On Wednesday, March 1, 1933, Pacific Coast Conference basketball referee Emil Piluso decided he'd had enough.

Two weeks earlier, University of Oregon students at a home basketball game against Oregon State thought Piluso wasn't being fair to their team, and they made their feelings known during the tilt. Oregon coach Bill Reinhart, it seems, did nothing to rein in the students.

Heckling a referee? Questioning his judgment and motivations? In this simpler era before TV, the internet and March Madness, it simply wasn't acceptable.

Oregon State won that Feb. 18 showdown by a score of 29 to 18 in a "conservative game, marked by close guarding" -- a family-newspaper way of saying the players were thumping each other. It had been a much-anticipated battle, pulling in the largest crowd Eugene's McArthur Court had seen in eight years.

A couple of days after the game, Piluso talked to Reinhart about the students' conduct and received no satisfaction. In fact, the coach apparently told him to stuff it. So after mulling over his options, the veteran referee sat down and wrote a letter to University of Oregon graduate manager Hugh Rosson.

He informed Rosson, The Oregonian reported, that there was "constant manifestation of displeasure at his decisions throughout the game of February 18, between Oregon and Oregon State, and that such conduct constituted a heavy risk to his reputation as an official and to his individual responsibility."

That being the case, Piluso wrote, "I think it wise that you secure someone who will be satisfactory to officiate your next games with Oregon State college."

UO and its arch-rival's final two games of the regular season were against each other that coming weekend -- games that would determine the conference's northern division champion. (Oregon State needed a win to hold off the University of Washington.)

When a copy of the letter landed on his desk, Oregon State coach Slats Gill decided to step in as mediator, and it looked like he was going to be able to head off a crisis. He quickly convinced Piluso to swallow his hurt feelings and agree to officiate the game as originally planned. But when Reinhart and Rosson met with Gill and Oregon State athletic director Carl Lodell to discuss the situation, the meeting ended with the UO men angrily declaring, "We will not play the games if Piluso is on the floor."

This was a significant problem. With Corvallis still a distant outpost at the time, and basketball still a relatively low-profile sport, there weren't a plethora of qualified referees who could step into Piluso's place on short notice.

Hearing about the referee's letter and the subsequent heated meeting between the schools' basketball bosses, influential Oregonian sports columnist L.H. Gregory seemed happy to stir the pot. "That's a pretty hot one," he wrote, referring to Oregon's threat to refuse to play.

"I don't know the details of the private quarrel between Billy Reinhart and Emil Piluso, and I'm not interested," Gregory wrote. "I do know, however, that Piluso is one of the best basketball referees in the northern division. His integrity is beyond question."

He then offered a solution, one that men of high character -- the very definition of college sports coaches, everyone agreed -- should be able to agree on:

"In all seriousness, Mr. Slats Gill, why not invite Mr. Billy Reinhart to referee the game himself? And in all seriousness, Mr. Billy Reinhart, why not referee it?"

UO quickly took the columnist up on the suggestion, with a clever twist. In a statement to the press, Rosson called Piluso's letter "wholly unwarranted" and expressed bafflement at the ref's pique. He insisted: "Previous to receipt of Mr. Piluso's letter we had no thought other than that of his officiating the remaining games of the year, but we feel that we are placed in a position where we must insist upon a substitution."

To show how dedicated Oregon was to doing the right thing, he said he and Reinhart were "even willing to play this game with Mr. Gill as referee, or to play the game without a referee, and guarantee the conduct of our players in these contests."

To be sure, Oregon was keen to show they wanted to get revenge against Oregon State rather than Piluso. The school's basketball leaders undoubtedly winced at Gregory's jab that they, just maybe, wouldn't mind walking away from its final two games. Reinhart's team sat at the bottom of the conference's northern division, a place it was unaccustomed to being. Its Corvallis rival, meanwhile, was having its best results in years. The energetic, young Gill, Oregon State's former star player, had recruited for speed and installed a then-unusual up-tempo offense that had proved frustrating to the team's opponents, including long-time division behemoth Washington.

Ultimately, University of Oregon administrators told Rosson and Reinhart to find a satisfactory solution to the brouhaha. On Thursday, the day after Piluso dropped his bombshell, Rosson convinced a Spokane referee, Jimmy Mitchell, to make the trek down to Corvallis to officiate the games. Oregon State could have challenged Piluso's benching but decided against it. "Despite the fact that Mr. Rosson has failed to convince us of any sufficient or valid reason why Emil Piluso should not officiate these games as originally scheduled, it is not the desire of Oregon State to win the northern division by forfeiture of games," said Lodell.

And so the games went on, and the first one was a doozy. It was as tight as you'd expect such a controversy-roiled rivalry battle to be, with plenty of the "close guarding" that had defined the Feb. 18 face-off. Playing only for pride (and for a teammate who had shockingly died of double pneumonia the week before), Oregon matched the more skilled, deeper home team point for point. Oregon State required a last-second free throw by point guard Red MacDonald -- "the shot that saved the championship for Oregon State," The Oregonian declared -- to send the game into overtime, where the "Orangemen" nailed down the victory and the northern-division title.

Ten days later, Oregon State secured the Pacific Coast Conference title -- its first ever -- with a rousing win, also in Corvallis, over southern-division champion USC. Emil Piluso, though the designated division referee for the state, didn't officiate that game, either. Jimmy Mitchell, once again, came down from Spokane to do the honors.

-- Douglas Perry

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