Hot Rod And The Best

The College of William and Mary basketball team was going no place last season. Then one day in January its members stepped into the field house at West Virginia University an hour before game time and found a crowd of 6,100—as large as the field house would hold—packed tight and screaming. The William and Mary boys gleefully repaired to the locker room and got ready for fame, which would follow immediately after the preliminary game involving the West Virginia freshmen.

Their great day never came. As they emerged from the locker room the West Virginia varsity also walked out on the floor—and the crowd walked out of the building. Warm-up was accompanied by a steady march of the customers for the exits. The William and Mary players looked at each other in bewilderment, but down court the West Virginia varsity, an equally ordinary team, was neither mystified, disturbed nor distracted. When Hot Rod Hundley turned out for freshman basketball the varsity had to get used to the comings and goings—mostly goings—of West Virginians.

Hundley is a sophomore now and attendance habits in the hills around Morgantown are respectable again. West Virginia may not have the team of former years but it has, unquestionably, the most colorful and controversial college player in the country. What is questionable about Hot Rod is whether he is the best.

There are a few extremists around West Virginia who are already calling Hundley the greatest basketball player who ever lived. Others, less carried away, merely call him the best they have seen. Lou Eisenstein, an NBA referee who watched some of Hundley's freshman games, was of the opinion even then that he could make any professional team in the country.

Hundley's less rapturous critics—and he does have less rapturous critics—fault him on two counts. They detect a laxity in his attitude toward defensive play, and they look with definite, unconcealed misgiving on an almost irresistible urge Hundley has to show off. This last is too much for one leading coach who confesses, "Thank God I don't have to handle him."

Hundley's showmanship is probably incurable. As a schoolboy he picked out two idols, Goose Tatum of the Harlem Globetrotters and Bob Cousy of the Boston Celtics. Most of the year around he worked at acquiring Tatum's genius for deceptive ball handling and some of Cousy's competitive guile. The results haven't always been successful. With the freshmen last year Hundley was often so tricky that his own teammates couldn't stay with him. A man who had gotten himself into the clear without realizing it was liable to be smacked in the head by a pass from Hundley, who most likely was looking the other way, busily occupied faking two other men out of position at the time he let the ball go.

There were other drawbacks, too. Everybody on the freshman and varsity teams began to imitate Hot Rod and it got so that the players were more interested in throwing passes behind their backs and dribbling with their knees than they were in shooting. The knee dribbling fortunately ended when an official in one game decided the maneuver was illegal, but West Virginia is still rife with almost-good continued on page 25 behind-the-back passers, and as everybody knows, there is nothing quite so terrible as a man who hasn't quite mastered the technique.

West Virginia's new basketball coach, Fred Schaus, insists though that the faults are all things that can be corrected in time. Hundley has been playing on a bad knee that was operated on at the beginning of this season and the one thing he hasn't been able to do effectively is guard. Schaus, a fine defensive man himself for five years in the NBA with Ft. Wayne and New York, thinks that when Hundley has recovered he will be as good as any defensively.

Offensively, what the fans see in Hundley is a man who can do practically everything. Most players who specialize in ball handling are indifferent scorers. Hundley as a freshman averaged 35 points a game, and in six games he didn't even try to score. Against varsity competition he is averaging 22.4 points a game.

THE PERFECTIONIST