Point a Minute

P: In the East it is Temple.

P: In the Midwest it is Michigan.

P: In the South it is Southern Methodist.

P: In the West it is Stanford.

Thus last week experts reckoned the best teams in the country as college basketball reached midseason. Because there is no national championship, the question of who plays the best basket-ball is one that perennially and profoundly agitates thousands of pool rooms and fraternity houses throughout the U. S. Each section of the country claims superiority, and the more pretentious teams usually spend Christmas vacation on a junket trying to prove it. This year basketball fans had an additional cause for controversy: the new centre-jump rule.

In contrast to baseball, the offspring of cricket and rounders, and football, the offspring of soccer and rugby, basketball can boast a pure American ancestry. Characteristically American, it has been prolific with its regulations. In 1891 the game started out with one rule: no more than one step could be taken with ball in hand. In 1892 basketball had 13 rules. Last year it had 113.

Meeting in Chicago last spring the rulemakers, still dissatisfied, gave basketball the most drastic alteration in its 46-year history. It removed the after-goal centre jump, distinctive maneuver of the game. This year, under the new rule, the ball, instead of being brought to the centre and tossed up after each goal, is automatically given to the team just scored on--for a throw-in from out of bounds just under the basket. This speeds up the game, adds about seven minutes of playing time, reduces the advantages of tall fellows over short ones, results in more spectacular tries for baskets and larger scores.

John Bunn. If the centre jump is the news-of-the-year in basketball. John Bunn is the man-of-the-year. John Bunn is basketball coach at Stanford. He served his apprenticeship at the University of Kansas where he played and later taught under famed Coach Forrest C. ("Phog"') Allen--within reverent earshot of Physical Education Professor James Naismith, basketball's inventor. In 1930 he took over basketball at Stanford, where the game had long been regarded as "sissy." He began to experiment with a jumpless game. Four years ago he tried it out, got Southern California's Coach Sam Barry to join him in a crusade for his new style of play. Last year while the Big Ten gave the new game a test and others followed suit, John Bunn took his boys on a transcontinental tour during Christmas vacation, watched them beat every team they met--both with and without his own rules. In Manhattan, playing under the national rules, his team broke the two-year (43-game) winning streak of Long Island University, with much help from an ambidextrous young forward named Hank Luisetti.

Bunn's Boy-Angelo Henry ("Hank") Luisetti, son of a restaurant chef, is the No. 1 product of this extraordinary coaching regime. He is considered so superior to all other basketball players this year that he is one of the few basketball subjects over which there is no controversy. Born & bred on that little strip of San Francisco waterfront that produced Base-bailers Joe Di Maggio, Frank Crosetti and Tony Lazzeri, Basketballer Luisetti is rated one of the best-of-all-time in basketball. A clever passer, spectacular dribbler, amazingly accurate marksman (with either hand or both), he has effected some of the most exciting scoring sprees ever witnessed by modern critics.

In his sophomore year, Forward Luisetti scored 32 points in 32 minutes during a Conference championship game. The same year he tallied 24 points in eleven minutes. In two years of varsity play (sophomore and junior) he scored 826 points, breaking the recognized three-year college scoring record of 632 made by Robert Meaney of Lehigh University in 1928-30. This season (his last) he is credited with making an all-time college record of 50 points in one game during the 92-10-27 victory over Duquesne during the Christmas trip. His total score since he started to play at Stanford: 1,306.

Last week, while Temple was defeating Manhattan College, and Purdue and Southern Methodist were trouncing Wisconsin and Texas respectively, Stanford was playing a two-night series against Southern California (dubbed the "University of Indiana at Los Angeles" because its entire first team and four substitutes are former Indiana high-school players). In the first game Captain Hank Luisetti and his able teammate, Art Stoefen, who is a cousin of onetime Davis Cupper Lester Stoefen and No. 2 Stanford pointmaker, lived up to expectations, helped drub Southern California, 64-10-54. Next night Luisetti, suffering from an injured eye, scored only 13 points, and Stanford was beaten 48-10-49.

John Bunn, sitting on the sidelines, was probably watching the last basketball team he will actively coach. Ironically, just as he had reached the status of top-ranking coach of the country, he was quitting basketball--to become dean of men at Stanford next year. But John Bunn was still repeating to newsmen what he had said many times before: "Hank Luisetti is the young man who made a coach out of John Bunn. He'd make a coach out of anybody."

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