The Game They Played

Stanley Cohen

Description

One of Sports Illustrated’s Top 100 Sports Books of All Time: The riveting story of the point-shaving scandal that shook college basketball to its core

It was the ultimate Cinderella sports story. Unranked heading into the 1949–50 season, the City College basketball team delighted their hometown of New York City and shocked the rest of America by winning both the NCAA and NIT tournaments. An unprecedented feat that would never be duplicated, City College’s postseason grand slam was made all the more remarkable by the fact that, in an era when many premier teams were segregated, its starting lineup consisted of 3 Jewish and 2 African American athletes.
 
With Hall of Fame coach Nat Holman and 4 of the starting 5 returning for the 1950–51 campaign, the stage was set for a thrilling title defense. Alas, it was not to be. City College’s season came to an abrupt end when 3 of its star players were arrested on charges of conspiring to fix games. The ensuing scandal, which would engulf 6 other schools and lead to the indictments of 20 players and 14 fixers, cast New York City sports under a dark cloud, derailed the careers of some of the game’s most promising young talents, and forever altered the landscape of college basketball.

The basis for the award-winning HBO documentary City Dump, The Game They Played is a poignant portrait of the unforgettable moment when an unheralded team of local boys united New York City in both triumph and disgrace.

Sujets

• Sport
• HIStory
• Crime
• United States
• Basketball

Informations

• Publié par: Open Road Media
• Date de parution: 22 septembre 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 5
• EAN13: 9781453295250
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

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The Game They Played
Stanley Cohen
For Betty
and our twin grandchildren,
Samantha and Matthew
PREFACE
It seems now as if it were all part of another lifetime. The years pile up and fold into decades and what once burned bright in memory recedes into the more remote pockets of recollection. We treat the past as if it were a vault in which events can be stored and preserved against the incursions of time. But time stakes its claim. Memory is an untrustworthy guide. The tale, cast anew each time, becomes transformed in the telling. The facts, of course, are always the same; it is the way we see them and feel about them that changes.
Fifty years have gone by since that dull February morning in 1951 when the news came that three members of City College s grand-slam team had been arrested for accepting bribes from gamblers to fix the scores of basketball games. It was just the prying open of the lid. Two days later, players from LIU were charged with the same offense, and it continued that way for months. It spread across the country and reached back across the years, and each time it was like tearing another piece of dressing from a wound that had just begun to heal. Of course, for those of us in New York, the worst had already occurred.
The City College team, on which the ax first fell, had been the treasure of the neighborhoods. These were not semipro athletes who had been recruited from around the country for their athletic skills. They were kids from the boroughs, born and bred in New York. They had learned the game of basketball in their local schoolyards, played for high schools in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and the Bronx, and they went to City College, most of them, not as athletes but as students.
And so, when the CCNY team won both the NIT and the NCAA tournaments in 1950-a feat never accomplished before or since-it was as if we had done it ourselves. It was not big-city arrogance that stoked the fires of our pride, for we had always thought of ourselves as underdogs in those brittle post-war years when being middle-class meant having food on the table and steam heat in the winter. Now, in a sense, we had certified the truth of our ways to the rest of America. Without athletic scholarships, without high-powered recruiting, without any inducements but the promise of an education, we had produced the best basketball team in the country. We did not need to import our talent; we grew it at home.
So, for a brief period of time, not quite a year, we were able to walk with a more certain step, for the national champions were kids like us-Jews and blacks mostly, sons of immigrants and grandsons of slaves-and they had taught us, demonstrated, that we could share equal footing with the best that America could offer. But if we were quick to bask in their reflected glory, if their triumph was ours as well, then we could not but accept a measure of their guilt. Perhaps it was not so much betrayal that we felt when we learned of the scandal, but a subtle sense of implication. We were less victims than accomplices, for which among us would be the first to disclaim the deeds of those who shared our roots?
Nearly twenty-five years later I found myself rummaging through the debris of the past, sifting through a medley of emotions, not certain which were new and which remembered. I had decided to put the entire story on paper, to trace the events and recreate the times, and perhaps explore some of their meaning from the perspective that time lends to trauma. The notion to write the book was not a sudden inspiration. It developed gradually out of a chance meeting at a cocktail party and a reminiscence of the way things used to be. We had, my new acquaintance and I, grown up in the same part of the Bronx, favoring many of the same landmarks, and common background has a way of surfacing. So we swapped the names of people and places, and the conversation soon wound its way to members of the old City College team. The exchange of question-and-answer was fairly typical. It usually began with Whatever became of ? followed by The last I heard and ended with but that was five, no ten, years ago. Little had been heard of Ed Roman or Ed Warner, Floyd Layne or Al Roth, in the years since they were front-page news, but those of us who experienced it firsthand continued to wonder. Pursuing a notion that had not yet taken shape, I leafed through the New York Times news index, looking for the names of the players, but they had all apparently slipped from public notice.
It was then that the idea of writing a book first occurred to me. All the elements seemed to be there: the glory of the championship year, the crunch of the scandal and the disillusionment, careers ended and lives torn apart, and the slow, tedious process of reclamation, trying to put the pieces back together and start anew. It was a lifetime s worth of triumph and tragedy packed within the space of a very few years and all of it at an age when most of us were still trying to fashion our future from wisps of dreams and unformed visions. There was meat enough here for a Hollywood script. Yes, indeed, I would trace the story from its genesis. I would gather the details from news clips, track down the players and tape long, incisive interviews, recapture the flavor of a decade past, and bring the entire saga right up to the present, noting what the players were doing now and how the scandals had affected their lives.
I headed immediately for the library s reference room and checked the book file. I looked under headings marked basketball, sports, scandals, gambling, bribery, Madison Square Garden, City College. Not a word, not a mention of the scandal. I had, through a back door it seemed, ventured into virgin territory. But before long a trace of tentativeness, of suspicion, began to filter into my mood. If the subject had lain fallow for twenty-five years, it was not likely for want of an author. No, I was not quick to believe that I was the first to come calling. Doubtless, there were other reasons, compelling reasons, why no writer had taken up the story until now. That afternoon, in the course of a chain of phone calls, I confirmed the truth of what I had begun to suspect the City College players, to a man, had consistently turned down every request for an interview. Still, I had learned long ago not to accept another s failure as my own. I decided to press forward.
Both Layne and Warner, I discovered, were employed by the New York City Department of Recreation. Layne also worked for Nate Archibald Enterprises, an agency that represented a number of NBA players, and it was in those offices that we met. We spoke for about ninety minutes, and I thought the meeting had gone well. Although no firm commitment was made, Layne and Warner agreed to cooperate as long as my approach to the subject seemed palatable. I told them I would prepare a sample chapter and a detailed outline for their approval. I left with the conviction that I was on my way. If two of the players were giving interviews, I reasoned, some of the others might be moved to add their own views to the record, and I felt that I had won the trust of Layne and Warner. As it happened, I never saw either of them again.
Layne never really turned me down. He just became gradually unavailable. I had sent him an outline and a chapter of about four thousand words, and I received in response a note reading: Ed and I find the presentation to be satisfactory. Within a matter of weeks, however, Layne was back in the news. He had been named varsity basketball coach at City College, and the appointment, quite properly, was greeted by most in the press as a triumph of justice. Now Layne was obliged to grant interviews to reporters from both the print and broadcast media, and although he was treated rather well, his ardor for my own project seemed to cool considerably. I made periodic phone calls, but I could sense that he no longer had an appetite for disinterring the past. Finally, he stopped returning my phone calls. I called Warner, who told me he was not necessarily backing out but if I wanted to hear what he had to say, other considerations were involved, considerations I was not prepared to meet.
I had already tried in vain to meet with some of the other members of the City team. One indicated he would go with the consensus. Another seemed less inclined to cooperate. Ed Roman, with whom I had had a passing schoolyard acquaintance many years earlier, was the most direct. He told me up front that he had decided long ago to give no interview of any kind, regardless of what the others might choose to do. We spoke, off the record, for the better part of an hour. He told me a great deal during that time, and his insights were sharp enough, and detached enough, that I regretted all the more having to do without them. For I had decided by then that I would go it alone if circumstance required.
It is a newsman s axiom that there is no such thing as no comment. The refusal to address a subject is in itself a statement, and if a writer is a degree resourceful and given at all to speculation, he might discover that he has happened upon a better story than he had hoped for. A silence that had been maintained for more than two decades spoke of something other than a casual reluctance. It was, in fact, a small miracle, given the number of players involved and the variety of opportunities that had been offered for them to tell their story. And yet one did not need