Basketball

Dartmouth no w is sitting on top of the league, with victories over both Pennsylvania and Yale, and friends, it begins to look as though we were to ha ve a real basketball team this year.

The Big Green hung up some sort of record by going down to Philadelphia and trouncing Pennsylvania by a 30-21 score. It seems to me that there has always been a bone of contention about this game, for year after year Dartmouth opens the league season away from home, and during the same period, the Red and Blue always starts the Green off on the wrong foot by beating them in this game.

So Dolly Stark sprang a surprise. The five men who started the game finished it, and not a single substitute was needed. These men deserve some sort of honorable mention, so here is the list:

Capt. Gray Magee, a Los Angeles boy who simply could not find himself during his sophomore year, played infrequently but well his junior year, and now captains the team brilliantly. Eddie Picken, who was always under the disadvantage of being known as "Jimmy Pieken's brother," but who by his performance against Yale showed himself to be one of the best defensive guards to step on the Hanover floor. Irving Kramer, normally a guard, but playing center in the absence of Harold Mackey. Lauri Myllykangas, whom headline writers for years have been trying to cram into a single-line head, leading pitcher in the Eastern Intercollegiate Baseball league, and now carrying on in basketball. Ben Burch, former freshman captain and a flashy shooter.

That is the cast of the drama of Pennsylvania, when the Red and Blue went down. Then this victory was followed by a rousing 29-27 affair with Yale which left everyone, including the referees, hanging on the ropes when it was all over.

The above cast did not function together in this game, and things started off quite dubiously. Suddenly Mackey and Jack Smart, both sophomores, were put into the game, and from then on things began to hum. Dartmouth was down 12-3 when the fun started, and it is a fact that they never passed Yale in the scoring until Ed Picken shot a goal with only three minutes to play!

Then, in those three minutes, Dartmouth protected a one-point lead no less than seven times,the end of the game showingboth Myllykangas and Beane of Y ale shooting double fouls. To cap this tumult, I saw the weirdest shot I ever hope to see and which was really crucial.

Mind you, Dartmouth won this game by only two points. McGowan of Yale took a long try at the basket, and the ball seemed ready to go in when it bounced on the hoop. It bounced slightly again, and then came to rest, suspended on the hoop and directly over the basket! There was a mad turmoil under the Yale basket, but the ball merely hung suspended there with all three officials blowing their whistles to stop the play. Finally someone dashed out from the bench with another ball and the original ball was dislodged. If that ball had dropped through, I don't know what the outcome of the game would have been.

Yale played without Albie Booth. He was taken sick on the train coming up here, and before the game felt pretty low. Even at that, after the Yale team had finished its practise, Albie appeared from one side of the floor garbed in an immense fur coat and made a dramatic entrance to the Yale bench, on which he sat the entire game. I talked with Albie immediately after the game, and he was feeling quite blue, although he reassured me that it would be a different story down at Yale, a fact on which I could wish him no luck.

There was no single hero in this game, which is a healthy fact. It has been a char- acteristic of Dolly Stark's teams that there shall be many interchangeable positions; that is, no one combination is used all of the time. There is no keener student of league competition than Dolly, and he seems to have a player to fit the opponents in every game. This time Harold Mackey considerably pepped up the proceedings, and Wild Bill McCall tried innumerable dashes through the entire Yale team. McCall was not used at all against Penn, but somehow the sight of a Yale jersey makes him play all the harder, and he simply slipt the Yale team all up.

With Albie in there might have been a different story. Yale's Ed Horwitz is the individual star of the league, and he has been accustomed to having the Yale midget as a running mate in every game so far this year, and the sudden before-the-game change might have had an effect upon his playing.