Little Pal On The Dead Run

While the Big Town and the big arena did not appear to create any emotional problems for Lennie, they did for Davidson. Despite Lennie's familiar face and whistle and their own high national ranking (now fifth), the Davidson team, making the school's first basketball appearance in New York, had a bad case of twitching tummy. Fred Hetzel, the big Davidson pivot man who is one of the year's collegiate stars, was timid, and under the boards two equally large but less-publicized and less-tense NYU players rapped him smartly and handled him well. The presence of Hetzel brought up the question of whether or not officials are influenced by pregame reputations of either teams or individuals.

"No," said Lennie. "You can't anticipate calls. It's not what they've done, it's what they do the night you got them. Hetzel I've seen before, and I remember him not because he's such a hot shot but because he is a real nice boy. He puts out the whole way, but he hardly ever opens his mouth. When a boy like that does say something, he may have a point. Some of them are different—always testing you. I'm working in the Midwest once and one of them's got a real ace. He's with the pros now. His team gets fouled—not this kid—but he's the one that steps up to take the free throw. I said, 'Pal, here's the ball, but if you shoot it, it's a technical. What are you trying to pull?' He gives it a big grin. 'Just seeing if you knew, baby,' he says.

"There's another one, he's always giving it that big 'who me?' act when you nail him. One night he really raps this other kid, sends him halfway up the bleachers, but it's, 'Who me, ref?', when I tell him to put up his hand. 'Pal,' I say, 'I may be blind, but I'm not deaf.' All you need is ears to call that kind."

Nervous Davidson eventually got the job done, and calm Lennie got his done, too. Madison Square Garden had been just like Iowa City. But the next morning was different. It broke foggy over Manhattan, and Lennie woke with travel jitters. "This is the kind of day they close down that La Guardia," he said. "I'm going to call the bus and train first, just in case. Let's get out of this town, quick." As it turned out, things were not quite that bad. By nap time Lennie was safely bedded down in a hotel room a mile or so from where George Washington was to play West Virginia. It is to be hoped he slept well, because four hours later he was a smallish man attempting to stand very tallish while several thousand George Washington fans shouted the kind of things that would chill a fellow right through his long underwear and liniment. With 30 seconds left and West Virginia down by three and surely beaten, Lennie had called a charging foul against GW. This put West Virginia in the game again. There was bedlam, but Wirtz stood unperturbed at the foul circle as though listening to soothing music. A quip made earlier in the week was recalled: "If a conference dumps me, pal, it's going to be for the ones I call, not the ones I don't see. I'll go out with the whistle blowing." The whole hullabaloo lasted no longer than it took for George Washington to win anyway, and it was back to the Washington airport, the fourth visit there in three days, and a midnight flight to Ypsilanti, Mich.

"Pal, we're home," said Lennie the next afternoon, speaking figuratively of the Big Ten and waving an expansive hand at the 9,000 fans jammed into the field house in Ann Arbor for the 2 o'clock Michigan- Illinois game. "It's old," Lennie said of the cavernous gymnasium, "but it still looks good to me. Even that floor on stilts." (The Ann Arbor court is raised a foot or so above the cinders of the field house.) "Once I was working on another of these up-in-the-air jobs. I'm the lead official. I hook under the basket and look around for my partner, I don't see him at all. He'd fallen off the floor. The kids in the stands had caught him and wouldn't let him back. We had to sort of bargain with them."

Everything about basketball at Michigan these days is very big—crowds, national ranking (No. 1) and the players. Buntin, Russell, Tregoning, Darden, Pomey are not only high but wide enough to create a fair zone defense by just standing still on the court. "Lennie," a friend said before the game, "if you get trapped between two of those boys, all they'll find is your whistle."

"I'm little but I'm shifty," Lennie said. "You know, I've only been caught good once. Dave DeBusschere, when he was playing in college in Detroit, came into me on the blind side of a pivot. If he hadn't had good reflexes and held me up, I'd have landed in Windsor."

A few moments later, after an offensive charging foul had been called on Cazzie Russell, the darling of the Michigan crowd, a student stood up at the edge of the floor and shouted, "Ref, if you had another eye you'd be Cyclops," hardly the kind of remark-to address to that fleet-footed pillar of Mount Healthy, Ohio, Leonard Wirtz. Shortly thereafter, when Russell drew another foul, Dave Strack, the Michigan coach, turned and began to hammer the bench with his fists. He drew a long look from the officials but no technical foul, splintering the bench apparently not being regarded as "an indication of protest." By and large, however, it was not an ornery crowd, since Michigan led most of the way. Both teams did very well at what they did best: Illinois running and Michigan rebounding. At the end Michigan had jumped six points better than Illinois ran. With the final horn, Lennie Wirtz was off the floor, through the crowd and heading for the dressing room like a forward driving in for a layup. His intention was to get to Detroit's Metropolitan Airport in 45 minutes, return to Mount Healthy that night and spend a full day at home. On Monday he was leaving for St. Louis, and then Richmond.

"Pal," Lennie asked, stuffing his striped shirt into his bag and closing it, all in one practiced motion, "how many whistles was it for the week?"

After a six-game, six-day, 3,000-mile tour such valuable information requires some computation, I said.