THE FIRST WINNER : Howard Hobson Guided Oregon to Title in 1939

The University of Oregon won the first NCAA basketball final in a rickety gym on a raised floor that forced players and coaches to crane their necks to see the action.

The tournament lost $2,600; they had to give tickets away to fill the gym.

And nobody cared except Oregonians.

Next week, the NCAA celebrates the 50th anniversary of a tournament that has turned into a $66 million extravaganza that commands national attention.

That first game was held at Northwestern University on March 27, 1939. With the game’s inventor, James Naismith, among the 5,500 watching, Oregon’s “Tall Firs” beat Ohio State, 46-33, for the title.

“They said they had 5,500 people there,” said Howard Hobson, 84, who coached Oregon. “I think they gave half the tickets away.”

The tournament was founded by the National Assn. of Basketball Coaches to compete with the prestigious National Invitation Tournament in New York, which rarely invited West Coast teams.

This year, the NCAA tournament is expected to gross $66,660,000, while the NIT was forced to settle for the leftover teams after the 64-team NCAA field was chosen.

The 1939 tournament brought together the champions of eight regions, a format that continued until 1951.

“The NCAA picked up the tab and took over the tournament,” Hobson said. “That was the biggest bargain in the history of sports, when you consider that the NCAA gets about three-fourths of its operating revenue from the tournament today.”

That first final was a major event only in Oregon.

“We expected the students, the people who were close to the program and the people who were interested in athletics to be excited about it,” said forward John Dick, a retired Navy Admiral and one of two survivors from the starting five.

“But it seemed to touch across all parts of our society here in the state, from the governor on down.”

The team returned from Evanston on a new streamliner that traveled non-stop from Chicago to Portland. But the people of The Dalles, Dick’s hometown, wanted the train to stop there so they could welcome home their favorite son.

“From what I was told later, they tried all of the local and regional railroad officials without success,” Dick said.

“Finally, somebody was able to reach the president of the railroad. They said if they didn’t stop the train, they’d barricade the tracks. He said, ‘All right, we’ll give you 10 minutes.’ ”

The Ducks’ front line of the 6-foot-6 Dick, 6-6 Laddie Gale and 6-8 Urgel (Slim) Wintermute, was among the tallest in the country. Bobby Anet, the 5-9 playmaker, was the heart and soul of the team, which finished 29-5.

All were Oregon-born, and Anet and his backcourt mate, 5-10 Wally Johansen, had played together since junior high.

The team won the Northern Division of the Pacific Coast Conference, then beat Southern Division champion California twice to advance to the regional tournament on Treasure Island in San Francisco Bay, where it beat Texas, 56-41, and Oklahoma, 55-37.

“We had a heck of a travel disadvantage,” Dick said. “We had to play Cal on a Thursday and Friday in Eugene, then we had to get on a train and go to San Francisco, play there Monday and Tuesday, then get on a train to Chicago and be ready to play on Monday.”

Then there were the gym, the crowd and the officials.

“It was terrible,” Hobson said. “I don’t know why they had it there except Tug Wilson was prominent in organizing the thing and he was the athletic director at Northwestern.

“We beat Ohio State on a Big Ten floor with Big Ten officials in front of a Big Ten crowd.”

But that was easy compared to the barnstorming train trip in December 1938, which Hobson believes was the first extensive intersectional road trip by a college team.

The team played in Madison Square Garden against City College of New York, then made stops in Philadelphia, Cleveland, Buffalo, Detroit, Peoria, Chicago, Des Moines and San Francisco, playing 10 games in 3 1/2 weeks.

“We became a family,” Hobson said. “It was a great morale booster because we had a very close relationship. When we got back, we were a force because the boys were used to playing on all kinds of courts with all kinds of officiating.”

“We learned a whole lot about body checking and things back there that we hadn’t run in to,” said Gale, a retired real estate broker who was a two-time conference scoring champion.

But Anet, who died in 1981, was the team’s key player.

“He was the greatest floor general I ever had,” said Hobson, who also coached at Yale and has been a member of the basketball Hall of Fame since 1965. “He sparked the team. He was its leader.”

To the team, the game was less exciting than the return.

“It was ho-hum and we won the game,” Gale said. “We didn’t realize what we’d done, but we came to The Dalles and we stopped the train and the whole town was there.”

That was followed by celebrations in Portland, Salem and Albany before ending with the biggest turnout, in Eugene, where Hobson said, “They were literally hanging from the lamp posts.”

Gale and Dick will travel with Hobson to Kansas City next weekend for special ceremonies marking the 50th tournament. Johansen died in 1971 and Wintermute drowned in Lake Washington in 1977.