Hoopster Rally Overwhelms Columbia

Lou Silver needed a full half of basketball to realize he was back home in New York. The 6-ft. 7-in. Merrick, Long Island, resident and Harvard's leading scorer, held scoreless in the first half, dropped in 14 points and pulled down 17 rebounds as the Harvard cagers won a homecoming from Columbia last night, 58-51.

Two out-of-staters, Tony Jenkins and Bill Carey, were also instrumental in the second-half surge that insured Harvard's victory. Jenkins finished with 20 points, and Carey popped in ten. Both snatched 12 rebounds apiece.

New Yorkers Ken Wolfe and Mike Griffin have brothers who play for the Lions; Silver and Arnie Needleman are from the Empire State and coach Tom Sanders played at NYU and grew up in the city. The freshman basketball coach at Columbia is named Mike Griffin, and present head coach Jack Rohan was an assistant coach at NYU when Sanders starred there.

So University Gym wasn't a strange place for the Crimson, although the squad did get lost. Sanders and his squad took the subway on a miserable snowy night to 116th St., and were misdirected, finally appearing at the start of the second half of the Columbia-Fordham freshman game.

"I think our lay-off showed," Sanders said in the locker room after the game. Sanders said Harvard was "certainly not sharp at all."

Sanders said he told Silver nothing special at half-time. "The man is a ball player, he realizes what he is doing," the soft-spoken New York native explained. "You point a few things out, and hope they correct it, and hey, you win a game," he said.

The win pulled Harvard's record to 6-10 overall and 4-2 in the Ivy League, while the Lions dropped to 2-16, with only one win against six losses in the league.

The Crimson went ahead in the second half when Silver and Jenkins combined to sweep the boards and pulled the cagers away from a 28-23 half time deficit. Rohan's small squad couldn't withstand the offensive onslaught, and folded.

At 13:06, Silver hit a foul-line jumper to pull Harvard away from a 37-37 deadlock. The Lions never really threatened after that. Cornett Lewers, a 6-ft. 4.5-in. sophomore from Brooklyn, led Columbia with ten points. No other Lions achieved double-figures.

Columbia held a five-point lead at halftime on the basis of a stingy zone defense that stymied Silver. Rohan used ten players in the first half, and Lewers scored eight points, contributing heavily to the Lions' success.

Carey continued his role as sophomore sparkplug for the Crimson, by scoring eight points in the first half and pulling down five rebounds. Tony Jenkins played 14 minutes and scored seven points.

From the field, Harvard outshot the Lions 38.5 to 37.8 per cent in the first half, but the Columbia team took 11 more shots. For the game, Sanders's cagers finished at 37.7 per cent from the field, while Columbia dropped to 35.2 per cent