by William Cook
The answer to the lackluster play of City College came on February 18, 1951, when three of the CCNY players that had played on the 1950 championship teams were arrested for bribery. All three of those arrested admitted receiving up to $1,500 each to fix three games played at Madison Square Garden during the current college season of 1950–51.
The method used by the players to fix the games was point-shaving where the players participating in the conspiracy are supposed to lose or keep the margin of victory below the point spread. Simply stated, even the most casual fan will understand that something is wrong with the game’s outcome when a good team suddenly underperforms and an average team overperforms. It creates suspicion of a fix.
Three CCNY players, Co-captains Ed Roman and Ed Warner along with Al Roth, were taken into custody when they returned to New York with Coach Nat Holman after a Saturday night 95–71 victory over Temple in Philadelphia. When confronted with the evidence all three confessed to the wrongdoing.
Others implicated in the scandal would soon be arrested, including Salvatore Tarto Sollazzo, a 45-year-old jewelry manufacturer and ex-con known as a sure-thing gambler. Also arrested was Eddie Gard, a Long Island University senior and former LIU player named as an intermediary with the CCNY players.
Also taken into custody that day was Harvey “Connie” Schaff, a New York University player who had attempted to line up players at NYU to fix a game against Cornell at Madison Square Garden on New Year’s Day in 1951, but failed. NYU, the pregame favorite, lost to Cornell 69–56.
In the NYU fix, Connie Schaff was approached by former outstanding LIU player Jackie Goldsmith working on behalf of Daniel “Dutch” Lamont, known as the biggest bookmaker in Altoona, Pennsylvania, and racetrack follower Joseph Serota. Goldsmith, Lamont, and Serota had offered Schaff $2,000 to hold down his team’s score against Cornell. Within a month, Connie Schaff was convicted and sentenced to six months in prison. The others would go through a series of appeals facing other charges. Goldsmith was also charged with attempting to bribe four LIU players to throw a game against Duquesne at Madison Square Garden on January 1, 1949.
In the days that followed, the scandal would widen as others would be arrested for bribery and attempted bribery of college players. One of those implicated was Henry E. Poppe, former co-captain of the Manhattan College team that was involved with fixing three Manhattan games during 1949–1950.
But it was the CCNY fixers that were the leading story in the scandal. The plot to fix the CCNY games is believed to have originated during the summer of 1950 when several of the college’s players were entertained by Salvatore Sollazzo at a hotel in the Catskills where college players from all over the country earned money in the summer by working at various jobs and playing unofficial basketball games in the tongue-in-cheek “Borscht Circuit” league for the entertainment of the hotel guests.
Prior to the 1950–51 college basketball season, an invitation was extended by Sollazzo to Gard to visit his home where it was suggested to Gard that he attempt to entice current New York City college players to fix games. Eddie Gard had known Al Roth since high school, he sounded him out and he was agreeable. At the beginning of December 1950, Ed Roman was approached by Roth and he agreed to visit Sollazzo’s home with Roth. Following a game at Madison Square Garden, Roman and Roth met with Sollazzo and he told them they could make a lot of money if they agreed to fix some games. The players were easy prey for the gambler. To entice the naïve players, Sollazzo asked them, what’s the difference if you win by ten points or seven points. Still, Roman and Roth were concerned that they might be detected if they didn’t feed the ball to Warner who they considered critical to follow through on the plot. Warner might suspect something and go to coach Holman. So, they approached Warner, and to their surprise, he wanted in on the action.
The three tainted games in question had been the CCNY games with Missouri on December 9, Arizona State on December 28, and Boston College on January 11. In all three games, the fix was for the CCNY players to keep their margin of victory down to no more than six points. They did better than that as they lost all three games.
In the Arizona fix, CCNY lost 41–38 and Roth, Roman, and Warner each received $1,000. In the Boston College game, lost by CCNY 63–59, Sollazzo had promised Roth and Roman $1,000 each. Warner was hurt and didn’t play, but Sollazzo said that he would still give him $500. However, after giving Roth $1,400, Sollazzo failed to honor his promise to Warner and Roman and at the time of their arrest, they were still attempting to collect. Nonetheless, all three CCNY players did receive incentives from Sollazzo, such as a payment of $500 each following the Washington State game that wasn’t fixed and won by CCNY 59–43. The game was played at Madison Garden and one of the CCNY conspirators bet all the money he received from Sollazzo on his own team.
While Al Roth, Ed Roman, and Ed Warner would all receive suspended sentences for their parts in fixing games, Commissioner Maurice Podoloff and the NBA took swift action to protect its brand banning all three from ever playing in the league.
Salvatore Sollazzo wouldn’t be as lucky as the players he used. He was sentenced to twelve years in prison and handed a lien of $1,128,493 for evasion of taxes.
By March 1951, three more CCNY players would be arrested and charged with fixing games by a gambler other than Sollazzo. Those players, Irwin Dambrot, Norman Mager, and Herbert Cohen, were charged in a conspiracy to fix games against SMU, UCLA, and Niagara University and enticed Ed Roman and Al Roth to join them. But upon their arrest, the three stated that they had been involved with fixing games as far back as 1948.
The initial bribe of $4,500 made to five players for fixing the SMU game on December 8, 1949, was to be split as follows; Dambrot, Mager, Ed Roman, and Al Roth $1,000 each. Cohen, a substitute who played only a little, was to receive $500. However, the money was never received by the players because the final outcome of the game against SMU in which CCNY won 67–53 resulted in a financial loss for the gambler. It was just a case of SMU playing so badly that the CCNY players would have to lie on the floor to lose.
However, the UCLA game played on December 27, 1949, and won by CCNY 60–53 met the fixer’s specifications and the players received the $4,500 payoff.
In the Niagara game, played February 16, 1950, at Madison Square Garden, Roman and Roth backed out saying they’d had enough. So Dambrot, Mager, and Cohen did the dirty work. CCNY had been a big favorite but was upset by Niagara 68–61 in overtime.
One of the most unfortunate individuals to be implicated in the scandal was 6′8″ Sherman White, a forward on the LIU team. White, an All-American, had just been named Sporting News Player of the Year when he was arrested for point shaving in February 1951. In the game against John Marshall College on February 28, 1950, White had scored 63 points. At the time of his arrest, White was the leading college scorer in the nation with a 27.7 point-per-game average and LIU had a record of 20–4. White was certain to be the New York Knicks number one draft choice in the 1951 NBA draft.
According to Sherman White, he had been recruited into the point shaving plot through peer pressure. In a 2001 interview with Dave Anderson of The New York Times, White stated, “Peer pressure. It wasn’t the money, it was just peer pressure. I didn’t handle it well.”1 White was implying that he joined the LIU team right out of high school not long after World War Two and most of his teammates were older having served in armed services. One of those older teammates just happened to be Eddie Gard, the connection between the CCNY players and Salvatore Sollazzo.
“I was naïve,” said White. “I think Leroy Smith and I were the only ones who were right out of high school. Socially and mentally, the other guys were ahead of us. At times you could tell the fans knew. They knew you like a book. And when I finally got caught, it was a relief.”2
For his part in the point-shaving scandal, Sherman White served eight months in the New York City prison on Rikers Island and was banned from ever playing in the NBA and possibly becoming one
of the league’s first black superstars.
In the months that followed, the college basketball scandal continued and within a year it would be revealed that game fixing in college basketball had taken place not just in New York City but was widespread. An investigation of the sport during the period of 1947 to 1950 resulted in the disclosure that eighty-six games in twenty-three cities and seventeen states had been fixed or tampered with.
The NBA would also ban another potential star, Gene Melchiorre of Bradley, who was the number one pick in the 1951 NBA draft by the Baltimore Bullets. On July 24, 1951, soon after the draft had taken place, Melchiorre, along with two of his former Bradley teammates, pleaded guilty to point shaving in one game played in 1951 vs. St. Joseph’s University in Philadelphia and Oregon State University in Chicago.
Irwin Dambrot, the 6′4″ center on the 1950 CCNY team, had been chosen the Most Valuable Player in the NCAA Tournament. In the 1950 NBA draft, Dambrot was the number seven pick by the New York Knicks. With the scandal breaking several months later it would have been a short career for Dambrot, so it’s good that he passed up the chance to play professional basketball and instead enrolled in Columbia Dental School.
The most shocking revelation uncovered in the scandal investigation was that Frank Beard, Alex Groza, and Dale Barnstable, stars on Adolph Rupp’s University of Kentucky Wildcats, had been involved in point shaving. Kentucky had won consecutive NCAA titles in 1948 and 1949 as well an NIT title.
The charges against Beard, Groza, and Barnstable stemmed from them accepting bribes to shave points in games played in 1949 against Loyola University of Chicago in an NIT game played at Madison Square Garden and a month prior against The University of Tennessee in Lexington. The Wildcats team had been on its way toward winning its second consecutive NCAA title. The three Kentucky players received $3,500 for their parts in the fixed games.
Coaches of the college teams caught up in the scandal were hardly exempt from scrutiny and administrative action. Nat Holman, the coach of CCNY, a victim of circumstances, was suspended by the New York City Board of Higher Education for “conduct unbecoming to a teacher.”3 Holman contended that he had no knowledge of his players’ actions and when offered early retirement he declined. Instead, Holman fought and won. In 1953, he was reinstated, but by that time, CCNY had de-emphasized its basketball program and banned its team from playing any games in non-college-controlled arenas. Nonetheless, since he was a member of the Original Celtics, Nat Holman’s legacy was assured, and in 1964, he was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp came under fire after it was revealed in a sixty-three-page report issued by Judge Saul S. Streit, one of the primary jurists investigating the scandal, that Rupp had meetings with Ed Curd, a well-known bookmaker in Kentucky. According to the report, Rupp admitted that he knew Curd and “had visited him at his home on at least two occasions and had telephoned him once to learn what the point spread was on a game to be played by Kentucky against the University of Alabama.”4
The report further stated that following a game played at Madison Square Garden in the 1947–48 season, Rupp had an after-supper snack with Curd at the Copacabana. The judge was particularly interested in who had picked up the check. Rupp said he didn’t know who paid for it.
Judge Streit stated that his inquiry showed that both Rupp and the University of Kentucky should share in the plight of the three defendants, Groza, Beard, and Barnstable. It was the opinion of Judge Streit that intercollegiate basketball and football at Kentucky “had become highly systemized, professionalized and commercialized enterprises. I found covert subsidization of players, ruthless exploitation of athletes, cribbing at examinations, illegal recruiting, a reckless disregard of their physical welfare, maturation of unqualified students, demoralization of the athletes by the coach, alumni, and townspeople and the most flagrant abuse of ‘athletic scholarship.’”5
The Southeastern Conference shut down the Kentucky Wildcats basketball program for the 1952–53 season for recruiting practices and providing secret payments to some of its star players. But in the end, it was all ignored by Kentucky, swept under the rug, and Adolph Rupp was soon back in business. By 1958, the Wildcats had won the school’s fourth NCAA championship.
At the time, the NBA had been informed bookies were skeptical of professional basketball, they saw it as a bad investment. While the players were very good, any one of them that had a bad game would come under heavy scrutiny by the media. Still, the bookies were sure that it wasn’t impossible for games to be fixed; the players were not only good but clever. But after the NBA had been in business for a couple of seasons, the bookies came to the conclusion that professional basketball was an honest game and began accepting bets on professional games. In a very short time, fans would begin betting heavily on professional basketball. Bets would even be taken in the arenas.
Then, the depth of the college basketball scandal cast doubt over the entire spectrum of the game and as a result, there was collateral damage to the NBA.
In the 1949 NBA player draft, Alex Groza, the brother of Pro Football Hall of Fame member Lou Groza of the Cleveland Browns, and Frank Beard were taken by the Indianapolis Olympians.
Alex Groza was sure to be a major gate attraction in the NBA and in his first game as a pro, played at Madison Square Garden on November 10, 1949, he scored 41 points as Indianapolis defeated the New York Knicks 83–79 before a packed house of 18,135.
In the 1950–51 NBA season, the Indianapolis Olympians finished in fourth place in the Western Division with a record of 31–37, but good enough to make the playoffs. In the Western Division Semi-Finals, the Olympians faced the powerful Minneapolis Lakers and led by Alex Groza, nearly knocked off the division champs in a best of three games series.
In game one, Minneapolis defeated Indianapolis 95–81. In the game, Alex Groza had 19 points while George Mikan had but 12. Then, in game two, the Olympians ran all over the Lakers, 108–88, as Groza scored 40 points while holding Mikan to just 2.
Game three was a shoot-out with the Lakers prevailing by a score of 85–80. George Mikan had 30 points and Alex Groza 38. It would be Groza’s final game in the NBA.
That summer, Alex Groza, along with former Kentucky teammates Ralph Beard and Dale Barnstable, would admit that they had accepted bribes amounting to $3,500 in the Loyola and Tennessee games played in 1949. Immediately, NBA commissioner Maurice Podoloff would ban all three players from playing in the league for life.
Bill Spivey, a seven-foot All-American center on the Kentucky Wildcats in 1949 and 1950, was charged with perjury when he refused to testify against his teammates Groza and Beard. Although the case against Spivey was dismissed, Maurice Podoloff decided to put the kibosh on another potentially great player for the NBA and banned Spivey before he had to chance to play in the league.
With the door to the NBA slammed in his face, Bill Spivey joined the Boston Whirlwinds, one of the Harlem Globetrotters’ patsy teams that accompanied them on tour. Spivey would continue to play theatrical basketball for several years eventually being moved to the Trotters’ opponents “A-Team,” the Washington Generals.
Then, the Indianapolis Olympians folded after losing their star players Alex Groza and Ralph Beard, along with Wallace “Wah Wah” Jones, all caught up in the college basketball scandal.
New York had been the epicenter of the college basketball scandals and the fallout had a devastating effect on the game in the city. Following the public exposure of the scandals, New York City colleges began to curtail their recruiting and the best high school players in the city left for colleges across the country. Highly touted Sihugo Green, of Boys High School in Brooklyn, enrolled at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh and became an All-American and NBA first-round draft choice.
With the taint of the scandal and lower quality of players competing, the number attending the remaining college games at Madison Square Garden began dwindling to 3,000 to 4,000. LIU wou
ld not schedule another game in the facility for nearly twenty years, and CCNY de-emphasized its program and would not allow its team to play in any arenas that weren’t college controlled. Many fans began to watch pro basketball for the first time.
Despite the loss of some potential major star players and the collapse of the Indianapolis franchise, the college basketball scandals would actually benefit the NBA, at least in New York. In 1950–51, the New York Knicks had only18 home games scheduled at Madison Square Garden; now, with fewer college games at the Garden, they would expand that schedule. The Garden had preferred booking college games as they attracted a much larger gate—sometimes as many as 18,000 fans for a game. So, the New York Knicks saw a window of opportunity to grab the fans and closed it.
Entering the 1951–52 season, the NBA would become a solid ten-team league and have a very competitive season. It would be that season that one of the first major changes would be made to improve play in the league. The lane was widened from six to twelve feet to prevent the big men from clogging the middle. The most notable big man clogging the middle was, of course, George Mikan.
In the Western Division, the Rochester Royals were champions and had the best record in the regular season in the NBA. The Royals proceeded to defeat Ft. Wayne in the Western Semi-Finals 2 games to 0, before being defeated in the division finals to their perpetual nemesis, the Minneapolis Lakers, 3 games to 1.
In the Eastern Division Semi-Finals, Syracuse finished on top and defeated Philadelphia 2 to games 1 while New York defeated Boston 2 games to 1. Then, in the East Finals, the Knicks surprised the Nationals 3 games to none.
The New York Knicks, who had finished third in the Eastern Division with a record of 37–39, suddenly found themselves playing in the NBA Finals against the Minneapolis Lakers in a city still tainted by the college basketball scandals. But the series would rejuvenate the fans in New York as the Knicks took the powerful Lakers to seven games before losing.
