a

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Coach ** Phog”’ Allen and his six-foot-seven center,
Al Wellhausen, experimenting with the ten and
twelve foot baskets.

beat a bitter rival in the final championship game by

suddenly producing an awesome giant—as I remember
he was an eight-footer—who did little else in the game
than stand under his own basket with his hands upraised
and batted the ball off the rim of the hoop every time the
enemy shot. It was very exciting, and the fact that such
a procedure has always been illegal under the rules did not

I ONCE read a short story in which a basketball coach

dismay the author at all. His facts, indeed, were stranger

than his fiction.

There wasn’t any fiction about his tall boy: we see some
pretty big ones here in the Midwest. I’ve had some of
them playing for me at the University of Kansas. One
year I kept my eye all season on the freshman team, watch-
ing the development of the center, Harry Kersenbrock,
who stood, barefooted, just a quarter of an inch under
seven feet. But we lost a fine lad when he was drowned
the summer before his sophomore year. One of the
Indiana universities a few years back had a player so tall
they couldn’t get him into a Pullman berth. The problem
was solved finally by taking out the end board of an upper
berth, permitting the player’s legs to extend into the
adjoining upper, and he was able to get a fair night’s rest.

Last_season Dick Wells, my center, was the midget of

the Big Six Conference, with his six feet one and a half
inches. He was topped by every other jumper in the
league. The rest of them ranged from six feet three and a
half up to six feet four and a half—and they were really
not big as big boys go. This season Kansas is back into the
skyscraper competition with a six-foot-seven center.

 

COUNTRY GENTLEMAN

Late last winter, on a basketball coach’s
vacation, I went to Kansas City to witness
the National A. A. U. basketball tournament,
which has been held there in Convention Hall
for several years, and I saw what looked like
a dream-come-true to a basketball coach—
whole droves of stretchy six-footers, and they
had power and speed to go with the height.
Five men in that tournament were over six feet
six; two of them ran up to six feet eight.

FIVE PROPOSED CHANGES |

ANY of those tournament players were

i ex-college stars, seasoned veterans who
knew how to handle the ball, and I expected to
get a great thrill watching them play, yet I
had a strong sense of disappointment in one
important phase of the games. Those tall fel-
lows were leaping at the ten-foot baskets and
were literally “‘dunking” the ball into the
hoop, just as a doughnut is inelegantly dipped
into the morning coffee. And I say that is not
basketball. My conception of the game is
that goals should be shot and not dunked.

I’m not picking on those fine tournament
players. Our big college boys are doing it, and
I’m teaching my beanpoles to tally that way,
as other coaches are doing. It is a fair way to
score under the present rules, and there is no
sense in trying a hard way when there is this
easier and surer short cut to the pay-off.

Yet I would like to ask coaches, officials,
players and spectators this question: Should
height, figured by itself, carry such a premium
as it does now? Isn’t the game penalizing the
fine players who fall below the six-foot mark?
I’ve thought for several years now that the
tall man has an unearned advantage and I had
that in mind when, not long back, I offered to
the rules committee the suggestion that bas-
kets be raised to twelve feet.

I want it understood that I am not trying
to eliminate the tall man from the game. Un-
der any conditions I’ll take a good big man
over a good little man, merely because he is
a bigger dish of a good thing. But I would
like to see a tall man forced to shoot his bas-
kets the same as a short man. The twelve-foot
basket would level them off.

We have experimented with the higher baskets here
at Kansas for two years, and the results have been inter-
esting to observers. But before discussing our findings I
want to list other changes I have offered for considera-
tion. Some of them, perhaps, will seem radical to stu-
dents of the game, but in my opinion they have merit.

I would move the backboards into the court to a dis-
tance of six feet. They are now two feet from the end lines.

I would permit an offended team to throw for the
basket in the half of the court where the foul was com-
mitted.

I would have all jump balls taken to one of three spots
on the playing floor—the two foul-shooting marks and
the center spot. Around two-foot circles at these points I
would have six-foot circles to hold other players away
from the jumpers until the ball is tapped.

I would change the scoring of field goals to three points,
the free throw remaining at one.

If it seems to some that a reformer wants to tamper

with a successful game, I want to say that I love the game

as only a person can who has played it and coached it for
more than twenty-seven years. To me it’s the greatest
game of them all. Knute Rockne loved to roast me about
basketball. He used to say: “‘Phog, there are two great
athletic games that I don’t care for, and basketball is both
of them.” But of course to ‘‘Rock”’ there always was but
one game.

In proposing these changes I am not seeking a vicarious
method of turning losers into winners, for we have at
Kansas won championships in our Conference twelve out

February, 1935

DUNKING ISN’T
BASKETBALL

by FORREST C. (PHOG) ALLEN

Director of Athletics and Basketball Coach, University of Kansas

of the past seventeen seasons, and we have won con-
sistently against outside big-time competition. There
isn’t an ‘Allen System”’ in basketball in the sense that
there is a Warner System and a Notre Dame System in
football; but if you will pardon the pride, I want to men-
tion that my players have gone out to high coaching posi-
tions—to Nebraska, Stanford, Kentucky, Northwestern,
Tulane, Iowa State, and to a host of smaller colleges and
high schools.

As a coach I may possibly lose my “‘curve,” as the
saying is, if the game is changed; maybe it will hurt us at
Kansas. I still favor one and all of the changes proposed.

If you think a game is inviolate, consider the one that
Gen. Abner Doubleday built, in 1839, on the flimsy
foundation of One Old Cat and some 4000 years of harum-
scarum hitting of some sort of ball with some sort of club.
There have been dozens of changes in baseball. In com-
parison, basketball has changed but little.

A baseball writer was kind enough to dig out for me a
list of changes that have been made in our national game,
some of them probably familiar to fans, but most of them
were new to me. In 1845, for instance, the pitching
distance was forty-five feet, as compared with sixty feet
and six inches today. When I read this my mind turned
to the dreadful predicament of a batsman today standing
at the plate, with fire-ball pitchers like Dizzy Dean and
Schoolboy Rowe throwing them up. I find that in those
days a batter could call for a high ball or a low one, but
even this would scarcely help him against fast balls
thrown from forty-five feet by these big-league aces.

At one time a team scoring twenty-one ‘‘aces”’ or runs
won the game, whether it took one inning or twenty. In
1858 a pitcher was restrained by a boundary line twelve
feet long, and he could take a short run before delivering
the ball. Previous to 1863 batsmen could use a bat of any
size, shape and material; at that time they were restricted
to wooden clubs, and thirteen years later the rules makers
placed the maximum length of bats at forty-two inches.
In 1864 the “out on first bounce”’ rule was abolished.

Those are only a few of the changes in the physical
aspects of baseball. It is a made game, the product of
years of trial and adjustment, although I think it has
now been perfected. And I maintain basketball is no
more inviolate than baseball. In some respects I feel we
have outgrown the original garments of basketball, just
as baseball outgrew the forty-five-feet pitching distance.

Athletics are an integral part of school and college
education, and our chief aim, of course, is the physical
development of our boys and to teach them to play hard,
to take punishment and come up smiling and still play
fair. Something is learned on athletic “‘battle”’ fields that
can’t be acquired in the classroom. But of importance,
too, is the spectator who pays the bill and lends zest to
inter-school contests. I’ve asked many of them about
their likes and dislikes in basketball and have found that
primarily they want action and scoring. I’ve watched
lots of hockey games and have loved the action, but I have
bemoaned the lack of scoring. Basketball fans dislike an
abundance of whistle blowing which checks the action
and breaks the interest. The perfect referee, to me, is the
one who is seen but never heard—well, hardly ever.

A PREMIUM ON SPEED AND AGILITY

EF YOU will check carefully on a game of basketball you
will find that a great many fouls are called as the play-
ers are scrambling under a basket for a ball coming down
from a rebound. It is inevitable with so many players
jammed into a small space. Many of these fouls are
purely accidental. And if there isn’t a foul committed in
the scramble for the ball the chances are great that the
player who gained possession of it has stuck his toe over
the end line, and the whistle blows anyway.

With the twelve-foot basket the players are spread over
a greater area, for the rebound from the high backboards
sends the ball farther out into the court; the area of dis-
persement of players is greater; the small man has quite
as good .a chance to recover it as a tall one. Thus the
premium is put on speed and agility instead of mere
height. I have been somewhat amused while watching