April 2, 1946.

Yr. Bob Switger, Sports Editor,
The Daily Register-Mail,

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I em sending you tear sheets from GC. E. MoBride's sport colum
in the Kansas Gity Star as of Friday and Saturday, Maroh 30 and 51. He
forgot to mention that the games were all played on a gonarete floor, and
the six-by-sixes whieh supported the basket and the backboard were set
right in a hole drilled in the concrete. The endline was then in line
with the back of the backstop, and the posts put in rather hurriedly for
the tournament were not wrapped, so the sharp odges caught many of the
players driving in under the basket.

No basketball games had been played in this Convention Hall
previously, and the whole set-up was entirely new, At that time there
were no elbow pads or knee guards used, end you oan quite imagine after
a three-game tournament on successive nights just the condition of the
players' elbows and knees. They were just a mass of raw beefateak. And
the games wers rough, too. ee

I sometimes think of how the boys complain about the roughness
of the geme now, with their normal protegtion that sanity has dictated. _
" @here is one other angle. I do not want to make 1% sound like
bossting, but I practionlly single-handedly got basketball to the Olympic
Games at Berlin in 1936. I made an effort to have basketball inoluded as
@ demonstration sport in the Olympic Games at Los Angeles and came having
near success until they promoted a football game, and of course there was
much more money in that. Zesh host country is permitted to have a demon-
stration game for the entertainment of the visitors. Basketball had not
at that time cooupied a prominent place on the Const, so it was difficult

to get it over.

: : I proposed that they build an outdoor basketball court in seotions
and use the Coliseum for the seating capacity, and play the game out of .

- doors, much as the Olympic Games wore at St. Louis when the Buffalo Germans
were there. But the football-minded prevailed, and while there I conferred
with Sohaku Ri of Watseka University, Tokyo, and some of the German pleni-
potentiaries. The Japs were strong for it. Dr. Karl Diem, when he got.
back to Germany, notified me that basketball had been ineluded in the games.
Of course, I had done a lot of work with the other foreign oomtries, and
the people here were much surprised because Dr. Diem notified m= three days
in advance of any of the other American officials. 7

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