The End of the Innocence (1950)
Nearly 75 years after the CCNY scandal, what happens now with sports and gambling?
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I.
The gambler and the ballplayer met in the summer of 1950. The gambler was married to a former model who used to lounge around the pool at Grossinger’s in the Catskills, where the ballplayer and his Long Island University basketball teammates would often gawk; the gambler drove a black Cadillac and rented a sprawling four-bedroom apartment on Central Park West in a building called the Majestic. The ballplayer was 23 years old, calculating and ambitious; he would occasionally bring his friends into his bedroom and open a dresser drawer that was filled with cash. The gambler carried all the trappings of wealth, but in reality, he was broke.
The gambler’s name was Salvatore Sollazzo; the ballplayer’s name was Eddie Gard. That summer, according to Matthew Goodman’s book The City Game, Sollazzo took Gard out on the town, buying him drinks and ensuring him that easy money awaited if he cooperated with Sollazzo’s scheme. Gard didn’t need much convincing to buy in; he was already imagining an entire network of fixers on basketball teams throughout New York City. He imagined himself becoming as rich as he presumed Salvatore Sollazzo to be.
Their names have long been forgotten, lost amid nearly 75 years of tumultous American history marked by scandal and deceit. But at this moment, in this unprecedented era, the gambler and the ballplayer feel as relevant as ever.
II.
Back then, and up until recently, sports gambling in New York City was straight out of Casablanca, one of those things that everyone knew was happening and no one really concerned themselves with. Every weekend in the winter at the old Madison Square Garden on 49th Street and 8th Avenue, they would play college basketball games, and every weekend people would pack the gym and choke the air with cigar smoke and pass money back and forth. But it felt as if what was happening on the floor and what was happening in the stands were separated by an ineffable ethical barrier.
By then, the idea of the point spread had become a thing, and one of Eddie Gard’s teammates had passed the idea down to him: Shave a few points here, and few points there, make the right people happy, and walk away with some extra cash. In the summer, Gard and his friends would play games up in the Catskills, and they would fix those, too. And eventually, a network was formed, and teams began to shave points, including CCNY, an eclectic conflagration of mostly black and Jewish players who had become the toast of the city after winning both the NIT and the NCAA tournament in 1951.
CCNY was a beautiful team to watch; they played the City style of basketball, cutting and weaving and passing and scoring. During that NIT run, they handed the racist Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp the worst loss of his career; it was, one observer told the documentarian George Roy, as if “three Jews and two blacks had whaled the shit out of middle America.” They were, Goodman said, the embodiment of New York City’s vision of itself as a city: Flawed, but ultimately uncorruptible.
III.
Eddie Gard built up the network of point-shaving he dreamed of. And then it quickly unraveled. The authorities had zeroed in; they observed Gard meeting up with Sollazzo near Central Park, and they uncovered a widespread scheme that implicated CCNY and LIU and others. It went far beyond Gard and Sollazzo and New York City; after Adolph Rupp declared that gamblers couldn’t touch his players with “a ten-foot pole,” three stars on Kentucky’s 1949 championship team were implicated, and Kentucky had to suspend its basketball program for a season.
Gard served time in prison. So did others. LIU’s star player, Sherman White, did eight months at Rikers and was banned from the NBA; he was such a pure talent that if he had gone to the Knicks, insisted the late New York Times columnist Dave Anderson, he would have shifted the balance of power in the NBA for a generation. While White later confided in Anderson, many of the principals involved refused to ever talk about it.1 There was something so painful about the way it cleaved the tiers of American society—the way it married pure and impure—that it was difficult to wrap your head around it.
“When a lot of us look back, that was the end of the innocence,” a scout named Mickey Corcoran told ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski back in 2001. “The scandal changed the way we looked at sports, the way we looked at everything.”
IV.
“With regulation, it’s harder for people to get away with those things,” Brian Musburger, founder of the sports gambling television network VSIN told me a couple years ago. “It goes back to integrity, and these things are better when they’re on the up and up.”
It is a cogent point, and as of now, the scandals that have emerged since the precipitous rise of legal gambling in America have been quickly detected and foiled, often because they are perpetrated by fools. But the way the culture of gambling has infiltrated the culture of sports feels more and more stifling by the day; you cannot escape it now, particularly during events like the NCAA tournament, and it is difficult to know what the results of this unprecedented experiment will be. Is regulation enough to deter human nature, or is that itself an overly idealistic notion? Have we gone too far, too fast?
There is a line, for now, between legal gambling and legitimate competition. But temptation will always lead people to find ways to traverse those lines. Just two years ago, Eddie Gard passed away quietly in Florida with no mention in his obituary of any of the transgressions of his past. The history, as always, has been cast off into a dark corner, as if it could never possibly be repeated.
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One of the CCNY players implicated was Irwin Dambrot, whose nephew Keith overcame a youthful mistake of his own to become both a successful college basketball coach and an early mentor of LeBron James—and who, on the cusp of retirement at Duquesne, defeated BYU in a first-round NCAA tournament game on Thursday.
Too far too fast? OMG the horse is out of the barn and gone to pastures unknown, never to return. The genie is out of the bottle. Call me a fatalist but how long before we totally lose all sense of confidence in the integrity of almost every sporting result? One can't root for any enterprise we look down upon. The end of fandom and the collapse of sporting enterprise. Que lastima.