Sports Biblio Digest, 2.16.20: College Basketball’s Enduring Scandal
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: The Negro Leagues at 100; How the Harlem Globetrotters Integrated the NBA; Astros Non-Apologetics; NYC Basketball Exhibit; Pete Maravich; Sabrina Ionescu; Jimmy Greaves; Curling in the Desert; A New Spring Training Novel; Colin Kaepernick; Remembering Christie Blatchford
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It’s been 70 years since one of the storybook tales in all of American sports: A double-national championship for the City College of New York basketball team.
During the 1949-50 season that culminated with victories over Bradley University in the NCAA Tournament and the National Invitation Tournament, four CCNY players discreetly altered the scoreline during some games, earning them permanent humiliation and notoriety.
The CCNY point-shaving scandal, as it’s generally known, actually involved players at several colleges during that time—including Alex Groza and Ralph Beard, blueblood stars of the storied University of Kentucky Wildcats—in perhaps the most stunning betrayal in American sports since the Black Sox.
In those years right after World War II, New York City and Madison Square Garden—college basketball’s “Mecca” and the home turf for basketball promoter extraordinaire Ned Irish—were havens for bookmakers and knowledgeable fans armed with the latest point spread information published by betting sheets.
“Basketball is the slot machine of sports,” New York sportswriter Jimmy Cannon wrote in 1951, and it's quoted by Matthew Goodman in his new book “The City Game,” the first full-length treatment of the CCNY scandal in more than 40 years.
Stanley Cohen’s “The Game They Played” and Charley Rosen’s “The Scandals of ‘51” were published in the late 1970s, right before another notorious point-shaving scandal in college basketball, at Boston College.
In the years since, the sport, and American sports, have changed dramatically. The CCNY and other players who shaved points in the 1950s did so to earn a relative pittance, mainly to assist their working-class families. They worked through other players who had ties to bookies and crime figures who would soon earn the attention of New York law enforcement.
Today, college players are still regulated as amateurs, which has led to a moral quagmire for the leaders of college sports. Coaches, universities, conferences and the NCAA earn millions from television revenues. The NCAA men’s basketball tournament TV rights alone are worth around $6 billion, and finance most of the collegiate sports governing body’s operations, including a salary for NCAA president Mark Emmert that exceeds $1 million a year.
Just this past week, however, Emmert stumbled through Congressional testimony, asking for federal help in restricting what college athletes can earn in endorsement money.
This took place against the backdrop of a continuing FBI investigation into college basketball, with the University of South Carolina the latest to become embroiled (I’ve previously written that much of what the feds are calling “bribery” is the normal course of college recruiting, and by extension they're doing the NCAA’s enforcement work for it.)
As Goodman diligently details, what transpired those seven decades ago laid the foundation for much more sinister developments today.
Back then, the long reach of crime figures infiltrated the locker rooms of CCNY, St. John’s and others. Goodman notes that CCNY lost all seven games that season in which players intentionally shaved points.
The two CCNY players at the heart of the point-shaving scheme, Eddie Roman and Floyd Layne, are portrayed as earnest, if vulnerable, to the promises of compensation.
They were the embodiment of a bustling campus in Manhattan that aspired to the best that higher education had to offer: A way up for the children of working-class parents.
Roman was the son of Russian immigrants; Layne was the devoted son of a single mother who worked hard. They were part of a starting five that was either Jewish or black. Their coach, Nat Holman, was already a celebrity by 1950, quite a bit aloof and rather impressed with himself.
When the police came for his players, Holman notably kept his distance.
The basketball part of the scandal was uncovered unintentionally, stemming from an investigative report by Ed Reid of The Brooklyn Eagle into bookmaking corruption involving police officers.
That probe spread to the college basketball courts of New York City. Roman was becoming ever-conscious about what he was doing, as Goodman explains:
“With each shot that clanked off the rim, he became even more aware that he appeared to be shaving points, and that caused him to caused him to press even harder to prove it wasn’t so, sending up another wild shot, like a card player who keeps pushing a cold streak, each time believing that this hand will be the one that changes his luck, but which only ends up putting him deeper in the hole.”
The internal battles these players experienced, as well as the frayed relationships they had with one another and others in the aftermath of the scandal, form the strengths of the book.
So is the prodigious amount of research, as Goodman pulled together the rich veins of New York City Jewish and ethnic life, the college basketball culture of the time, and the worlds of the shady bookmakers and the ethos of those they corrupted.
Perhaps nothing is as evocative of the fading innocence that serves as the backdrop for this saga than the resorts in the Catskills, similiar to the hotel were Roman waited tables and played basketball in the summer of 1950:
“It was hard to imagine a more idyllic setting for basketball than outdoors in the mountain on a summer night, amid the pines with a bright moon overhead and, at many of the hotels, a lake sparkling in the distance. . . . Spectators crammed together on bleachers pressed tight along the sidelines, older guests watching from rocking chairs; on the cooler evenings some of them sat wrapped in lap robes, passing thermoses of coffee. In one game that summer, the ball was passed wildly off the court and play was delayed for ten minutes as the referees, armed with flashlights, went hunting for it in the deep grass.”
The CCNY participants in the scandal are portrayed as something of victims, but Goodman reveals them as young men who made a grave mistake, and they were forced to reflect on that for the rest of their lives.
Roman played in the minor-league Eastern League before becoming an educator and later a counselor in the New York City school system. After many years away from the CCNY campus, Layne returned to succeed Holman as basketball coach.
Another player charged in the point-shaving scheme, Ed Warner, overcame a near-fatal car accident and addictions before finding redemption toward the end of his life.
While political careers were made, coaching careers were salvaged and business careers were enhanced, the players stood out in the cold:
“The corruption was not abstract; it was both intimate and pervasive, a rotting smell that seemed to hang in the air, seeping into all aspects of their lives, reminding them always that this was the way things were done in the city; this was the real city game.”
More about “The City Game” from NPR and New Books in Sports. Goodman offers his favorite books about sports scandals for The Wall Street Journal. The author’s website is here.
A Few Good Reads
Much is being produced these days about the 100th anniversary of the beginning of the Negro Leagues, especially at the sport’s lauded museum in Kansas City, where a year of special vents are planned. At The Undefeated, a piece about Rube Foster, the pitcher and salesman who did much of the heavy lifting to elevate the segregated game into business viability and a civic institution in many black communities across America;
At the Negro Leagues Museum, more than 200 hand-painted portraits of former stars are on display, and Major League Baseball and the players’ union announced a $1 million donation to support ongoing activities;
At the Kansas City Star, Vahe Gregorian covered Centennial festivities and quoted new Royals owner John Sherman: “This whole story is about resiliency. . . . we won’t let the haters win;”
Houston Astros management and some players tried to do damage-control about their sign-stealing scandal as spring training got underway this week, but just made matters worse with what many regarded as less than any sincere contrition;
New Astros manager Dusty Baker is asking MLB to protect his players from premeditated beanballs (Larry Bowa of the Phillies is all in favor of this), but players for other teams keep lashing out, especially new Cincinnati Reds pitcher Trevor Bauer;
In Southern California, two Little League organizations are banning the use of the Astros name for any teams after protests from parents who are disgusted by the scandal and because, well, it’s Dodgers country, too;
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred wants to muck up something else, this time the playoff format, by expanding the number of teams and also allowing those with the best records to choose their post-season opponents, which truly is preposterous;
Here’s a rule change to mess with the bullpen obsessions of managers: Relievers must pitch to a minimum of three batters or pitch to end the half-inning;
When Jackie Robinson broke the Major League Baseball color line in 1947, the NBA was just getting started. Eric Nusbaum, the former sports editor of Vice, writes about the influence of the Harlem Globetrotters in integrating the league, especially after a 1948 game against the all-white Minneapolis Lakers, the league’s first dynasty. Nusbaum’s forthcoming book is “Stealing Home: Los Angeles, the Dodgers, and the Lives Caught in Between,” published by PublicAffairs;
The late Kobe Bryant, who was buried with his daughter this week, was named a finalist for the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, along with a group that includes recent NBA retirees Tim Duncan and Kevin Garnett, former Kentucky coach Eddie Sutton, former NBA player and coach Rudy Tomjanovich, women’s standout Tamika Catchings and Baylor women’s coach Kim Mulkey. The inductees will be announced at the Final Four in April, with enshrinement in late August;
A new exhibit devoted to basketball opened up this week at the Museum of the City of New York, and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was among the dignitaries in attendance. It’s called “City/Game: Basketball in New York” and there’s an accompanying catalogue. Something I didn’t know: In the 1930s, his father, Ferdinand Alcindor, was a high school basketball teammate of Red Holzman, later to coach the Knicks to their only NBA championships;
It’s been 50 years since Pete Maravich broke Oscar Robertson’s all-time college basketball scoring record, and Scott Rabalais at The Advocate in Louisiana thinks it may never be broken. Even more astonishing is that Maravich scored his 3,367 points and averaged 44.2 points a game in three seasons at LSU, when freshmen were ineligible;
This year’s women’s college player of the year figures to be Oregon senior guard Sabrina Ionescu, a Bryant devotee who’s dedicating her season to his memory. On Friday, she became only the second Division I collegian ever to score 2,000 points and dish out 1,000 assists. The other is Courtney Vandersloot, who played for current Ducks coach Kelly Graves at Gonzaga. Ionescu led Oregon, currently ranked No. 3, to its first Women’s Final Four last year. Her statistical trajectory keeps rising, and she’s only 27 rebounds away from 1,000 career boards;
On Tuesday, British television will show a documentary film on former Tottenham Hotspur star Jimmy Greaves, who’s also the subject of a strenuous campaign by The Daily Mail for greater recognition as a soccer icon. Greaves, who turns 80 this week and was a popular TV commentator, was a starter for England’s 1966 World Cup team, then was ruled out of the quarterfinals with an injury. Geoff Hurst started in his place and stepped into history, scoring a hat trick against West Germany in the finals to clinch England’s only World Cup championship. “If Jimmy Greaves was playing today he’d be up there with [Lionel] Messi,” noted football TV host John Giles this week;
Near Phoenix, the Coyotes Curling Club is thriving, having won a national tournament last year against powerhouses from the Upper Midwest, and currently competing in the 2020 national “bonspiel” in Spokane.
Sports Book News
This coming Saturday, Emily Nemens, editor of The Paris Review and author of a new baseball novel, “The Cactus League,” will appear at the Wellstone Center in the Redwoods, a writers’ colony near Santa Cruz, Calif., with former ESPN baseball writer Molly Knight, author of “The Best Team Money Can Buy,” a 2015 book about the Los Angeles Dodgers;
Colin Kaepernick says he still wants to play again in the NFL, but for now he’s writing a memoir and launching a book publishing company as part of his continuing social activism;
Jay Horwitz, the longtime and respected former PR director for and official team historian of the New York Mets, will be publishing a memoir, “Mr. Met,” with Triumph Books in May.
Passings
Christie Blatchford, 68, was the first female national sports columnist for a Canadian newspaper, a stint that proved to be a gateway for a wide-ranging journalism career that earned her equal amounts of admiration and controversy. She fiercely championed victims of crime, covered Canadian military involvement overseas and was scornful of politically correct pieties.
Rosie DiManno, another legendary, tough-minded Toronto journalist who’s written equally about sports and other topics, remembers her friend, who died this week after a brief bout with cancer, as “an indomitable life force.” At the Globe & Mail in Toronto, where Blatchford wrote about sports, one of her successors, Cathal Kelly, sizes up her career covering bats, balls and pucks, among other things:
“She genuinely did not care what strangers thought of her. That may not be a great quality in a kindergarten teacher, but for a newspaper columnist, it’s like a superpower.”
Please, more of this, straight into my veins!
“Blatch was old school. She was a broad in the Lauren Bacall sense. She was tough, maudlin, brilliant, ruthless, kind, changeable. She was all the things a human can be. All of us are works in progress, but Blatch was somehow closer to being finished.”
I can only dream of having something like this on my tombstone.
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The Sports Biblio Digest is an e-mail newsletter delivered on Sunday. You can subscribe here and search the archives. This is Digest issue No. 194, published Feb. 16, 2020.
I’d love to hear what you think about the Digest, and Sports Biblio. Send feedback, suggestions, book recommendations, review copies, newsletter items and interview requests to Wendy Parker at sportsbiblio@gmail.com.