KURLAND, Robert ("Bob")

(b. 23 December 1924 in St. Louis), college basketball player who led Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College (A&M) to unprecedented back-to-back National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball championships in 1945 and 1946. His unusual height and shot-blocking methods helped lead to the adoption of the rule against goaltending.

Kurland, already six-feet, six-inches tall at age thirteen, was recruited for the school basketball team at Jennings High School in suburban St. Louis. He played for four years on the team, where his height gained him the nickname "the Jennings Giant," and he twice made the Class B state tournament. Kurland also won the Missouri high school high-jump championship in his senior year. He reached six feet, nine inches, at age seventeen, but his awkwardness on the court kept him from being recruited by college basketball programs—that is, until his high school coach informed him that coach Henry Iba of the Aggies at Oklahoma A&M University (now Oklahoma State University), who virtually never traveled to recruit, wanted to have dinner with him.

When they met in 1941, Iba invited Kurland to Still-water, Oklahoma, for a tryout, as was the practice then, stressing that there were no guarantees of acceptance. After three days of workouts, Iba offered Kurland a scholarship and a part-time campus job, promising to try to teach him how to play at the college level. Kurland was attracted by the engineering program at A&M and decided to enroll, graduating in the fall of 1942. Like other young men over six-feet, six-inches tall, Kurland's height made him ineligible for military service.

Iba's teams were famous for their defense, and while the coach originally saw Kurland primarily as a defensive player, he patiently encouraged him, through endless repetition, to develop a hook shot and improve his footwork. He also put Kurland on a jump-rope regimen and made him practice as much as four hours a day. As a collegian Kurland grew to weigh 225 pounds and stood just a shade under seven feet tall. This was a shocking height at that time, making Kurland subject to predictable abuse. University of Kansas coach Forrest "Phog" Allen called him a "glandular, mezzanine-peeping goon," and Kurland even referred to himself as a "strange giant." The University of Oklahoma (OU), A&M's cross-state rival, sent a man on stilts onto the court during warm-ups and had its shortest guard face Kurland for the initial jump ball; the Aggies' publicist came up with the nickname "Foothills." After playing sparingly in his freshman year, Kurland became a starter for the 1943–1944 season, averaging thirteen points per game and being named an All-American.

Kurland made his mark as a defender, blocking and batting away shots even as they were on their downward arc, as was then legal (no interference was permitted when the ball was in the imaginary cylinder directly above the basket). This was Iba's deliberate strategy and Kurland executed it with increasing dexterity. "Goaltending," as it came to be called, had not been an issue before, but now Phog Allen called for the basket to be raised from ten feet to twelve. Coach Bruce Drake at OU complained that the Sooners had lost to the Aggies because Kurland had taken over twenty shots out of the basket. Fans from rival schools booed when Kurland goaltended, and OU's Drake argued in print that it was "practically impossible to beat a team whose giant raises his defensive umbrella over your goal."

As Drake was chairman of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) rules committee, he was in a position to do more than whine—he arranged for an NCAA official to come to Norman, Oklahoma, for the OU–A&M game. Sitting on a platform set up behind the basket, the official observed Kurland's play to determine if his hands were over the cylinder when he blocked, and they were (the Aggies won the game, 14–11). The three-second rule had been adopted in 1936 to prevent players from camping out directly under the basket and waiting to be fed a pass, but as the lane was only six feet wide when Kurland played, his spectacular size meant that he was still close to the hoop.

Rival coaches managed to outlaw goaltending by the time Kurland started his junior season in fall 1944, but the rule change failed to slow him down in any way. The Aggies finished with a record of 26–4 (all losses to military teams) and won the 1945 NCAA title 49–45 over local favorite New York University at Madison Square Garden in a very physical contest. Kurland dominated on defense and offense with his inside game, scoring 22 points (of a team total of 49) before a record championship crowd of 18,035, and was the obvious choice for the Most Valuable Player (MVP) award.

In a postseason Red Cross charity event called the "Champion of Champions" game, A&M was matched with National Invitation Tournament champion DePaul University of Chicago, which had its own big man—six-foot, ten-inch George Mikan. Kurland and Mikan had faced each other twice before in their college careers, but this third matchup, inelegantly called the "battle of the goons," was far better publicized. Mikan got in foul trouble early, thanks largely to the efforts of A&M's defense, and the Aggies prevailed 52–44, with DePaul missing 80 of 96 shots attempted.

Kurland's senior year in 1945 was more of the same all around: he led the nation in scoring with an average 19 points per game, while his team earned a 28–3 record and another NCAA championship. This impressive record led Curt Gowdy, then an employee of Oklahoma City radio station KOMA, to suggest that A&M's (and OU's) games be broadcast for the first time, with Gowdy calling the games for both schools. Kurland scored a career high fifty-eight points in the last regular-season game of the year despite being guarded by "Easy" Ed Macauley of Saint Louis University, a future National Basketball Association (NBA) star with the Celtics and Hawks.

Kurland's continued rivalry with Mikan began to attract attention. In December 1945 A&M lost its first home game in two years to DePaul and Mikan, who outscored Kurland twenty-five to eighteen. The Aggies, however, won a re-match with the Blue Demons 46–38 before 12,000 fans at Chicago Stadium, although Mikan again outscored Kurland nineteen to ten. A&M lost the next night to Bowling Green State University, but finished the year with fifteen straight wins and a second consecutive NCAA championship, becoming the first team to repeat.

For the first time the Final Four teams gathered at the championship site, Madison Square Garden in New York City, before a new record crowd of 18,479. In other firsts, the title game was televised, a filmed version was produced, and gate receipts topped the $100,000 mark. Kurland was named MVP for the second straight year as the Aggies defeated the University of North Carolina 43–40. He scored twenty-three points and assisted on all but four of A&M's other field goals, becoming the only player to score more than half of his team's points in the championship game.

Kurland turned down offers from the NBA's forerunner, the Basketball Association of America (BBA), accepting instead a job with Phillips Petroleum in Bartlesville, Oklahoma, as a part-time executive and full-time player on the company's Amateur Athletic Union (AAU) team, the Phillips 66ers. He played for the 66ers for six seasons (1946 to 1952), during which they won three AAU national championships (1947, 1948, 1950). He also played on the gold medal U.S. Olympic teams of 1948 and 1952, the first player to be a team member twice. Kurland enjoyed the greatest success of any big man in college basketball history up to his time and, with George Mikan, created the first famous rivalry between big men. A three-time All-American (in 1944, 1945, and 1946), Kurland was named Helms Foundation National Player of the Year in 1946 (an award won by Mikan the previous two years). He was elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 1961.

A lengthy interview with Bob Kurland is recorded in Billy Packer with Roland Lazenby, Fifty Years of the Final Four: Golden Moments of the NCAA Basketball Tournament (1987). Some information is available in Eric Nadel, The Night Wilt Scored 100: Tales from Basketball ' s Past (1990). Curt Gowdy and coauthor John Powers discuss Kurland at length in Seasons to Remember: The Way It Was in American Sports, 1945–1960 (1991).

Lawson Bowling