolff quit Princeton in 1947 after three years to play pro ball with the New York Knickerbockers, gave that up after three seasons to become a coach — at Lafayette, Hofstra, and then Princeton. In 16 seasons, his teams have won 294 games v. 106 losses—a record topped only by Kentucky’s Adolph Rupp and U.C.L.A.’s Johnny Wooden. Van Breda Kolff insists that Princeton is “just a smalltime outfit trying to get along”—thereby provoking exasperated snorts from opposing coaches who are forever losing top prospects to him.

Bill Bradley, for instance, had already enrolled at Duke before he decided to go to Princeton—because he wanted to become a Rhodes scholar and figured his chances were better in the Ivy League. Center Chris Thomforde, a 6-ft. 9-in. sophomore who is the team’s top scorer with an average of 15.9 points per game, fielded offers from several dozen colleges when he graduated from Long Island Lutheran High School in Brookville, N.Y.

What More? Van Breda Kolff insists that recruiting is easy at Princeton, which like all Ivy League schools does not give athletic scholarships. “I meet them, then let them stay with the boys in the dorms,” says Butch. “It works. Good school, good ball, good kids, what the hell more could they want?”

Butch’s casualness ends at the gym door. A fundamentalist who scoffs at patterned offenses (“I’d rather just play basketball”) and fancy zone defenses (“In a man-to-man defense, you know exactly who makes a mistake”), he is, according to one Tiger player, “the best coach in basketball—from Monday through Friday.” But when game time rolls around, he turns into a Tiger—screaming at his players, snarling at referees. A loss sends him into a paroxysm of frustration; even a victory leaves him wan and wet with perspiration. Not until the season is over and the pressure is off does Butch become a good guy again. Then he’s off to sing a chorus of the Cannon Song and hoist a glass with “my guys.”