BASKETBALL
Let's face it. This was the worst basketball season in thirty years. Your correspondent has been delving gloomily through the archives and has found that the last time Dartmouth finished with a won and lost record (8 won and 17 lost this year) as bad as this one was the 1920 season, when the Green quintet completed the season with a score of 5 victories and 20 defeats. By a strange coincidence, 1920 was also the last time Dartmouth finished in the cellar of the Eastern Intercollegiate League. In that distant winter, the Green had a league record of 1 victory and 9 defeats. This year, with the League enlarged, the record was 1 victory and 11 defeats. Since then, we have won the League championship in 1927, 1938, 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944, and 1946. The stretch from 1938-44 constitutes a record for consecutive titles won by any team. But the 1950 season was not one of them.
The team started the season in a blaze of glory by nosing out Cornell in its first league encounter, thereby establishing its lone league victory. Since that time, as chronicled in our last dispatch, things have grown gradually worse. The last home game (a non-league encounter with Brown) saw only 300 clients in the stands, a situation unprecedented in modern Dartmouth basketball. This was the last home game for Captain Emil Hudak, Red Rowe, Wes Field, and Dick Buckley, all stalwarts for three years of court battles. The undergraduates observed this mass valedictory by staying away in large numbers. To borrow a phrase from our esteemed poet, T. S. Eliot, this season ended "not with a bang but a whimper."
Misfortune came late in the season, not in individual doses but in great gobs. Bill Biggs, who had been the leading Dartmouth scorer in league encounters, injured his knee in one of the later contests and thereby missed the last several games. Sophomore Len Hedberg went on probation at midsemester. Dick Buckley sprained his ankle. Captain Emil Hudak broke a blood vessel in his knee in the Brown game. And so it went. In terms of personnel, the sole bright spot in the waning weeks was the rapid development of sophomore John McDonald, who spelled Red Rowe at center and gave considerable promise of becoming a formidable figure under the basket.
In short, this is a season which everybody will be happy to see vanish into the limbo of the record books. It is definitely nobody's fault, but the boys just didn't have it. In the circumstances, the only thing to do is to dwell nostalgically upon the past, upon the great days of Dartmouth basketball, when the Green was feared and respected up and down the Atlantic seaboard and points west. There are other years.
