“REDMEN REPEAT” and “THE GERMAN AND THE GINGER”

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876. ST. JOHN’S REDMEN VS DEPAUL BLUE DEMONS

NATIONAL INVITATION TOURNAMENT FINAL

MARCH 26, 1944

MADISON SQUARE GARDEN

QUALITY OF PLAY—6.32

DRAMA—8.10

STAR POWER—5.71

CONTEMPORARY IMPORT—9.25

HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE—5.41

LOCAL IMPACT—8.20

TOTAL: 42.99

“REDMEN REPEAT”

During WWII, the National Invitation Tournament was the big prize of college basketball, an eight-team affair held each spring at Madison Square Garden on Eighth Avenue between 49th and 50th. The NCAA Tournament would eclipse the NIT soon enough, but in the years when soldiers and sailors traipsed up and down the avenue, stopping for a drink and a dance at the Stage Door Canteen while awaiting their ship across the Atlantic or train west toward the Pacific, the NIT reigned supreme. 

The 1944 edition was unofficially hosted by St. John’s, whose campus was then in Brooklyn, not Queens. They had won the championship in 1943, but were considered long shots to repeat, thanks to a mediocre 1944 campaign (they lost three starters from 1943 to the service) and an injury to their best player, Dick Maguire. Invited to the NIT as defending champs, they seized the opportunity with a stirring, unexpected run to the final. But it was assumed that was as far as they would get, thanks to their opponents, the husky, brawling, big-shouldered squad from Chicago, DePaul University.

The Blue Demons were coached, incredibly when you think about it, by Ray Meyer, then in his third year on the sideline. Meyer would still be running the show at DePaul into the first Reagan administration, coaching Mark Aguirre and a powerful (if underachieving) team into the mid-1980s. But no player in Meyer’s four-decade career was as impactful as his center in 1944, George Mikan. Basketball’s first great big man was unstoppable down low, and reorientated a sport heretofore controlled by flashy dribbling and long perimeter shooting. 

In the semifinals Mikan and the Demons squeaked past another team led by a dominant, if raw, center, Bob “Foothills” Kurland of Oklahoma A&M (see #903). St. Johns also won a narrow semifinal, surprising a heavily favored Kentucky team that had easily vanquished the Johnnies earlier in the season. Lanky center Ivy Summer played well in the pivot in the semi, but would be giving away several inches and dozens of pounds to the 6’9”, 265-lb Mikan in the final, held at the Garden on Sunday night, March 26, 1944.

But St. John’s had an ace in the hole—or on the bench, anyway, in head coach Joe Lapchick. For Lap himself was once considered basketball’s great big man, though he was just 6’5”. A native of Yonkers, Lapchick starred with the Original Celtics of the 1920s, a dominant barnstorming outfit, showing off adroit passing and agility while winning almost every jump ball, which in those days followed each made basket. Evolution being what it was, Mikan surely was beyond what Lapchick would have been able to handle, but as an old and excellent center himself, the coach used the days before the game to drill his Johnnies on defending and trickery in the paint to slow Mikan. 

“We’re going to show you a miracle tonight,” Lapchick declared to the press before the game, a bit of coach speak intended to obscure the fact his team were solid 7-point underdogs. A rabid, overflow crowd of 18,374 jammed every cranny of the midtown arena, many of them having journeyed in from that far off land across the water, Brooklyn, in hopes of seeing their lads pull a third straight upset. 

From the opening tap, the “Lewis Avenue Lads” were all over Mikan, swarming him, not letting him establish position, swatting at his hands and knees. On the night he would connect on just 4 of his 23 shots, proof of an incredible effort led by Summer but involving the whole team. Mikan was so frustrated he took several inadvisible fouls, which led to his banishment to the bench after his fourth foul (and just 13 points) with not yet six minutes gone in the second half (in 1944 players were disqualified with just four fouls). The Redmen were up 35-31 at that point, and it seemed were assured of victory. 

The “westerners” went nine minutes without a bucket at one point, but still were hanging around, much to Lapchick’s chagrin—so much so that that the coach fainted on the sideline. “A white-coated intern from Polyclinic applied restoratives,” reported the Brooklyn Eagle, and Joe revived, his full consciousness greeted with wild applause from the crowd. “I just had a blackout,” said Lapchick later. 

Play resumed, and the Johnnies decided to spare their coach any more tsuris. The “husky, hawk-faced” (Daily News) Bill Kotsores connected for three straight buckets to put the game away, securing MVP honors in the process (he finished with 16 points to lead all scorers). Meyer and Depaul were finished. The final was 47-39. With the win the Johnnies became the first team to repeat as NIT champs, a feat that would not be matched until South Carolina did it in the much-diminished modern NIT in 2005-06. 

AFTERMATH:

A bit of fairy dust was vacuumed off Lapchick and the Johnnies and few days later, when they were beaten by Utah, the NCAA Tournament champ, in a Red Cross fundraiser at the Garden. Nevertheless, few would remember that footnote in years gone by, specially as Lapchick went on to win two more titles with St. Johns and became the very successful coach of the Original Knicks. 

DePaul would rebound to win the 1945 NIT, somehow the only title Meyer would win in his 42 years of coaching. 

WHAT THEY SAID:

“To use words such as ‘courageous’ and ‘gallant’ in reference to a basketball game may seem absurd today when such adjectives should be reserved for heroes of battle, not play. Yet, they are the only fitting ones with which to describe the perseverance of the gritty St. John’s team which last night defeated DePaul.”

—Joe Trimble, New York Daily News

FURTHER READING:

Lapchick: The Life of a Legendary Player and Coach in the Glory Days of Basketball by Gus Alfieri

VIDEO:

875. DON BUDGE VS GOTTFRIED VON CRAMM

U.S. NATIONAL TENNIS CHAMPIONSHIPS

MEN’S FINAL

SEPTEMBER 11, 1937

WEST SIDE TENNIS CLUB

QUALITY OF PLAY—6.46

DRAMA—7.33

STAR POWER—7.12

CONTEMPORARY IMPORT—7.66

HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE—6.88

LOCAL IMPACT—7.55

TOTAL: 43.00

“THE GERMAN AND THE GINGER”

Don Budge is somewhat lost to history, falling into the cracks between the first great tennis star, the charismatic if pederastic Bill Tilden, and the greats of the post-war era. But Budge was as dominant as anyone for a brief spell in the late 1930s before WWII ended his reign. 

Budge was an enormous redheaded monster dressed in slacks, the sporting attire of the day. “Playing tennis against him was like playing against a concrete wall,” moaned one of his frequent victims. “There was nothing to attack.” With a huge service game and a stylish, steady backhand, the Oakland native was invincible as the world darkened and slid towards apocalypse. 

He is best known for winning the first ever Grand Slam in 1938, capturing the four major titles in Australia, Paris, Wimbledon and New York, the first time anyone had accomplished the feat. But 1937 may have been his best season. After losing a hard-fought final to Fred Perry at the 1936 U.S. Nationals, Budge took over the men’s game when Perry turned pro (in those days the big events were strictly amateur). At age 22 he won Wimbledon, easily besting German great Baron Gottfried von Cramm in the final. 

Two weeks later, Budge defeated von Cramm again at Wimbledon, this time in the deciding match of the Davis Cup. While this match wasn’t quite as freighted with jingoistic sensationalism as the fights between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling or the Berlin Olympics of ’36, it was closely watched, and was an all-time classic. The German took the first two sets and was poised to hand Hitler a propaganda victory. But Budge worked his way back in to the match, winning the next two sets to even matters. Budge then rallied in the fifth from 4-1 down to win a dramatic 8-6 victory and bragging rights over the Nazis. 

Three months after that breathless match, the two men faced off yet again, this time in the final of the U.S. National Championships, the forerunner to the U.S. Open, held in Forest Hills at the West Side Tennis Club. 14,000 fans packed the joint on a warm and sunny Saturday afternoon, September 11, 1937, to witness this third encounter between the two great players in as many months. “Every reserved seat was gone by Friday, an unprecedented situation, and undoubtedly five to ten thousand more could have been dispensed of had there been accommodations,” noted Allison Danzig in the Times. 

There were two sets of seeds, one for Americans and one for foreigners. Budge and von Cramm were the respective top seeds. Budge crushed all competition en route to the final, winning five matches without dropping a set or a bead of sweat. Von Cramm, by contrast, had to go five grueling sets against Bryan Grant in the quarterfinals, and dropped the first two sets to Bobby Riggs in the semis before roaring back to see three straight and make the final. Few gave him any shot against the all-powerful American, however. 

Budge cruised to a 6-1 opening set, the 16th straight set he had taken in the tournament. But the Baron was still sizzling over his defeat in England, and came storming back. A classic aryan Teuton with blonde hair and a entitled mien, the long trip to America (and the vitriol he received for representing the Swastika-marked flag) had worn him down, but now von Cramm called on inner reserves of iron to work back into the match. He began attacking the net with verve while hitting winners from every spot on the court. 

“When both men were going at full speed tennis of the sheerest brilliance was on view and the applause at times was almost deafening,” wrote Danzig. In one of the greatest sets of tennis ever played in Forest Hills, the German outlasted Budge 9-7 to even the match. The energy expenditure hurt the older (GVC had just turned 28) player, however, and Budge cruised to a 6-1 third set. But just when the crowd was writing off the Hun, von Cramm got off the deck once again to take the fourth set, 6-3. The crowd, now assured of a fifth set (and their money’s worth), unleashed enormous tsunamis of noise with every point. 

Once again, Budge and the Baron would tangle in a fifth set. In the third game, Budge broke a 1-1 tie by unleashing a smoking backhand volley from nearly his own baseline for a winner, an incredible shot that broke von Cramm in service and spirit. Budge crushed the Nazi under his boot after that (in truth, von Cramm detested the Hitlerites), winning the next four games with the loss of just seven points. Budge won the last set 6-1 and the U.S. Championship at the same time, his first in NYC and the second of what would become six straight majors.

AFTERMATH:

Budge turned pro after his Grand Slam of 1938, seeking to cash in on his excellence. After several years of being the top pro in the nation, he joined the Army Air Corps in 1942, where he was injured while running an obstacle course. He returned to tennis after the war but never was the same player as he was before hostilities broke out. 

Von Cramm’s life took a decided turn the spring after his loss in New York. He was arrested by the Reich for conducting a homosexual affair, and thrown in prison for a year. Budge, in a show of solidarity with his great rival (and in a departure from his cruel treatment of Tilden’s homosexuality), gathered a petition from the stars of the tennis world and sent it to Hitler, demanding von Cramm’s be set free. It worked, and the German “tennist” was released. But his troubles were far from over. He was conscripted into the war machine and sent to the Eastern front, where he narrowly survived, albeit with severe frostbite, while most of his company was slaughtered.

Amazingly, von Cramm returned to tennis and played for the German national team into his mid-40s. He was killed in a car crash in Cairo in 1976. 

WHAT THEY SAID:

“In majestic isolation Budge stood alone and pre-eminent in world amateur tennis, a great champion who could look back upon a long and arduous campaign filled with cruel responsibility and unmarked by a single instance of defeat on the turf…not even so magnificently armed and physically equipped a challenger as von Cramm could stay the hand of this new California comet out of Oakland.”

—Alison Danzig, The New York Times

FURTHER READING:

A Tennis Memoir by Don Budge

VIDEO: