The Game They Played: The True Story of the Point-Shaving Scandal That Destroyed One of College Basketball's Greatest Teams

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 a graduate degree in psychology to detect their ambivalence and to see that the inclination to speak lay just beneath the desire for secrecy. But the passing of the years had served only to stiffen their resolve. Now they would find it much more painful to work their way back, to stir up the sauce of the past and set it simmering again. Much that had been forgotten would be roused to consciousness once more, and they would need to begin anew the process of assimilation.

As I made my trek through the past, reading the microfilm and scanning past editions of newspapers and magazines, I found myself wondering whether the feelings I was experiencing then were the same as those I had known twenty-five years earlier. It is always easier to recall the intensity of one’s emotions than it is to define precisely what they were, for it is the depth of one’s hurt, not the coloration, that finally leaves its mark. But as if by way of compensation, the distance of time serves to sharpen other perceptions. The effects of the scandal, which at the time could only be inferred, had now been brought into focus, and there were consequences whose gravity I was just beginning to assess.

I had, for example, not even begun to gauge the extent or duration of the price the players had been asked to pay. A quarter century had passed, and still they maintained unlisted telephone numbers. None had yet spoken for the record. Some continued to guard the past with a fervor that seemed almost sacramental, as if any reference to that part of their lives would be a betrayal that might stir the wrath of sleeping gods. Others invested their testimony with a value far beyond its possible worth. And yet they had been, at the time, young men guilty of no more than a misdemeanor. They had left no corpses in their wake, damaged no other lives as much as their own. But if their long-held silence had a common root at all, it was perhaps the understanding that they had trespassed less against the statutes of the state than against the code of their youth, and for such offense there is small remittance. The years might offer respite, but some part of their lives would always be cast in shadow. It was as if some vital organ had been lightly damaged. It would mend in time, it would continue to function, but it would never be quite the same again, and one could never be unmindful of its presence.

Now, another twenty-five years later, it appears that little has changed. More than half a lifetime has slipped by since the scandal broke. The players, still silent, are of an age when the past might seem to be only loosely connected to the present. If originally they had wished to conceal the indiscretions of their youth from their children, it was now their grandchildren they were trying to protect. Yet most of them had gone on to careers that were probably not very different from what they might have been. Layne, who spent all of his post-college years in sports and recreation, now coaches basketball at a Brooklyn high school. Warner, forerunner of the Elgin Baylor-type, multi-purpose forward and the only one who had pro-star potential, lives in an apartment not far from the City College campus, confined to a wheelchair following an automobile accident. The other forward, Irwin Dambrot, recently retired from his dental practice and is living in New Jersey. Roman, the affable center with the soft outside touch, was a psychologist in the New York City school system before dying of leukemia in 1987. The fifth starter, Al Roth, has had a successful business career in a New York City suburb.

College basketball, though wounded, also managed to survive. It recovered fully enough to withstand another point-shaving scandal, even bigger than the first, ten years later. But it had, in the process, become transfigured. Its center had shifted. The game had risen to prominence in New York City during the years of the Great Depression, but after the scandals it began to move west. Most of the local colleges de-emphasized the sport and moved it back to the campus gym. Madison Square Garden no longer vibrated on the nights of college doubleheaders. All was still well in the Midwest and out on the Coast, and the southern states had begun to pick up the beat, but in New York the lights were out.

Before very long, it would hardly seem to matter. By the seventies, the game was being played on a much broader landscape. Television, little more than a novelty in the early fifties, had fused itself to big-time sports so that it had become difficult to envision the one without the other. Basketball was particularly well suited to the eye of the camera, played as it was in an abbreviated space in which the focus was always on the ball. The networks understood. The NBA expanded its playoff format so that the finals began in June and ended, if they went the distance, not long before the Fourth of July. The NCAA showed even more imagination. It enlarged its once regional eight-team tournament in geometric increments until the field consisted of no fewer than sixty-four teams from virtually every town and hamlet in the country. The extravaganza, which lasted two and a half weeks, became known as March Madness and rivaled the World Series as a national television attraction. It provided a smorgasbord of games that offered a feast for the connoisseur and morsels of sweets for the casual follower. With sixty-four teams in the hunt there were likely to be one or more schools close enough to home to offer a rooting interest for those whose alma mater might not be represented. Of course, there were other conditions that might conceivably cause a viewer to favor one team over another.

There has always been an umbilical connection between sports and gambling that is at the same time decried and denied by those who inadvertently profit from it. Since the creation of the point spread in the forties, basketball has been an exceptionally attractive proposition for gamblers. The score changes by the minute in basketball, in increments of one, two, and three points, and if one has a bet on a game, he can watch his fortunes rise and decline dozens of times during the course of a single contest. It is like watching the cylinders of a slot machine spin swiftly before coming to rest one at a time, poised for the next pull of the handle. But for those unsophisticated in the rudiments of betting or perhaps disinclined to risk real money while laying odds of 11–10 on every wager, the NCAA tournament offers an enticing alternative in the form of brackets that follow the pairings of the teams as they advance or fall out of contention. NCAA brackets are as popular as lottery tickets in March, and rare is the office that does not run its own pool. Each player plunks down the ante—usually around ten dollars—and fills in the bracket round by round throughout the run of the tournament. Points for victories are awarded on an increasing scale as the games proceed. The winner of the pool can expect a reasonably lucrative payday, and there generally are awards for one or more runners-up. It is a lot of action for ten bucks—sixty-three games played day and night across the span of nineteen days—and instant fans are created all over the country; at least for as long as their picks remain in contention.

During the 1999–2000 season, questions were raised by some TV sports analysts regarding the attraction the relatively unimposing field of teams would have for a national television audience. With increasing numbers of top prospects leaving for the pro ranks before graduation, the best college players of the previous year were now in the NBA, and as the regular season drew to a close it was apparent that the tournament would be without a dominant team or a player of true star magnitude. As it developed, the early rounds of the tournament fared well in relation to previous seasons, but ratings suffered somewhat as the field narrowed. There was a good deal of conjecture about the flagging interest, but the likelihood was that the bracket devotees were switching channels as their choices fell from the charts. It was, after all, a tournament of second-round upsets, and most brackets were headed for the wastebasket by the time the field entered the round of sixteen. Not too many March-only fans, one might guess, were prepared to spend the evening with Billy Packer analyzing a zone defense when they could watch Regis Philbin in his monochromatic shirts and neckties dangling millions before ordinary folks groping for lifelines to their final answer at multiple-choice odds of three-to-one.

Like it or not, gambling, even of the modest office-pool variety, is the lifeline to prime-time television sports. Viewers crave a stake in the action, and if it were not possible to place a wager on a sporting event, the well of television money that nourishes the economy of every major sport would begin to run dry. It is the unspoken paradox of sports that while gambling is a dagger pointed at its heart, it is also the fuel that drives its engine. It draws the viewers who create the audience that attracts the sponsors who fill the coffers of the networks with the vast reservoir of funds that feed the colleges’ athletic programs as well as professional franchises. At the office-pool level, of course, gambling is a relatively harmless pastime. However, when big money is bet on the outcome of a contest there sometimes emerges the inspiration to guarantee the result, to turn the wager into an investment. No sport is better suited than basketball to the quick fix. Since points are scored freely, it is far easier to manipulate the score than it is in football where touchdowns and even field goals are often at a premium. Players can be seduced with the fiction that they are not selling out their schools because they can still win the game while staying under the spread. For added measure, with only five players on the court at any one time, one need only put two or three stars under contract in order to fashion a solid investment.

If the fixing of college basketball games is not so commonplace now as it was forty or fifty years ago, it is because the vast sums of money that await players who have a future in the NBA make taking a bribe a poor risk. With millions to be had upon the signing of a contract, and graduation no longer a prerequisite to enter the pro draft, which talented teenager would be ready to take his chances on fixing a game for what now amounts to chump change? Nevertheless, a point-shaving scandal of one magnitude or another seems to make headlines at least once a decade. The 1961 scandal, the one that featured the late Jack Molinas, was the last one of national dimensions, involving at least fifty players from twenty-seven colleges who fixed games in fifty-one cities and twenty-two states. Others that followed appeared to be local in scope. In 1979, three Boston College players were implicated in a scheme to fix nine games; in 1985, five players on Tulane’s team were accused of shaving points in two games; and in 1997, two Arizona State players pleaded guilty to manipulating the scores of games dating back to 1994.

But these events were treated as little more than footnotes to what would forever be known as the scandal of the fifties, the City College scandal, for this was the one that struck the telling blow, that shone the light on what resided beneath the bedrock of one’s ideals. Innocence dies slowly but it dies only once. It was the City College story that compelled a nation’s attention because it had about it the push and pull of classical drama. Gifted young men, some of them still in their teens, had ascended the heights and taken the fall and had managed to do both in less than a year. At a very young age their lives had assumed the cast of a morality tale, and like all such tales, it would be told again and again and in many forms.

Published in 1977, The Game They Played was the first detailed treatment of the story, but others were not far behind. Books and articles appeared periodically. In 1998, HBO produced an award-winning documentary called City Dump, using The Game They Played as a source. Each new telling of the story provided its own view of the events and sought its own truth, for the players, to a man, have declined to discuss it. Now it has reached a point where the reasons for their silence might be of greater interest than anything they might say.

They have, after all, been approached many times over the years, by many people, for a wide variety of projects, and while they have declined to speak for the record, there is always the suggestion that at least some of them might be ready to cooperate with an interviewer if the price is right. From time to time word has drifted about that they are under contract to a particular writer for a share of the royalties or that they are on the brink of a movie deal that might prove more lucrative. But, I found myself wondering, for what, exactly, would they be paid? What could their testimony possibly be worth fifty years after the fact? Enough time has passed now that their perceptions could not possibly reflect what they felt then. Half a century is too long to hold the feelings fresh. Memory is inexact and the recollection of emotions is particularly elusive. In any life, events that have occurred long ago seem to belong to another age, another lifetime. They are recalled as if they have been learned rather than experienced firsthand. Yes, you think, I must have felt a sense of disappointment, betrayal, disillusion, but too much has happened since then to be sure. Time is a prism that bends experience to its own ends; it makes the past conform so that it is coherent with what followed.

So, after obtaining the players’ unlisted numbers, I decided to call no one. For even if one or another was willing to speak with me, what would I ask them and what could I possibly hope to hear in response? Every question would be wrapped in another question and inside every answer would be another that was equally plausible. Their unwillingness to speak for half a century says more than their words are likely to convey. There is, finally, nothing left for them to tell. The surest root to whatever truth we must know can best be found now in the way we interpret the sound of their silence.

S.C.

PROLOGUE

It was the big man who drew the crowd. He had been gone for a long season