Bee's Blackbirds

Christmas week is Big Week for U. S. college basketball players. While most undergraduates are at home picking up old ties and new socks, most basketballers are off on junkets. In & around New York City last week were assembled an unprecedented collection of visiting basketball teams--Southern California, Texas, Tulane, Michigan, Oklahoma A. & M., Oklahoma, Missouri, Colorado, Oregon, Santa Clara, McGill--matched against the East's best quintets.

Outstanding among the invaders was Oregon, a towering team averaging 6 ft. 3 in., Pacific Coast Conference champion, defeated only once in 25 games and winner of the post-season National Collegiate A. A. tournament last year. But when Oregon's Webfeet tangled with the Blackbirds of Long Island University in the season's first big intersectional game at Manhattan's Madison Square Garden, the Blackbirds nipped them in a nip-& tuck, 56-to-55 thriller.

By snatching the game, which for drama equaled anything ever seen in the Garden, the high-flying Blackbirds preserved a winning streak rare in basketball annals. Because they play so many games a season, U. S. basketball teams seldom finish a season undefeated. Long Island University, however, won all its 24 games last year, had by last week won 42 games in a row (eight of them this season).

Though little, and only 13 years old--and unable to afford a gymnasium of its own--Brooklyn's Long Island University has for several years had tip-top basketball teams. Coached by Accounting Teacher Clair Bee, a nervous little 150-pounder who never was any great shakes as an athlete but is a generalissimo at working out strategies on a wooden board, Brooklyn's Blackbirds have chalked up 149 victories in 159 games.

Stressing long shots rather than a short passing attack (on the theory that a straight line is the shortest distance between two points), Teacher Bee has developed team after team of dead-eyed marksmen. Three years ago, a team of Beemen ran up a string of 43 victories before finally losing to a steaming-hot Stanford bunch led by famed Shooter Hank Luisetti.

This week, on the same court where they were bagged just three years ago almost to a day, a new flock of Blackbirds, with a winning streak of 42, will meet Southern California, year in & year out one of the most formidable basketball teams in the country. If they can outshoot Sam Barry's Trojans, Clair Bee's boys will earn their reputation as a college basketball team second to none.

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