Baskets in 4/4 Time

At Yale, basketball used to be considered something better left to Y.M.C.A.s and volunteer fire departments. Until 1937, when Yale changed its mind, basketball lettermen had to be content with a two-inch minor-sport "Y" instead of five-inchers given to crewmen, footballers, baseballers and trackmen. Even after basketball became a major sport, Yalemen refused to get worked up about the game --until Tony Lavelli of Somerville, Mass, came along.

This season eager Yale undergraduates and townspeople have crammed Payne Whitney gym to watch slender, 6 ft. 3 Tony Lavelli shoot baskets. He was as far from the old "Pudge" Heffelfinger mold in Yale athletes as was tiny footballer Albie Booth. For one thing, he was apt to be shy in a crowd; for another, what he really wanted to be was a musician. A competent piano and accordion player already, he hopes "to pick up some day in the musical comedy composing field where Cole Porter and Irving Berlin leave off." But with his long fingers Tony Lavelli could flick basketballs through hoops better than anybody in the collegiate game.

Princeton Could Learn. In desperation, rival coaches assigned two and sometimes three men to stop him. It was seldom enough.. The night that Princeton made the mistake of putting only one man on him, Lavelli scored 40 points (next time Princeton switched its defense, put two men on Tony and upset Yale 47-45). When Williams tried guarding him with one man, he racked up 52. No one had so completely mastered the one-handed hook shot, flipped while taking a stride away from the basket, as Tony Lavelli. His detractors pointed out that he was slow afoot and weak on defense, but Yalemen replied: "All Galli-Curci could do was sing." Tony Lavelli could shoot.

At Storrs, Conn, last week, the University of Connecticut buckled down to the job of trying to stop him. With two and sometimes three men guarding him, Tony did not rely solely on his trusty hook shot. He moved for the corners, tossed high-arching one-handed push shots, personally collected 32 points as Yale won, 71-55. As his last point of the game swished through the hoop on a free throw, a big cheer rocked the gym. Lavelli had made his 1,870th point as a Yale basketballer--just enough to tie the major college scoring mark set by the great George Mikan (TIME, Feb. 14) at De Paul University in 1946.

Girls Could Wait. Tony says he really took up shooting baskets to cure an inferiority complex. As a 12-year-old, he did fine at piano lessons but that didn't win him much prestige with his playmates; so he began practicing basketball shots at least an hour a day. Now the piano pays off too. At Yale, where many a student prides himself on his singing, he is a willing and able accompanist. He has already written a dozen songs (all unpublished as yet) which have such titles as I Want a Helicopter and Why Do You Make Me Wait? His music, plus basketballing and maintaining "gentleman's grades" in his studies, does not give him much time for girls. Says Tony: "I'm going to look over the field in the spring."

The pros were already wrangling about which club will get him next season. Tony, who has been playing basketball since high-school days, was sitting back waiting to see what pro offers looked like. He had also put in applications at three music conservatories--Manhattan's Juilliard School, Philadelphia's Curtis Institute and Boston's New England Conservatory. If he did play pro basketball, Tony figured he could combine the game with music.

Meanwhile, there was still a little more college basketball ahead. At week's end, Tony plunked in his first basket against Harvard in the sixth minute of play (thus breaking Mikan's mark) and got 20 more points before Yale won, 77-58. Two weeks hence, thanks mostly to Lavelli, Yale (won 21, lost five) would move into Madison Square Garden to take a whack at the N.C.A.A. championship tournament.

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