SPORTS of the 'CRIME'

Anguished screams from 60 Boylston St. indicate that Mr. Samborski is having trouble finding a successor to Floyd Wilson as head coach of basketball.

In the best interests of the sport, the CRIMSON has carefully screened the candidates, narrowing the field down to four men. It is our conviction that any one of them can do something for Harvard basketball.

Lyndon Baines Johnson

Before Mr. Wilson was relieved of his coaching duties the CRIMSON received a letter from one of his staunchest supporters, who said the problem with Harvard basketball lay not in the coaching but in the recruiting. The coach's detractors replied that this might be true, but Wilson had been stamped as a loser and few decent basketball players were willing to play for him. It was a vicious circle.

President Johnson, however, has demonstrated ample talent for solving such a problem. The coach of the most unsuccessful cause in American history, he has still managed to attract 500,000 men to his team. And they're good men, outscoring the enemy, 3000-400, last week. Admittedly the President has been shown to be a little weak on defensive fundamentals -- he has trouble protecting his own baskets -- but he has some devastating offensive weapons.

Even if Johnson can't produce a winner here at Harvard, he can always bring in his own press team to tell us that the scoreboard is wrong. Unfortunately, Johnson presently has other commitments. But there is unbounded hope at Harvard that he'll be looking for a new position when the basketball season opens on the first Wednesday in November.

Gen. Louis B. Hershey

In an effort to find an energetic recruiter, our scouts have combed nearly every square mile of the American scene. They discovered that the country's best is Louis B. Hershey, the President's legman for Selective Service affairs.

He has proven himself an able administrator, albeit sometimes weak on accepting other people's ideas and innovations. It seems, sadly, that Gen. Hershey has a fatherly inclination to let the older boys play first. We fear that as coach he might tend to overlook the younger talent.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Our third candidate for Mr. Wilson's post has connections with an untapped reservoir of basketball strength--the New Delhi school-yards. At 6-8 Galbraith might even fit into the picture as player-coach. Next year's Ivy League championship game could feature a head-to-head shoving match between Galbraith and Columbia's other-worldly flake, 7-0 Dave Newmark. We've been told (and George Plympton should know) that the Canadian-born scholar is quite a mover. Fast big men are hard to find.

As with the other candidates, there are obstacles to Galbraith's getting the job. First, he'd have to give up his skiing weekends in Switzerland--although he might be able to arrange with Telstar for transmission of inspiring halftime talks to his boys. That way he could avoid close contact with the undergraduates.

Second, one wonders whether he could adapt his theories of the Affluent Society sufficiently to mollify the abusive Harvard Society of Masochists. One hopes so: imagine Galbraith, immaculately tailored, swinging his walking stick against the hardwood, cursing at Jack Rohan's Columbian technocrats. "Gallagher," he might say, "you must maximize your scoring output without University aid."

Our scouts said there was only one other man who could possibly handle the job. So we asked William Buckley whether he was interested. Answered he, smiling his lopsided unGodly and unmanly smile, "No!"

Until the University takes action to remove Harvard basketball from its step-child status, Buckley's answer is the one we feel tempted to advise all candidates for the coaching job to give.