Firehouse Frank and His Boys

Other coaches grumble about his firehouse brand of basketball. "I know they hate it," says cocky Coach Frank Keaney of Rhode Island State. Long ago he quit concentrating on defense and worked up an exaggerated fast-break style. Says he: "We will give anybody 100 points if we can get 101." Every man on his squad knows that he has to throw rather than dribble, outrun rather than outskill the opposition--and keep running. The fans love it.

Last week, with the basketball season nearly half gone, Keaney's firehouse gang was one of a dozen major U.S. college teams (out of more than 400) still unbeaten.* They ran past bewildered New Hampshire, 88-64. Then they went after Maine. Sixty-two-year-old Coach Keaney was as much a part of the show as his team.

Before the game was two minutes old, he was on his feet, claiming that the opposition had fouled, bellowing to one of his own boys that he'd be "sold to Louisville" (banished to the bench). He kept repeating one word--"faster"--to a team that was already whizzing past Maine. Maine tumbled, 99-66, and Rhode Island's remarkable scoring record rose to a dizzy 96.4 per game. Before the week was out, Connecticut became victim No. 8, by a score of 74 to 57.

Voice from the Widely Bimps. When he isn't exploding all over the basketball court, Frank Keaney is a good-natured Irishman who saves old glassware as a hobby. In practice, one of his tricks is to bolt a steel rim inside the baskets, reducing their size from 18 to 15 inches; it made the basket-shooting in the actual game seem easier. While his players romp on the court, Keaney, a Phi Beta Kappa, calls to them in his own curious language, compounded of corny phrases he has coined himself, mixed with Latin or Latin-sounding words. Samples: "Little Ossie Fagus, non compos mentis, biblioclasmic. . . . You're stale stew ... go back to the widdy bimps [bench] . . . don't be a Fanny Willie [showoff] ... dig up a new arm in some cemetery." Besides being athletic director and basketball coach, Keaney also brews his own medicines; the team swears by his skin-hardener and his cure for athlete's foot.

His current crop of basketballers are mostly freshmen, small and inexperienced. The star of the team is 5 ft.11 in. Center Jack Allen, a superb dribbler and a deadly shot from just beyond the foul circle. In most of the other positions, Keaney keeps shuttling substitutes in & out with instructions to run until they tire, then signal for relief. By this simple method, which has proved effective in Keaney's 27 years at R.I. State, his fast little men recently trampled powerful St. John's in New York's Madison Square Garden.

Keaney disagrees with people who tell him he has a super-duper basketball squad. Says he solemnly: "They're going to get their ears knocked off." He doesn't think any of them compare with two of his former basketball All-Americans--Ernie Calverley and Stanley "Stutz" Modzelewski. But if Rhode Island gets past dangerous St. Joseph's in Philadelphia this week, they may be on the way to an undefeated season.

* The other eleven: Duquesne, Washington, Alabama, West Virginia, Washington & Jefferson, Washington & Lee, Army, Seton Hall, Bucknell, Lafayette, Eastern Kentucky.

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