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C H A P T E R 12 • • • Olympic Pride E ven though basketball had been played in the Olympics as far back as the 1904 Games in St. Louis, those contests had always been viewed as “exhibitions” or a “demonstration ” because teams from only one country participated. Similar contests were played at the 1924 Olympics in Paris and at the 1928 Games in Amsterdam. By the 1930s, however, basketball definitely had grown to become an international sport. The sport was being played competitively in more than 20 countries on the continents of North America, South America, Europe, Asia, and Africa. Phog Allen had campaigned to have the sport included at the 1932 Games in Los Angeles, but did not have enough support to get that goal accomplished. He then began to work toward having the sport added for the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, and this time he was successful. With the sport added to the roster, Allen came up with another idea—he wanted to have Naismith and his wife Maude attend the Games as special guests of honor, so that Naismith could be saluted for his invention of the sport. Allen took his idea to the National Association of Basketball Coaches, and they 152 • Chapter 12 endorsed the plan. The leading supporters were Allen and A. C. “Dutch” Lonborg, a former Kansas athlete (and the school’s future athletic director) who was then the coach at Northwestern. The association designated the week of February 9–15, 1936, as “Naismith Week,” and the plan called for one penny to be set aside from every ticket sold to a basketball game anywhere in the United States that week. Those pennies, collected in a fund, would pay for the Naismiths’ travel to Berlin, and if any money was available after the trip expenses were paid, it would be used to create another type of memorial. While the original concept was for money to be collected from college and high school games, the campaign spread to include professional games, church league games, youth league games— anywhere that someone was willing to organize the effort. The campaign even spread to Naismith’s native Canada, where $20 was collected at a high school game in Almonte. The honor of making the first contribution to the fund went to Lawrence High School, which collected money when it played Ottawa, Kansas, High School in late January. A crowd of 515 spectators turned out, and at halftime more money was raised when members of the school’s pep squad stretched out blankets and had fans throw change onto the blankets. After the school collected more money throughout the week, a newspaper headline reported that $51.40 had been raised for the fund. AAU teams in Kansas and Missouri also contributed to the fund, with $31.34 being raised at a game between Santa Fe Trails and Philco in Kansas City. A KU graduate who had moved to Oklahoma, Robert K. Johnston, sent in an individual contribution of $25. The Gridleys, an independent team in Wichita, donated $52.58 to the fund. The largest contribution from a single game, not surprisingly, came from the Kansas–Kansas State game in Lawrence on February 16, when $105.35 was raised. Before that game, Chancellor Ernest Lindley, the man who had replaced Naismith as the director of physical education and given the job to Allen, praised Naismith by saying that “he is a Olympic Pride • 153 man whose influence has gone further than that of any other man in Kansas.” Kansas high schools combined to contribute $550 to the fund, and the total of more than $1,000 raised in Kansas was the most collected in any state. Overall, with contributions coming from 43 states and Canada, the amount raised exceeded $5,000, and this was more than enough to fund the trip. Before leaving for the Olympics, Naismith received two more honors. He was invited to be the guest of honor at the AAU national tournament in Denver, where the top two teams would earn bids to the Olympic Trials in New York. Naismith was also invited to that tournament, where the team representing the United States in the Olympics would be selected. Naismith was pleased that one of the two teams to make the AAU finals turned out to be the McPherson Oilers, from McPherson , Kansas. The Oilers won the AAU tournament by defeating the Universal Pictures team from Hollywood, California. Both teams qualified for the Olympic Trials. At...

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