Tribute from Philly

The following column appeared in The Philadelphia Bulletin after the Dartmouthbasketball team played Penn at the Palestra. It is a warm tribute to the IndianSquad from an impartial observer.

If Dartmouth men are popping top buttons off their vests these days, there's a good reason for it. Their basketball team is enough to make even the most modest alumnus a bit chesty.

A Palestra press box remark that Dartmouth was a good team having a great night seemed to me to be an understatement. To this observer, the boys from Hanover as they played against Penn, gave no indication of being merely good. They were never less than great.

This Dartmouth squad has everything an old grad would want of his college in athletics. Above all else, from the coach to the substitutes, it has class both in action and in appearance.

It's as fine a looking group as I've ever seen assembled on one squad. Only a few are dark, but they're all tall and handsome —and well-built. You get the impression even before the whistle that these kids have something on the ball. They had plenty, particularly in the first few minutes, as Penn discovered.

NOT MERELY TALL BOYS

Cowles' collegians are all tall, but unlike most of the so-called big fellows of basketball, they are built in proportion to their height. For instance,-Jim Olsen, tallest of the squad, is 6 feet, 5 inches by 200 pounds.

Furthermore those Dartmouth boys are really athletes, not merely tall boys whose main qualification for the game is ability 10 reach higher into the stratosphere than the majority of their opponents.

They move with the easy grace of coordination and balance. They are fast starters and very clever at faking the direction of their dribble and the angle of their shots. They all but faked Penn's players, Larry Davis excepted, out of the Palestra. Davis, graduate of Bill Anderson's school of defense, is a fundamentally sound guard, as tough to fool as anyone in the league.

Excellent shots tool Their scoring took your breath in the early minutes when they sank eight of 11 shots. No team could be as good as they were at the start, but even when they settled down to what appeared to be their par they still bore the mark of greatness.

Dartmouth is also unusual in the sense that the team pays some attention to defense. Most of the high-scoring squads neglect defense almost entirely, but anytime a basket is made against Cowles's

quintet it is well earned Dartmouth has an oversupply of what it takes to win in college basketball..