Gopher Basketball
In the late ’40s/early ’50s, college basketball was king in NYC. The Knicks schedule at Madison Square Garden was arranged around the strong college teams fielded by local squads from Long Island University, Brooklyn College, St. John’s, and CCNY. Basketball was the game of choice among the city’s kids, and the most talented ones would scatter to the various colleges within the city who were all among the nation’s elite. The strong connection between college basketball and NYC was reflected in the fact that the finals of the NIT and NCAA were both held at Madison Square Garden to end the season.
Amidst all this fervor for the game was the reality that dark forces lurked close to the campuses and MSG, and in the summers extended up into the Catskill Mountains, where many of the college basketball stars would be set up with summer jobs and close proximity to professional gamblers. When the lines on college basketball games shifted from straight odds to the point spread, a shifting morality came into play for the players-you weren’t throwing the outcomes of the game, just the final margin of victory, so where was the harm?
With this mindset, CCNY overcame an inconsistent season in 1949-50 to win the dual championships of the NIT and NCAA, a much desired feat that made CCNY, the largest public college in NYC, the apple of the eye of the Big Apple. The following year, when players from LIU, Brooklyn College, and CCNY were implicated in the point shaving scandal, the inconsistent regular season of 1949-50 for CCNY came into sharp focus. The judgements rendered against the corruption of college basketball was delivered harshly by the administrations of the New York City colleges (save St. John’s, where the author posits the influence of the Catholic Church in keeping the university out of the scandal), to the point where the basketball programs at LIU, Brooklyn, and CCNY were all de-emphasized, never to return to their former heights.
Cohen wrote this book from a perspective close to the topic matter, as he was a New York City native nearing his entry to college and own college basketball career at Hunter College in New York right after the scandal broke. Cohen played basketball in the neighborhood with one of the more talented of the point-shavers, and as you read throughout the book, you feel a hurt emerging from the author as the beloved game he grew up with in his city was torn asunder by the first of the point shaving scandals that would plague college basketball. This is apparent when Cohen describes how the point shaving scandal stretched into the small towns of Peoria and Lexington, affecting national powers Bradley and Kentucky, but not paralyzing the programs on the same scale as it did the New York colleges.
As I read this book, I found myself often frustrated by the author’s style and inability to connect many of the questions that arose for me. To be fair, the book was written in 1977 and none of the primary players in the scandal made themselves available to the author for the book. That being said, Cohen chooses to alternate between telling the facts of the scandal and his own memoir of growing up in NYC. I believe one could combine the two effectively, but I found the memoir to be a muddled delivery which often drew away from a very fascinating topic. Cohen’s description of the 1949-50 basketball action was rote and uninspired; perhaps it was tough to get an accurate retelling of the games nearly thirty years later (particularly without the participants accounts), but it felt as if the author was rushing through the basketball games, leaving the reader with a pretty limited scope of the players involved, especially when thirty pages later he begins to delve into the scandal.
In addition to these shortcomings, Cohen seemed to leave many questions hanging-primarily, how did the college basketball game survive as a whole, when its very integrity was at question? What about the governing body of the NCAA, were they ineffectual at that time or had they begun their rule yet as the governing body of sport? And what occurred to make point shaving, which was so prevalent in the game and seemingly did not subside even as these scandals were breaking, become an aberration in today’s landscape? It makes sense that today’s college players do not want to risk a pro career, but Cohen doesn’t make that link.
With all my criticism, do I recommend this book to college basketball fans? I do. Even with its unevenness, it’s one of the few books out there recounting the college basketball point shaving scandals from the late ’40s through early ’60s, and from a quick perusal of those books on amazon, their reviews are also less than stellar. I finished this book frustrated, wishing that someone would come along and fully tackle this fascinating and significant chapter in college basketball’s history. For now, Cohen’s book seems to be the best out there, and it does offer some very good insight into what occurred and how it changed college basketball in NYC irrevocably.
The Game They Played=Townsend Orr rating
Bobby Jackson-An incredible book. One of my all-time favorites.
Willie Burton-Just shy of legendary status. Top notch.
Townsend Orr-Enjoyable book, but erratic.
Dave Holmgren-Not very memorable.
Mitch Lee-An unmitigated disaster. Run away from this book!