BREAD AND BUTTER BASKETBALL.

By Alvin F. "Doggie" Julian. EnglewoodCliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1960.334 pp. $5.35.

This month Alvin F. "Doggie" Julian observes the start of his tenth season as head basketball coach at Dartmouth, and it is particularly appropriate that the occasion be marked by the publication of his remarkable book on the game, Bread and ButterBasketball.

Over the past nine seasons Doggie's Big Green teams have won 151 games, lost 113, and since 1956 have captured three Ivy League titles. Drawing upon this Dartmouth coaching experience and his fourteen previous years of coaching at Muhlenberg, Holy Cross, and with the Boston Celtics, Julian has compiled a book which should rapidly become a "bible" for anyone who wants to coach basketball and, for that matter, for everyone who is interested in the sport.

Certainly this is a technical book. The 197 diagrams and the detailed chapters treating all aspects of the game from his twenty-six "magic rules" to the intricacies of offensive and defensive patterns and plays, the daily outline of practice schedules, the detailed scouting reports, and the analyses of game procedures leave little doubt of this. The technical nature of the book is further evidenced by the fact that PrenticeHall has chosen to publish this as a selection of their Coaches Book Club.

Yet the down-to-earth qualities, the flashes of humor, the driving love for the game, and the warm affection and respect for his players that has so endeared "Doggie" to all Dartmouth men make this an extremely interesting and readable work. Julian will break into the most technical dissertation with an anecdote, which vividly illustrates his point; and his pet phrases such as "french pastry," "scrambled eggs," "you look like the Keystone cops," and, of course, "bread and butter" resound throughout - just as they must be indelibly etched in the minds of all who have played for him.

Bread and Butter Basketball in part is the inside story of Dartmouth basketball for the past nine seasons. Doggie's dressing room "pep" talks, the story of Rudy LaRusso's "Rebounder's Union" (eight rebounds a night to qualify), the warmth of the hand-clasped huddle mingled with the secret of Dartmouth's "person-to-person" defense, and the tensions that build with a winning, tournament-bound team are all here.

But underlying the technicalities, the anecdotes, the humor, is a philosophy of coaching - of working with young men - that sets the book apart and gives it a rare and important quality.

"I think we coaches can help take the softness out of youth growth and substitute a strong physical, mental and moral fibre," writes Julian. "Let's teach these boys team play, responsibility, sportsmanship, quick thinking, the overcoming of fear, and the various physical skills which will benefit them all through their lives."

If you want to know what goes into winning basketball, if you even want to watch basketball intelligently, this book is must reading. But beyond this, it is an unforgettable autobiographical portrait of a coach and gentleman to whom Dartmouth and Dartmouth men will always be indebted.