Say it ain't so!
Neugeboren, Jay
ON BASKETBALL, BOOK-WRITING. & BETRAYAL Say it ain't so! JAY NEUGEBOREN Rick Kuhn was sentenced to 10-years' imprisonment yesterday for his part in a point-shaving scheme that was hatched during...
...That's how come I got such clean hands...
...One of the players implicated, Doug Moe, had been a few years behind me at Erasmus and we'd played together in the Holy Cross schoolyard on Church Avenue...
...To judge from the coverage of this new fix in the media, nobody seems shocked...
...JAY NEUGEBOREN Rick Kuhn was sentenced to 10-years' imprisonment yesterday for his part in a point-shaving scheme that was hatched during the 1978-79 season, when he played basketball for Boston College...
...As one schoolyard player put it, when writing his memoirs of the period, "Point-shaving was as much a part of college basketball in the forties and fifties as the two-hand set-shot...
...It doesn't surprise me, when I look through Big Man now, fifteen years later, to see that, like me, Mack Davis too is fascinated by athletes such as Pete Gray, the one-armed outfielder of the old St...
...Those warm afternoons when, between games, I'd lean my back against the wire fence, my rear-end on concrete, and sip a cold Coke while I talked with my friends about the Knicks and the Dodgers and our own Erasmus Hall High School team, debating and arguing about which players and teams were best, and why - those long hours on weekends and vacations with the older guys who'd been stars on the Erasmus team before my time and who'd gone on to be All-American players in college and stars in the pros - those days seem, in my memory, endless...
...Yeah, me, I got the cleanest hands of any fixer around...
...But by the mid-sixties, Casey had shot himself in the head, Hodges and others had moved out, and my two great heroes seemed already to be old men: one a white-haired executive running Chock Full O' Nuts, the other a smiling and helpless paraplegic in a wheelchair...
...The NBA could not try to punish them again...
...Still, the news makes its way to our small New England town that yet another set of basketball point-fixing scandals has broken...
...We must keep going...
...Because some of the St...
...The kid that grew up in the schoolyards of Brooklyn is still alive in me, still wishing that someday these schools will be back in the big time, will take their revenge for all the years during which they've paid the price others should have shared...
...We are all voyeurs - peeking into locker rooms, hotel rooms, courtrooms...
...The two I chose, Ralph Beard and Gene Melchiorre, were both quick, aggressive, small guards...
...My beloved Dodgers - I'd been born two blocks from Ebbets Field - were, by this time, gone from Brooklyn forever...
...When my two young boys debate with their friends the salaries of players as often as their averages...
...The old plea, echoing the infamous Black Sox scandals, was in my heart...
...when we watch the free agent drafts and see the hardship cases leave college early...
...I'd known some of the players from those first fixes - they'd gone to my high school, they'd played in my local schoolyard, they'd patted me on the back and taken me into games with them and encouraged me and given me pointers...
...Louis Browns, by Gene "Silent" Hairston, the deaf boxer, by "Pistol" Pete Reiser, the great Dodger centerfielder who crippled himself by crashing into the walls of Ebbets Field...
...BY THE TIME I wrote Big Man, I realized, too, that my desire to write about the scandals was, in part, a desire to recapture the Brooklyn of my childhood - a time and place that were no longer what they had been...
...I did my research, I talked with lawyers, I discovered that what my instincts had told me, was true - that the NBA, involved in interstate commerce, had a monopoly, and could not conspire to take away anyone's livelihood...
...He'd been an All-City player at Erasmus and I'd idolized him when he became a backcourt star on CCNY's "Cinderella" team - the only team to ever win both the NCAA and NIT championships in a single year...
...Kuhn's lawyer...
...And yet, I have to admit that my own childhood heroes could not have fallen so far had they not been raised up so high, had they not been bathed in glory by the very system of big-time athletics that did them in...
...John's boys had gone on to long pro careers, as players and coaches...
...Davis, with his self-protective irony, answered me: "All these guys always wanting to know why I did it, they give me a pain...
...In the novel Davis becomes involved in, among other things, the attempt by a sports writer to bring a lawsuit against the National Basketball Association for having blacklisted players such as Davis...
...He boasted that gamblers "couldn't reach my boys with a ten-foot pole...
...And the others - Groza, Beard, Barnstable, Spivey, Mel-chiorre, Schlichtman, Grover, Chianakas, Mann, Preece, Kelly - from faraway places with strange-sounding names such as Peoria and Hardinsburg and Covington and Bradley - I'd read about them and argued about them too...
...Later on, when I read about how the St...
...It is as if, I begin to think, the nation has aged along with me - as if the innocence I lost has somehow been lost by us all...
...So that NOW, in 1982, when I read an article that talks not of the tragedy that has befallen these young boys from Boston College, but of how the fix was set up, and how the mob was allegedly involved, and how the boys flubbed outlet passes and missed foul shots and met in hotel rooms, I am terribly saddened...
...Junius Kellogg, the Manhattan College star who refused a bribe and reported it to his coach, became a national hero...
...when we watch them ask to be traded...
...At the time I was crushed...
...Hugh Casey's bar and grill was a few blocks away from my house, and Gil Hodges's bowling alley wasn't much further...
...Lots of the players had lived in Flatbush, had come to my gym in high school, my local synagogue...
...I work at the Minit-Wash, washing down cars, you know...
...Despite my sadness over the corruption that surrounds young athletes, despite my anger at the way they are told, almost from the cradle, that they are valued primarily for their physical talents because these talents make big money for others - when I look through results of games in papers, I look first, not for the UCLA or Notre Dame scores, but for those of CCNY and LIU...
...Patrick's, on the corner of Madison Avenue and 50th Street - the Archdiocese of New York - was known in the city as "the powerhouse...
...Say it ain't so, Joe...
...In my heart, I knew, I'd always had a special feeling for athletes like Campanella -' for great players who'd been cut down in the prime of their lives - and these feelings were connected to what I felt for the fixers...
...he had put on so much weight - was so broad and pasty-faced - that it wasn't until a friend of mine whispered his name to me, between baskets, that I realized who he was...
...They'd been banned for life from college and professional sports...
...JAY NEUGEBOREN, the author of Sam's Legacy and An Orphan's Tale, has a new novel just out, The Stolen Jew (Holt, Rinehart...
...some had left college...
...I ask myself...
...Holman said...
...Sports was my whole life then, and on days when I didn't work at my after-school job I'd be in the schoolyard until sundown, playing stickball or punchball or three-man basketball...
...The game I loved, I was discovering, was played in a world fraught with corruption, and the only ones who were innocent, it seemed, were kids like myself, and (but only for a while) those like Rupp and Allen and City College coach Nat Holman, who tried, in the shabbiest and most self-righteous ways, to disown their own players...
...What, in short, would you do with your life if you couldn't do the thing you loved...
...At CCNY, Floyd Lane, still considered "clean" after others had confessed - played his heart out, leading a ragamuffin team to a 67-48 victory over Lafayette, and was carried on the shoulders of the students around the City College campus . . . but Lane, too, it soon turned out, had been involved in point-shaving...
...It was also that I kept asking myself, though not in words, what it would be like to be one of them...
...when we watch players sit out seasons for money...
...when we read the statistics on college athletes who never get degrees - despite the lip-service we pay to qualities such as pride and integrity and team spirit - who can believe anymore that the primary drive and passion in an athlete is to play as well and as hard as he can because that is what he was born to do...
...And there was something else about the fixes of the early fifties: though the scandal eventually spread to the Midwest, the first (and for a while the only) players to be implicated, were all from the city, all schoolyard ballplayers, and all, almost to a man, Jews or blacks: Herb Cohen, Irwin Dambrot, Al "Fats" Roth, Connie Schaff, Ed Roman, Eddie Gard, Norm Mager, Leroy Smith, Dolph Bigos, Floyd Lane, and the two greatest of them all, the two who everyone knew would not only make it big in the pros, but would, with their flashy schoolyard moves and their enormous talents, revolutionize the very style of professional play - Eddie Warner and Sherman White...
...It is as if, in my memory, the fixers of my youth are legends whose names and lives are tainted by the tawdriness and shame of this new scandal...
...That was the word in the schoolyard, and the word echoed...
...If you loved basketball and were blessed with the talent they'd had, what would you do if you couldn't ever play again...
...I wasn't the only one who felt that way, I knew...
...BUT IT WASN'T only that the players I'd worshipped had let me down, I realize now...
...When the second set of scandals broke in 1961,1 had, again, been touched personally...
...THIRTEEN YEARS LATER, when I was twenty-six years old and had long since forsworn the hope of becoming a professional athlete, I began to write about the fixes of the early fifties...
...And how luring the glory of that system remains...
...There were double-jeopardy concerns too - the players had been tried by the courts and, in some cases, punished...
...The City Council of his native Portsmouth commended him, the Chicago CYO Club of Champions presented him with its annual medal, the New York City Police Commissioner awarded him a scroll of honor...
...What then, I wondered, would they do with the rest of their lives...
...Shit, man, nobody giving me an education cause they like my looks...
...When one of the fixers came down to our schoolyard - to watch, or to play some three-man ball - nobody ever asked questions, nobody ever mentioned the fixes...
...And if there was something tragic in the fall of Roman, Roth, Warner, White, and the rest, there was, for a time, something equally noble about the lives of those who had not succumbed to temptation...
...Judge Bramwell rejected an appeal for leniency by . . . Mr...
...After quiz show scandals and Watergate, after confessional books by sports stars about theft and rape and homosexuality and violence and drugs, why should anyone be shocked anymore by three kids who shaved a few points...
...some had been given jail terms - they were outcasts and pariahs, the marks of Cain on their foreheads...
...Every college athlete may now come under suspicion from coaches and fans.'' -New York Times, February 6, 1982 There are NO schoolyards in North Hadley, Massachusetts, where I live now...
...And I wonder, too, if there are still kids in the playgrounds of small towns and the schoolyards of big cities who believe the way I believed - kids who, thirty years from now, will remember the names of Sweeney, Cobb, and Kuhn, and will feel saddened that men of such grace and talent were once bought out for a few pieces of silver...
...John's players were spared by "divine intervention," as it were, I would become as bitter as I'd been when I'd first heard the rumor...
...Big Man told the story of Mack Davis, and it was set in my old Brooklyn neighborhood in the year 1956, five years after the fixes...
...The tale comes to me on winds that seem to travel from a foreign land, and the cast of characters in the story - fixers as well as players - seems utterly unlikely: a dog groomer, a school librarian, the alleged mastermind of the $5.85 million Lufthansa theft...
...A substantial argument can be offered," Judge Bramwell said, "that a substantial term of incarceration imposed on this defendant will be recalled in the future by another college athlete who may be tempted to compromise his performance...
...Everybody seems to take the commercialization of amateur sports for granted - the recruiting, the phony jobs, the inflated scholarships, the extra gifts, the under-the-table cash...
...Did that first set of scandals really take place thirty years ago...
...And there were, we knew, dozens of other players quaking and waiting, players whose names were passed from mouth to mouth in the schoolyard during those years, but who were never implicated by the D. A. Those from Catholic colleges - St...
...Cardinal Spellman's residence next to St...
...That's pretty good," Mack says...
...I'd even cut out full-color pictures of two players from copies of Sport magazine and taped them to the wall above my bed...
...When these city boys were caught, the coaches and athletic directors from the Midwest claimed that the fixes were a uniquely city thing: "Out here in the Midwest, this condition, of course, does not prevail," Phog Allen, coach of the great Kansas teams of those years, said, "but in the East, the boys are thrown into an environment which cannot help but breed the evil which more and more is coming to light...
...It was as if somebody had cancer and you weren't allowed to use the word...
...We're treating this thing as if it never happened," says Bill Flynn, the Boston College Athletic Director...
...Nobody seems very interested in why players should sell out or be sold out - everybody seems more interested in the how of it all...
...I'd seen the greatest of these fixers - Roger Brown and Connie Hawkins - playing in the schoolyard when they were in their prime (before the pros let them back in), and I ached, all over again, for their lost years, their lost careers...
...gamblers paid, I worked for them...
...It seems impossible, for I can still recall the name of every single player and gambler and coach who was implicated...
...Some of the players - Sandy Koufax and Tommy Brown - were Brooklyn boys who'd played their sandlot ball at the Parade Grounds, where I'd played...
...Adolph Rupp, the "Baron" of Kentucky, whose teams in the first four postwar years won 130 out of 140 games and three national championships, declared that his great (and highly recruited) players were ' 'just a bunch of small-town boys, just some kids . from down the road...
...I remember - less than a year afterwards - seeing Al Roth come down to the schoolyard...
...I'd watch the older guys with awe and longing, and I'd wait for the moment when one of them would pick me for nexts or tell me I'd made a good move or a sharp pass...
...The college paid me, I did what they wanted...
...John's especially - were, we told each other, being protected by a real powerhouse...
...they'd made public confessions...
...Athletic directors still talk the way they did thirty years ago, and this is no surprise...
...The Dodgers had seemed like an extended family when I was a kid and they'd been in their glory years...
...It doesn't surprise me that I've been drawn to the lives of other players who were more sinned against than sinning, who fought, not always with success, against an unjust fate: Lou Brissie, "Big Daddy" Lipscomb, Arnie Davis, Herb Score, Lou Gehrig, Brian Piccolo, Ed Head, Monty Stratton, Darrel Stingley, Tom Smith, Maurice Stokes...
...As the tale of the scandals began to unfold, as more and more players and schools were implicated, I began to sense, if dimly, that all was not as good and pure as I had believed...
...This crime has reminded millions of sports fans that athletes can be compromised...
...It might yet be possible, then, I dreamt, for a small, inflamed kid like myself, who was willing to drive through a brick wall to score a lay-up, to make it...
...It is as if the fixers of my youth were, somehow, heroic pioneers-men who laid down their lives and talents so that others might not err in such large ways, men who risked and dared things that make those who have come since seem to be pathetic imitators...
...But more important than what I discovered about the legal status of the NBA's blacklist - by putting myself into Mack's situation, into his very skin - I discovered, for one imagined human being, what it felt like to have been one of the fixers...
...I wonder if there will be kids who thirty years from now will still be heartbroken, as I was - who will still yearn to have these three players say it wasn't so...
...He wore street clothes and a heavy coat, and he leaned against the fence, watching us play...
...And to the question I'd asked my heroes silently, as a kid - Why did you do it...
...Mack said...
...What list they got for the white boys...
...and I can still recall with almost the same outrage and sadness - the same downward sinking of my heart - how utterly shaken I was, and how, more than anything in the world, I wanted to believe that it wasn't so...
...The game has meant too much to the youth of the college, of the nation, even the world, to be affected by half a dozen kids with a price.'' Yet District Attorney Frank Hogan's investigation showed that Holman had not only recruited vigorously, but had been party to the forging of the high school and college records of his players...
...How different, I think, from the fixes of my own youth...
...When the first set of scandals broke in 1951,1 was a scrawny thirteen-year-old kid growing up in the schoolyards of my Brooklyn neighborhood...
...For they too had had their adult lives stolen from them...
...Alas, the word was true, and Molinas (already banned from the NBA for betting on his own team), after being caught and convicted, and after serving a term in jail, was eventually killed in his Hollywood Hills home, shot in the back of the head...
...I recalled, also, sitting around the office of the Columbia newspaper in the late fifties, when I was an undergraduate there, and being told by the sports editor what was common knowledge around the city's schoolyards then - that the big man in the fixes, the guy the D. A. was after, was none other than one of Columbia's former greats, Jack Molinas...
...I did it for money, what they think...
...By this time I'd written eight unpublished books and had accumulated over two thousand rejection slips (I attacked the literary world with the same drive and persistence I'd used against zone defenses) - yet it was only when I went to the subject that had, for more than half of my life, been haunting me, that things clicked - that my literary shots, as it were, began going in...
...The fix soon expanded to include Bradley and Kentucky (most of the Kentucky fixers had already graduated and gone - as an entire team - into the NBA, forming the new Indianapolis franchise...
...My three children ice-skate on the lake that I look at from my window, they bike on the country roads behind our house, they take long walks with my wife and me on the hillside across from usthrough apple archards, along paths that run through forests of birch, maple, oak, and spruce, and over fields upon which, at this very moment, I can see cows grazing...
...bookies paid more than gamblers, I signed up with them...
...Because they had never paid the price that the Jews and the blacks and the country boys from Kentucky and Illinois had paid...
...a potential Rhodes Scholar who worked for nothing at a camp for underprivileged children, a twenty-five-year-old substitute who'd already been a minor league baseball player, a black player not quite good enough to make the pros...
Vol. 109 • March 1982 • No. 5
