My Old Neighborhood Remembered (12 page)

The news was incomprehensible. As with all local college basketball players, they were major sports figures in New York. These were
our
heroes who had fallen. College basketball was more important than professional basketball. The local college teams played their home games in Madison Square Garden and young sports fans rooted for college teams the way people root for professional teams today. You were an N.Y.U. fan, a City College fan, an L.I.U. fan, and you took sides when they played each other and rooted for the local team when they played a team from elsewhere.

Although the 1951 scandal involved fixers at N.Y.U, L.I.U., Manhattan College, Toledo, Bradley, and Kentucky, in the media it became known as “The City College Basketball Scandal” because of the number of City College players involved and the stature of the City College team.

In the 1949-1950 season, City College won both the NIT and the NCAA championships. The NIT title was more highly regarded than the NCAA then with the games staggered and the finals for both played in Madison Square Garden. With its starting team consisting of former New York City high school ballplayers, City College was the ultimate New York City-style basketball team with considerable ball movement, everybody capable of smoothly handling the ball on offense.

In the NIT tournament, City defeated San Francisco, and then top-ranked Kentucky by 39 points, then Duquesne and Bradley to win the championship. In the NCAA tournament, City defeated Ohio State, North Carolina State, and for a second time in the post-season, Bradley, seven straight unexpected victories in the two tournaments. They were the pride of the city for an instant as a Cinderella Team. Their accomplishment, the double championship, still stands. Teams can no longer play in both tournaments.

The point spread was at the core of the scandal. The players apparently were not trying to lose games. They were trying to win, but by fewer points than the team was favored to win by in the betting line, so the gamblers would collect on their smart bets. The players could walk off the court winners of a game, cheered by their fans, and pocket their payoffs. Less frequently, players were given bonuses for running up the score over the point spread, the gamblers betting those games the other way.

The scandal surfaced when Junius Kellogg of the Manhattan College team reported a bribe offer to his coach. The bribe was brought to the attention of the police and events began to unravel for the fixers and the gamblers. Along with Ed Roman, Irwin Dambrot, and Ed Warner, their City College teammates, Al Roth, Norm Mager, and Floyd Lane were also arrested.

Eventually, we learned City College had rigged the outcomes of games during the very season they ended up winning the double championship. We followed the story, we talked about it — I was fifteen then — we couldn't believe they would do such a thing.

Stanley Cohen, another teenager in the neighborhood, became a writer and as an adult, still absorbed by the scandal, wrote a book about it,
The Game They Played
, named by
Sports Illustrated
as one of the Top 100 Sports Books of All Time.

Thirty-two players were involved, some who were headed for basketball careers in the NBA, including the gifted Sherman White of L.I.U. The new professional league had betting problems of its own. Games were being taken off the board by bookmakers who would not accept bets because they were suspicious of planned outcomes. The NBA was never going to allow players involved in the scandal to play in the league. For the few thousand dollars they each received, the ballplayers were punished dearly. Over the years they did get past the ignominy and put together respectable lives.

The ballplayers caught in the scandal grew up in a city where a distinct betting culture existed in its working class neighborhoods. Many neighborhood people were habituated horseplayers. Battered by The Depression, people were looking to win bets for the sheer money of it and for whatever positive feelings they would have from winning. In the Bronx were the candy stores that attracted bookmakers and bettors. In our neighborhood you could see the more desperate versions of the bettors crouched over their racing forms day and night in Bickford's Cafeteria, located at the Grand Concourse and 188th Street near a cars-to-the-track bettors' candy store. A regular in the candy store and in Bickford's was the most famous local bookmaker, Joe Hacken, also known as, Joe Jalop.

When we reached high school, betting cards proliferated among us, administered by the slicksters in school, the cards containing the point spreads for the week's upcoming college football games and we bought the cards and made our picks.

Intrigued by the subject of the fix scandal, when I was older I went through copies of
The New York Post
and looked at the point spreads of all the games played in the 1949-1950 season by the teams that were named to have rigged points. I compared the point spreads with the final scores of the games. The New York teams that were said to be fixing games, C.C.N.Y., N.Y.U., L.I.U., and Manhattan College, failed to win by more than the point spread in far more games than the District Attorney's office announced as fixed games. They may not have covered the spread, in gambling parlance, because that was the way those games played out. But they may have fixed more games than the District Attorney was willing to reveal to the public. We will never know. Whether the fixing of basketball games went beyond the seven colleges identified is something else we will never know. I suspect the fixing was more widespread than we were told.

The ballplayers in the scandal had to have been aware of the extent of gambling in their neighborhoods. They saw the point spreads listed in the newspapers for every game they played. They would have heard about NBA games being taken off the board and the rumors that NBA players were rigging games, the everybody's-doing-it argument. We can feel sympathy for them if these cultural influences were working on them and if they felt they were unpaid workers in a business operation run by their colleges and by Madison Square Garden, with others profiting from their labor. And we can feel sympathy for them because they paid an extremely high price for their college-age blunder. But Junius Kellogg reported his bribe offer. They did this thing and they didn't have to do it.

Shortly after the news of the scandal broke, I was talking about it with friends in a candy store on 184th Street. One of the older girls from the neighborhood was listening to us. She was a student at City College. “For years they've been saying everyone at City is a Communist,” she said, despondent, “and now this.”

I had an Emil Verban autograph, the only one in the neighborhood, I'm sure. A second baseman with the St. Louis Cardinals, Philadelphia Phillies, and Chicago Cubs from the mid-1940s to 1950, he is known today perhaps only to baseball fanatics. He was a major player to me and I rooted for him.

My mother called me at home from her job at J. W. Mays in Brooklyn and said she helped a baseball player named Emil Verban pick out some children's clothing at the store and he gave her two tickets for the game that night in Ebbets Field against the Dodgers and if I wanted to go I should come out to the store and meet her. We went to the game, Dodgers-Phillies. Coincidentally, one player was signing autographs on the field near the grandstand after the game was over, Emil Verban. I rushed my mother down to where he was standing and he remembered her. They had met only a few hours before. She introduced me, he said hello, shook my hand, and gave me his autograph.

This was neither the first nor the last time my mother took me to a game. When I was growing up she took me to baseball games, football games, basketball games, hockey games. Going to Yankee Stadium or the Polo Grounds was always exciting, but they were nearby. Going downtown to Madison Square Garden was particularly exciting. In her earliest years of working, with very little money at her disposal, selective in what she could manage to do, she would go with me to Sunday afternoon hockey games and we would walk up several flights of stairs to sit in the upper reaches of Madison Square Garden. The tickets for Sunday afternoons didn't cost much, so she could do it — amateur hockey, teams like the Sands Point Tigers, and minor league professional games featuring the New York Rovers, a farm team of the New York Rangers. Sometimes on a special night when there was no school the next day, she spent a little more money and would go up to the balcony with me for a Rangers game.

By the time of high school we could get student discounts to hockey games and I would also go with friends to baseball games. I no longer needed my mother to take me. As she progressed through her business life, she evidenced no interest whatsoever in sports. She never would have gone to a sports event with a friend or watched a game on television. She did ask me to go with her to see plays. She loved theater. The woman she became, successful, well-dressed, sophisticated, to look at her you wouldn't have imagined she once sat high up in the Madison Square Garden balcony for hockey games. Years later, I recalled for her how she took me to games, this in light of her turning out to be completely disinterested in sports. She said, “I thought a boy growing up without a father should go to sports events.”

The all-around smartest students in the Bronx generally went to the Bronx High School of Science. Administrators at Science and Science graduates have pointed to the school's highly impressive list of distinguished alumni and properly so. But every Bronx high school produced good citizens and people of achievement and some who made a significant impact in the world at large, the likes of Rosalyn S. Yalow, a graduate of Walton High School in the Bronx. After receiving a doctorate in nuclear physics, she worked as a medical researcher at the Bronx Veterans Administration Hospital in the 1940s and went on to be awarded a Nobel Prize in Medicine.

New York City's public high schools predominantly operated on the principle of large schools moving large numbers of students through a large variety of subject offerings. I went to DeWitt Clinton. If I went anywhere else — apart from the Bronx High School of Science, which surely would have been a problem for me — I am positive I would have done as well in the classes in which I did well and I would not have done any better in the classes I stumbled through.

Clinton was located on Mosholu Parkway near the northern end of the Grand Concourse. The all-boys school was not a zoned-by-neighborhood high school. About ten percent of the students were African-American, largely from Manhattan, the rest of the school population mainly came from throughout the Bronx — Jewish, Protestant, and Irish-American and Italian-American Catholics who had chosen not to attend Catholic high schools.

In looking over my high school graduation yearbook from the class of 1952, I took note of how many teachers were male. These were most likely the men who entered teaching at the time of The Depression and because they were culturally restricted by their backgrounds they were never candidates for jobs in corporate America. Postwar they were well along in their careers and not going anywhere else, as were their female teaching colleagues, restricted by the-smart-girls-become-teachers bias of the time. Several of my high school teachers were markedly superior to the professors I was to have in college.

From the outset at Clinton I started playing basketball in the intramural program and that helped bring the large school down to size. In my home room was my friend, Ben Miller. Ben played guitar and was building up a playlist of folk songs with which to be charming with girls. I considered him highly advanced. We found out if we could get into the school chorus we could be in the home room for the chorus, a home room with few people in it and a relaxed atmosphere. I reasoned I must have been able to sing, since I had been picked out by that music teacher in Hebrew School.

The teacher for chorus, Mrs. Brotman, was quite pleasant in her demeanor and played some notes on the piano and asked me to match the notes with my voice. I could. I was in the chorus. And so was Ben. The home room was informal and there I stayed for the remainder of high school.

The chorus was divided for vocal arrangements into four parts. I was the baritone line above bass and we had first and second tenors. A third of the members of the chorus were African-American. Most of them sang in their church choirs. Because of these students we had a decent chorus.

We sang at assemblies, graduations, and we sang carols in the hallways at Christmas time. I was fairly good at holding my part, but under pressure of performance you could sometimes feel the entire structure collapsing, the bass line and baritone line drifting into the tenor line that was carrying the melody. We would start out singing something like the Fred Waring arrangement of
Dancing in the Dark
, four-part harmony, and by the time we reached the end we were practically singing in unison. Not a bad sound, but not four-part harmony. Sometimes we got it right.

Apart from being in a group with more African-Americans than I ever had contact with before — and more than I would have contact with in college — listening to some of these church choir-disciplined singers and singing along was an uplifting experience. One young man, Gordon Rivers, had a high, soaring tenor voice and was so passionate when he sang, he would completely lose himself in song, never pausing, just singing. Mrs. Brotman would have to call out, “Breathe, Rivers! Breathe!”

The only varsity letter I received in high school was a letter for music, not anything an athletically-minded boy was going to wear on a sweater, still I was happy to have it. As it turned out, being in the chorus was not just gaming the system on home room. Singing with those real singers was wonderful.

When I was finishing my first year of high school, a student protest atypical of those days occurred. All New York City teachers were paid the same salary. Arguing that their specific skills and, in some cases, additional education should be factored into their pay, high school teachers were seeking an increase. Mayor William O'Dwyer, overseeing the New York City budget, refused the high school teachers at a time New York State had just given the teachers' supervisors at the Board of Education a 30% raise in pay.