Scorecard

QUESTION OF TASTE

The decision of the National Football League, of Pimlico racetrack and of some colleges to maintain weekend sports schedules as the people mourned the murder of President Kennedy shocked some sports fans. There were protests, and even hysterical threats of bombs and picketing.

All men are not alike in their sense of fitness. The games that were held were very well attended. It was, in the end, something that everyone had to decide for himself. No act of fiat—one way or the other—would have been an appropriate memorial for John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

OLD GUARD FIGHTS ON

Before the college basketball season even starts, the fight has begun over the method to be used in selecting the team that will represent the U.S. at the 1964 Olympics. Once again it is an NCAA-AAU battle.

In the past, the trials to select a team were heavily and, we believe, unfairly weighted in the AAU's favor. Three NCAA and three AAU teams participated despite the fact that about 90% of first-rate amateur basketball is played on college campuses. In addition, the selection committee had a disproportionate number of AAU members. Today, AAU basketball is just about dead. Only one major team is left from the National Industrial League, the Phillips 66ers. There is no real tournament to choose a champion. AAU basketball is pickup-team basketball.

Despite all this, the AAU is going to insist, at an Olympic Basketball Committee meeting next Sunday in Kansas City's Muehlebach Hotel, on the old trials system. It was unjust four years ago; it is idiotic now. But the AAU controls the committee.

With no real hope that our suggestion will be accepted, but simply because it makes sense, we urge that the man best qualified be put in charge of the trials and the selection of the U.S. team. He is the University of California's athletic director, Pete Newell, who knows more about basketball and international competition than all the AAU committeemen put together. And then some.

THE SPITTER (CONT.)

C. C. Johnson Spink, editor and publisher of baseball's Sporting News, recently queried the 20 general managers of major league baseball teams, asking each of them if he would be for or against legalization of the spitball in case the subject should come up at the forthcoming (Dec. 5-7) major league meetings in Los Angeles.