Published in Sport Magazine, January 1951, pp. 14-15, 76-77.

by STANLEY WOODWARD

STARTING with the premise that there is a great deal of betting on all sports in the United States, the disinterested investigator comes quickly to the conclusion that there is an ever-present danger of corruption in all major sports, but that college basketball stands head and shoulders over the others when it comes to corruption already uncovered or strongly hinted at.

This, so far, is the case against basketball:

(1) Five Brooklyn College players were paid $1,000 for throwing a game that was to have been played in Boston. The bribers were arrested, tried, and sentenced. The players were expelled. The game was cancelled.

(2) A player who lived in Brooklyn and attended George Washington University in Washington, D. C., was approached by gamblers, reported it to the police, played along with the potential bribers, and brought about their arrest and conviction.

(3) On two occasions, players of New York's City College reported that they had been approached by gamblers. In each case, the tapped player reacted violently, the bribers ran off, and no action was possible.

(4) Last Spring, after Bradley University of Peoria had been runner-up to CCNY in both the NCAA and National Invitation tournaments at Madison Square Garden, Paul Unruh, Bradley All-American, said that he had been approached and offered a bribe.

As you can see, most of the finagling has been centered in New York City where, it is a good guess, gambling on college basketball games is far more common than anywhere else in the country. It is no coincidence that "fix" attempts keep cropping up in the area that boasts (if that is the proper word) the most gambling. Organized gambling and corruption go together like ham and eggs, as the spectacular investigations of 1950 have shown on front pages across the nation.

The concentration of major basketball attractions in large cities like New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Buffalo, San Francisco, etc., has tossed the game Into the laps of the betting gentry.

It fills a natural void at this season of the year. People who have become accustomed to risking their loose cash on the outcome of baseball games in the Summer and football games in the Fall, automatically look toward basketball as a fresh opportunity to "get even."

If the bets were made merely on the basis of one team winning and another losing, it is doubtful if much trouble would result. That is, insofar as the players and the schools are concerned. But that kind of wagering would be too hard on the bookmakers' purses, so the vicious "point-spread" system is universally employed.

Most bookies give themselves the benefit of the short end of 6-5 wagering. Thus, if you desire to back your belief in Holy Cross with cash, and the Cross is a 12-point underdog against Kentucky, you win $5 by betting $6 if the point difference turns out to be less than 12. If Kentucky beats Holy Cross by more than 12 points, you lose. If the spread is exactly 12, the bet is generally off.

The thing that makes pointspread betting so vicious is not the fact that it's hard to understand. When your own money is involved, you manage to figure out what it's all about even if you couldn't pass plane geometry in high school. But it undoubtedly makes it easier to sell a pusillanimous college boy on the proposition of tampering with thE result of a game.

In short, if you sidled up to a boy and suggest that he do his best to throw Saturday night's game to the opposition, he may very well take a poke at you - even if he is not an Eagle Scout. But if you carefully guide the conversation around to where you can suggest that he might rake in a nice bundle of cash for himself merely by regulating the point spread in the final score - without changing the actual result of the game in any way - he is much more likely to let himself be sold.

The chances are good that there would be a whole lot more "business" done in connection with college basketball games if it weren't so hard to monkey with the outcome. Basketball is a tough game to fix. It's easy to fix a fight; you only have to get to one man. It's comparatively easy to fix a horse race. It's easy to fix a hockey game, in spite of the fact that there are six men on each side, because the goaltender controls everything. If he plays a brilliant game and still misses four stops out of a possible 50, he can turn the tide.

But even if you get to one man, or even two or three, on a basketball team, you have no sure thing. Basketball coaches are keen. Furthermore, most of the good teams have 10 or 12 players of first-class ability. Thus, if the coach notices that one of his operatives is letting people get by him for layups and failing to score with his usually dependable short push shot, he may take the man out of the game. He may take two or three men out if they are performing sloppily, or even a whole team.

Then where are you? The boys who were going to do your business for you are sitting impotently on the bench and a bunch of earnest galoots who don't know anything about your delicate arrangements are out there popping the ball in and rendering the point spread 23 instead of 14 - thus losing you all your money.

I was talking about the possibilities of basketball-fixing with one of the great coaches of the game the other day. Clair Bee, coach of Long Island University, a man whose blunt honesty is one of the positive factors keeping funny business to a minimum in gambler-ridden New York.

"I've got good boys on my team," he said, "and I can't imagine that any of them would as much as speak to any of the shady characters who roam around the West Side. So let's disregard personal and associated aspects. But if, in another era, I were coaching another team that was less ethical, and if one or more of these theoretical players were to have been fixed by gamblers, I think I would know it. I would see a man do something that I knew he never did, and I would make one of two conclusions: (A) I would think he was sick and off his 'game; (B) I would think that some mental handicap - and in wild theory, it could be interference by an outside person, say, a gambler - was accomplishing the same result.

"Whatever the cause, I would substitute for the boy, wrap him up, and sit him on the bench. I might put him in the game again, but, as sure as shootin', if I noticed any more departures from form, I would take him out and keep him out.

"In my opinion, no one player, or even two or three, can throw a basketball game. The coach, however, could do it. How? By keeping his best scorers on the bench. By making a series of wrong decisions on personnel. By giving his team the wrong defense. By failing to provide effective measures against the opponent's big scorer. In a dozen ways.

"We are lucky to have an honorable group of men in the basketball coaching field. So far, I have never had any doubts about any of them, and I am convinced that none of them ever has done anything except maneuver to win each game the best way he could."

Bee is certainly not over-stating the case when he says that the game is lucky to have an honorable group of men as its coaches. For, if the coaches once began to play footie with the gamblers, the roof would fall in. As it is, the coaches are the only really efficient policemen of the game. This is true, even though the big arenas like Madison Square Garden make every effort to keep the surroundings of the college games thoroughly decent. The Garden, for instance, maintains a force of about 45 special policemen for each big basketball doubleheader. This group, under the direction of former New York City detectives Emil Sardonelli and Charles Esau, is usually augmented by about a dozen city detectives and some uniformed city patrolmen from the district encompassing the Garden.

But, as the scandals that have broken already conclusively prove, a lot of strange things happen despite this protection. The worst mess of all was the Brooklyn College case. It's the only one on record in which players admitted actually taking bribe money. Primary arrangements had been made for them to throw a game to Akron University in Boston Garden. For agreeing to comport themselves on the court in accordance with the briber's master plan, each player was paid $200. They were to get an additional $400 apiece after the game, making a grand total of $600 per man for the adventure. The five, all residents of Brooklyn, were Bernard Barnett, Larry Pearlstein, Bob Leder, Jerry Greene, and Stan Simon. All but Pearlstein were starters.

Akron was expected to be favored by about four points in the Boston game. The Brooklyn boys were instructed to lose by six or seven, thus insuring the syndicate's bets on Akron at the four-point spread. The plot was discovered wholly by accident.

Police were watching the house of one Harry Rosen, whom they suspected of receiving goods stolen from fabric concerns. The law closed in on the house while Rosen was being held elsewhere and found Barnett and Pearlstein looking for him. At first, the boys were suspected of being involved in the garment racket, but, frightened half to death when the cops grabbed them, they quickly blurted out the whole story of the basketball bribe.

It developed that Rosen spoke to Pearlstein on January 20, 1945, about proposed manipulations in the Akron game scheduled for January 31. Subsequent meetings were held involving the other four players on one hand and two associates of Rosen's, Harvey Stemmer (also implicated in the celebrated Hapes-Filchock pro football fix) and a man known only as Danny. The first advance payment was given to the players, and the fix was on - until the startled cops broke it up.

In the other big basketball bribe case, the George Washington affair, the player involved- - Dave Shapiro - emerged with great credit. He reported the gamblers' touch right away, and he helped obtain their arrest and conviction. The Paul Unruh blast against "New York gamblers" probably would have carried more weight if it had been made at the time of the alleged approach. But the Bradley University hero waited until all the post-season tournaments were over, and he was back home in Peoria, before he blew the whistle. By then, there was nothing that anyone could do about it.

The greatest question before the college authorities today is whether or not the establishment of the game in the big-city auditoriums is encouraging gambling and leading to trouble. There wasn't much betting on the sport in the old days, when the game was confined to the small college gymnasiums - but, then, the game wasn't widely followed in those days. It does seem significant, however, that it is where the college kids play their games in the huge metropolitan arenas that the problem of controlling gambling and its pernicious influence is most serious.

For instance, there is a lot of betting on college basketball - and the pro version, too - in Boston, where the Boston Garden shelters a great deal of exciting basketball action each Winter. You can see the bookies congregating before each doubleheader at the East end of North Station, under the lobby of the Garden, and you do not have to strain your vision to see them operating during the games. They bet heavily in Chicago, too, although it's interesting to note that the Chicago bookies don't like to do much business on the games in New York. "Don't trust 'em," they'll tell you.

Yet, in a smaller community like Lexington, Kentucky, there is very little betting, even though the whole town is crazy about the sport. With Baron Adolph Rupp's consistently successful Wildcats to keep them interested, the citizens of Lexington are probably as basketball-conscious as any men and women in the country. But they don't bet much, and there is absolutely no organized bookmaking such as you find in the larger population centers.

"Basketball," said Larry Shropshire of the Lexington Leader, "is purely a school sport around here. If they holler for more points during a game, it's just to break a new scoring record, not because they're worried about the point spread at the end."

Larry is referring to the fact that you will frequently hear the fans in one of the big arenas screaming their heads off over baskets sunk or missed in the last few seconds of play, when the actual outcome of the game has long since been decided. What they're yelling for is their money, and nothing else.

More of the colleges which take basketball seriously might do well to follow Kentucky's example and build a big field house for the sport. The new one at Lexington, being used this year for the first time, holds about 12,000 people. It will enable the Wildcats to take care of all the folks who want to see them play, and it will help the Athletic Association budget at the same time. But it will keep the kids on the campus - except for occasional road forays into the metropolitan arenas.

The scandals that are already on the record demonstrate that the colleges had better find a solution of some kind. You can point a finger at almost any of the big spectator sports and solemnly warn them that corruption is in the offing. But in the case of basketball, you can say that it has already come around to call.

How many times will it have to break into the living room before somebody decides to lock the door?

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