The leading scorer in the first NCAA title game went on to become an Admiral in the U.S. Navy, a man of strong constitution. But John Dick, one of the "Tall Firs" of Oregon, still remembers the three-day, three-night train ride to Chicago in 1939.
It wasn't that the players had never traveled that far. They had been to New York earlier that season. It was just that this new thing, the NCAA Championship Game, was only a few days away at Northwestern, and the buzz was much different than what surrounds the tournament today.
"When you'd get off a train trip that long," Dick said, now 82, "it was like the earth was still moving for a day."
Decades before the tournament would earn billions from television, it lost $2,531 in its inaugural year. On March 26, 1939, a crowd of 5,500 watched Oregon defeat Ohio State 46-33 at Patten Gym. Players and coaches said later they suspected half the crowd got in for free.
Unlike today, when an army of reporters will detail Shane Battier's thoughts on the human genome project, information on the inaugural title game is hard to find. The archives of Northwestern, Ohio State and the NCAA had no original documents connected to the event.
The National Association of Basketball Coaches organized the NCAA Tournament in response to the National Invitation Tournament. The coaches wanted a truly national tournament, not one susceptible to eastern politics and controlled by private entrepreneurs. After 1939, the NCAA picked up the debt and control of the tournament.
"Here we were, in a Big Ten gym we had never seen -- with Big Ten officials, incidentally -- and all that travel," Dick said. "They chose Northwestern as a site because it was centrally located. But Northwestern didn't have a very good facility for it. We played at Purdue the following year and it was far superior."
Dick, a forward, was part of Oregon's front line that measured an imposing 6-foot-8, 6-4 and 6-4. The Chicago Tribune gave the game prominent display. Organizers tried to make it special. The inventor of basketball, James Naismith, who died later that year at age 78, attended the game. Before the championship, two teams of Northwestern players competed using Naismith's original rules and peach baskets.
"Last night's contest was attended by a pageantry new to basketball in the central states," the Chicago Tribune reported. "Each player and the two coaches were introduced to the crowd one by one as the spotlight played on them."
Dick had 13 points, but Ohio State's Jimmy Hull, who had 12, was named what is now known as the most outstanding player.
In later years, Ohio State's players, including Hull, were quoted as saying that some of the Buckeyes' players didn't even want to go to the NCAA Tournament. They didn't know what it was and they had already achieved their goal by winning the Big Ten. They wanted to stay home and watch the state high school championship.
"I've read in recent years about some of those statements," Dick said. "It seems to me a little far-fetched. Their coach was the guy in charge (of the coaches' association). That doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense to me."
The tournament captured Oregon's imagination. On the train ride home, word arrived that people in Dick's tiny hometown of The Dalles, Ore., wanted to stop the train to greet the team. Grudgingly, the train company allowed a brief stop. The people presented Dick with a gold watch.
Celebrations followed in Portland and Salem before the train arrived home in Eugene. An Associated Press story quoted Oregon coach Howard Hobson as saying of the fans, "They were literally hanging from the lamp posts."
Dick went on to a 32-year career in the Navy. He commanded the aircraft carrier Saratoga for two years and served as chief of staff for all carrier forces in the Western Pacific.
Dick has watched the tournament's explosive growth. He was there when Bill Bradley scored a tournament record 58 points in the third-place game of the 1965 tournament in Portland, Ore., and then he watched UCLA defeat Cazzie Russell and Michigan in the championship. He went to the 1988 Final Four as part of the 50th anniversary celebration.
But don't try to get the admiral to stare wide-eyed at what the tournament has become. Maybe Dick would be more amazed if his life experience didn't include golfing one day with a Naval War College classmate named Alan Shepard, the first American in space.
"We lived a block apart in Virginia Beach and we were playing golf, and I asked him, 'What's next on your list?'" Dick said. "He said, 'I want to go to the moon.' Later, president Kennedy announced it."
Even with all those basketball billions, spawned from humble beginnings, it's hard to compete with that.
