History of Point Shaving Calls Into Question Integrity of Today's' Games

By Alan Goldstein

In January 1954, All-Star forward Jack Molinas was banned from playing in the National Basketball Association after admitting to having wagered on 10 games involving his Fort Wayne Pistons, even though he insisted he only bet on his team to win.

In issuing the ban, commissioner Maurice Podoloff said, “[Molinas] is a personal psychiatric aberration that will not affect the league.”

But a number of NBA players and big-time gamblers knew Molinas was hardly an isolated case. Podoloff reportedly urged New York District Attorney Frank Hogan to end his investigation in order to preserve the league after at least one team owner threatened to dissolve his franchise if his star player was found culpable.

All but swept under the rug was the fact that, three years earlier, Podoloff had banned referee Sol Levy after he was accused of fixing at least six games in the 1949-50 season by calling excessive fouls against key players to influence the point spread.

But this was a minor problem compared to the devastating news that NBA All-Stars Alex Groza and Ralph Beard, the backbone of the Indianapolis Olympians franchise, had conspired to fix a number of games for their alma mater, Kentucky, in the 1948-49 season. After Groza and Beard were banned by the NBA in 1951, the Olympians lasted only two more years.

For more than a half-century, the NBA has been scandal-free. But the recent revelation that veteran referee Tim Donaghy had influenced a number of games with his foul calls the past two seasons to pay off heavy gambling bets has cast a black cloud over the league. David Stern, who has served as a model for tough-minded big-league commissioners in his 23 years as boss of the NBA, has done his best to minimize the damage.

Sounding a lot like Podoloff, Stern told assembled media in July that he believed no other league officials or players would be investigated in the probe initiated by the FBI. He blamed “a rogue, isolated criminal” for causing the unfavorable publicity, adding, “I feel betrayed by what happened on behalf of the sport. This is not something that is anything other than an act of betrayal on what we know in sports as a sacred trust.”

But deep down Stern realizes now that every questionable call by an official will be second-guessed. And the fact that it was the FBI, not the NBA’s own security force, that collared Donaghy will also raise questions by skeptical fans. Will Donaghy’s fall lead to more trouble in his plea-bargaining attempt to implicate other officials? As history says, “You can bet on it!”

THE CHEATING GAME

With apologies to Charles Dickens, the winter of 1950-51 in New York City was the best and the worst of times. As a freshman at New York University, for a mere dollar I was entitled to a distant seat in the end balcony at the old Madison Square Garden on 50th Street to witness the finest college basketball in the country.

The cavernous arena was usually filled to capacity as Garden impresario Ned Irish staged at least 20 college doubleheaders featuring the top area teams -- CCNY, Long Island University, NYU and St. John’s -- with Manhattan, Brooklyn College and St. Francis of Brooklyn also fielding competitive squads. At the time, the Garden also hosted the postseason National Invitational Tournament (NIT), which was considered far more prestigious than the still-growing NCAA Tournament.

The hometown professional New York Knicks were treated as second-rate citizens, sentenced to play the majority of their games in the cozy 69th Regiment Armory. In fact, for the most part, the NBA was considered minor-league, still boasting franchises in the late ’40s in such outposts as Sheboygan, Waterloo, Fort Wayne and Rochester.

If the Knicks happened to qualify for the playoffs in April, they were shut out of the Garden by the annual month-long appearance of the circus. As a wag once cracked, the old Garden smelled of "stale beer and elephant piss.”

But the Knicks seldom rated a headline in the daily sports pages compared to the college game. In 1950, the CCNY Beavers had become the toast of the town with an unprecedented sweep of Bradley in both tournament finals. With all of the hoopla, it was a given that temptations to capitalize on players' celebrity were sure to follow.

The wise guys, who used to gather on “Jacobs Beach” (named in honor of Garden boxing czar Max Jacobs) outside the arena to wager on the weekly Friday night fights, now turned their attention to college basketball, with the point spread offering all kinds of possibilities.

The credit -- or blame, if you prefer -- goes to Charles McNeil, a math wizard who had earned a master's degree at the University of Chicago. As a sideline, he devised the point spread which allowed betting not on the outcome of the game, but the expected difference in the score.

In time, a clearing house in Minneapolis established the official betting line and the whole world of wagering turned on its axis. An astute bookie called the point spread “the greatest invention since the zipper.” The introduction of the point spread not only enticed gamblers, but also served as a ready excuse for bribed players to rationalize they could shave points while still helping their teams to win games, although things often got out of control.

Rumors of fixes began as far back as 1945, when five Brooklyn College basketball players were expelled for attempting to rig games. But this was quickly brushed aside the following year when the NFL’s championship game between New York and Chicago came under scrutiny after Giants quarterback Frankie Filchock and running back Merle Hapes failed to report bribe offers. Strangely, Filchock, who pleaded innocent, was allowed to play and performed well in a 24-14 loss to the Bears.

But everything began to quickly unravel in January 1950 when Manhattan center Junius Kellogg told his coach, Kenny Norton, that he had been approached with a $1,000 bribe by graduated Jaspers star Hank Poppe to shave points in an upcoming game against DePaul.

After being questioned by police, Kellogg was urged to play along with Poppe, who had told him all he had to do was make sure Manhattan won by less than 10 points, the official line. By game time, it seemed anyone who had ever tossed a ball at a hoop knew something was fishy as almost all the bets were waged on DePaul. And the crowd in the Garden jeered the Jaspers, including Kellogg, who played with rubbery legs, for every missed shot or turnover. Shouts of “Dump!” and “Fix!” were heard throughout the arena, but somehow the Jaspers prevailed, 62-59.

But Poppe would not cash in on the outcome. In the early morning, he was arrested and quickly confessed. Soon, detectives learned that a year earlier, he had collaborated with former teammate Jack Byrnes in fixing Garden games against Siena, Santa Clara and Bradley. “I’d give a million dollars to be out of this fix,” said Poppe, who was granted immunity after offering to help the investigation.

Meanwhile, Kellogg was being afforded hero treatment on the Manhattan campus where the student body, faculty and clergy applauded his honesty. “I never gave that bribe offer a thought,” he said.

But his coach could not dismiss it so easily. “This racket is not purely local,” said a distraught Norton. “I loathe this whole stinking business. I can’t believe that gamblers got next to my kids.”

Norton’s bitter words were echoed by rival city coaches as the scandal quickly grew to involve the entire starting five of CCNY’s Cinderella championship team, the backbone of LIU’s nationally ranked squad, and several lesser known players from NYU. There was a popular rumor that, before tip-off, the game fixers would bend over and tie their shoelaces to inform the gamblers they were ready to do business. It seemed that there were some games in which every player on the floor had sneaker problems. During one LIU game, in particular, star guard Leroy Smith tossed up air balls on consecutive free throws. If games got too close to the agreed-upon number, they often turned into soccer matches with balls repeatedly kicked out of bounds, double dribbles and wild passes. All too often, it appeared both teams were competing to commit the most turnovers or go into mysterious scoring slumps.

As Charles Rosen, author of “The Scandals of ’51” quoted the late New York Post sports editor Ike Gellis, “If the bookies were aware of the monkey business, so were the sportswriters. All of the New York sportswriters had contacts with the bookies. A lot of them played the ponies. Any sportswriter worth his salt knew what was going on.”

One of the big-time bookies tipped Gellis off to the fact that CCNY was regularly dumping games. Gellis passed the word along to New York District Attorney Hogan, who quickly tossed a net over City’s top six players -- Ed Warner, Ed Roman, Al Roth, Floyd Lane, Irwin Dambrot and key reserve Norm Mager.

LIU kingpins Sherman White, Smith and Al Bigos, a rugged Army veteran, were next on Hogan’s agenda. White’s demise was the most painful. He was the only accused to serve time in jail. A gifted 6-foot-8 forward who was averaging more than 27 points a game, White had been promised a future as the Knicks’ No. 1 territorial pick in the upcoming NBA draft. He had given it all up for $5,000 in bribe payments that he had hidden in his dorm room. 
As folklore has it, the detective who accompanied White to the station house reportedly said, “We all gamble.” And a guilt-stricken White responded, “But no one gambled for higher stakes than me.”

Only St. John’s, a traditional national power, managed to escape Hogan’s investigation, and apparently for good reason. When the suspected players were brought in for questioning, they were accompanied by a number of clergy and high-powered lawyers who would not allow the players to be interrogated without them being present.

It was also rumored that Cardinal Francis Spellman, the archbishop of New York, had persuaded Hogan that implicating star players from the Catholic schools would severely curtail the recruitment of regular students to their campuses. So, St. John’s did not lose a single player in the probe.

By the time Hogan and company finished their investigation, the sordid statistics read that games had been fixed in 22 cities in 17 states, and a total of 49 games were actually rigged. Thirty-three players from six colleges were implicated. The fallen included Squeaky Melchiorre, the gifted diminutive center of the Bradley team that lost in both the 1950 NIT and NCAA finals to CCNY.

Perhaps the most shocking arrests were those of Kentucky stars Groza and Beard, shortly after they had returned from competing in the 1948 Olympics. Their renowned coach, Adolph Rupp, had been quick to label Madison Square Garden and New York the “Gomorrah” of college basketball, boasting that gamblers could not touch his powerful Wildcats “with a 10-foot pole.” But Groza and Beard, who were already performing as pros in Indianapolis, were charged with fixing college games in 1948 and 1949, including a planned collapse to Loyola of Chicago in the 1949 NIT. They had even managed to predate the New York hoop fixers, much to the chagrin of Rupp.

Rupp tried to minimize the damage. “The Chicago Black Sox threw games. These kids only shaved points,” he reasoned. “Why condemn kids for one mistake in a lifetime?” But Podoloff wasted little time in permanently banning Beard and Groza, who had made the Indianapolis Olympians one of the league’s most attractive teams. More than any of the fixers, Beard was devastated by his fate.

After judge Saul Streit placed him on indefinite probation in March 1952, Beard sobbed, “I’m guilty. Let me die. All I ever wanted to be was a professional basketball player. Alex and I were part owners of the Olympians. We were on top of the world. I lost everything. I was humiliated, ridiculed and branded a criminal. Stuff like that would never go away.”

Actually Beard, like White, had an opportunity to play later professionally at different times for the Baltimore Bullets of the weekend Eastern League, comprised mostly of Pennsylvania towns. But they played before small crowds for chump change.

For all intents and purposes, big-time college basketball in New York was dealt a near death blow, with LIU, CCNY and NYU all downsizing their programs and playing most of their games on campus. To fill the void at the Garden, Irish turned all his attention and publicity to promoting the Knicks as a big-time operation.

Were hard lessons learned by the players who followed in the wake of the 1951 scandal? Hardly. If anything, the rigging of games simply spread to the hinterlands. Molinas, who failed to win numerous appeals to return to the NBA, put his devious mind to work in bribing collegians to alter the point spread. In the early ’60s, “the master fixer”  managed to entice players from Bradley, Bowling Green, Alabama, North Carolina State, College of the Pacific, Niagara, Holy Cross, St. Joseph’s of Philadelphia and South Carolina. In all, he was charged with helping to fix 28 games involving 22 players from a dozen colleges.

At his sentencing in New York on March 17, 1962, Judge Joseph Sarafite called Molinas “a completely immoral person, and the ringleader of groups that corrupted college players to dump games for money.”

After serving only part of his term at Attica Prison, Molinas moved to Los Angeles and turned his fertile brain to establishing a pornography ring. But he continued to wager heavily on basketball action and soon became greatly indebted to the Mafia in Las Vegas. They settled it when New York hit man Joseph Ulo put a .22-caliber bullet through Molinas’ brain in the summer of 1975.

Even with Molinas out of the picture, gamblers continued to persuade college athletes to make an easy buck by merely playing tricks with the point spread. In 1981, Boston College star guards Ernie Cobb and Jim Sweeney and reserve forward Rick Kuhn were accused of point shaving. What made it more of a national story was the fact that they were bribed by Henry Hill and James Burke, a pair of mob wise guys who were later immortalized in the movie “Goodfellas.”

When it came time for indictments, Sweeney, who had the sweet image of the boy next door, was set free. Cobb, BC’s leading scorer, finally went to trial in March 1984 and was found not guilty. Still, he found himself barred from playing in the NBA.

Kuhn, who had made the initial contact with Hill, became the fall guy and was sentenced to 10 years in prison, the toughest sentence ever given a player found guilty of fixing games. Kuhn, who was released in 1986, was penitent. “I sent myself to prison the night I thought I was bigger than the game,” he told Newsday. “I thought I was invincible -- the Pete Rose syndrome. Let’s face it: I made the decision to put myself in jail.”

But Kuhn’s hard times failed to cure the gambling bug. In the ’80s, Tulane’s star forward John “Hot Rod” Williams was accused of being the leading role player in fixing a pair of games.

In 1990, a probe of N.C. State’s 1987-88 team was initiated by an ABC interview with a former Wolfpack player whose face was hidden from the cameras. No formal charges were brought, but the constant negative publicity forced colorful coach Jim Valvano to resign in 1990. 
In the ’90s, the beat went on with reported fixes by players at Arizona State, Northwestern and Fresno State.

***

Where and why did it all start in the ’50s, and will it ever end? Some of the answers are all too obvious. The fixers had learned to play the game by watching all the illegal recruiting machinations by their coaches and the altering of grades by school administrators to keep them eligible. The game dumping came with the territory.

Perhaps this was best illustrated by CCNY, a school located in upper Harlem that prized its high educational standards, purportedly limiting enrollment to students with an 80-plus average. But glaring exceptions were made in awarding scholarships to Lane, Roth and Warner, whose reading scores at De Witt Clinton High School were considered “mentally dull.”

When guard Roth sought to transfer to NYU, his CCNY transcript mysteriously disappeared. All this subterfuge was ultimately credited to Bobby Sands, the right-hand man for revered head coach Nat Holman, one of the Original Celtics.

The majority of the tainted players made their first association with gamblers by “working” summer jobs in the Catskills, a.k.a. “the Jewish Alps.” Almost all of the major hotels fielded teams of college stars to entertain guests. Large bets were even made on the total final score of games, with players rewarded for hitting the right number.

It was here that high roller Salvatore Sollazzo, with major help from former LIU backcourt man Eddie Gard, got his hooks into the Blackbirds’ White, Smith and Bigos and, ultimately, all of CCNY’s starters. Gard also involved Levy, the first soiled NBA referee. Sollazzo kept the players in his fold by rewarding them with wine, women and song, not to mention bribe money.

With so many of their players involved and the bookies becoming more and more suspicious, how was it possible for Holman and his LIU counterpart, Clair Bee, widely considered the biggest brain among the coaching fraternity, not to detect the foul play of their charges?

Over the years, former LIU player Irwin Bell recounted horror stories about the hoop scandal. He recalled one time when he entered a game in the closing minutes with LIU maintaining a comfortable lead. “I made a couple of quick baskets before White called a timeout. He pulled me to the end of the bench and whispered in my ear, ‘Kid, you’re going to get us killed!’

“I didn’t take it seriously. Like my wife Gloria often reminds me, at 19 I was pretty naïve and unsophisticated. I just thought when I yelled, 'Switch' and no one responded, or when I was wide open for a layup and had a pass thrown at my ankle, that these things just happened sometimes.”

Bell was also quick to dismiss the notion that Bee knew the real facts, but chose to ignore them rather than face the consequences of dismantling a championship-caliber team.

“He spent hours and hours with us in practice, or drawing up plays on the blackboard," Bell said. "Wouldn’t he have said something if he felt some of the guys were laying down? Not once did Coach Bee mention that he suspected guys were giving less than 100 percent, and he was an unusually articulate man. He was a true basketball genius, especially in designing zone defenses. I borrowed so much of his strategy when I got into coaching.”

In his book about the ’51 scandal, Rosen insists Bee spoke privately to his larcenous trio after getting an anonymous letter. A few days earlier, LIU blew an early 20-point lead and barely beat Western Kentucky, 69-63. During the game, Smith tossed up two air balls on foul shots. Put on warning, White, Smith and Bigos reportedly played it straight the rest of the season.

After his players were arrested and LIU dropped basketball the following season, a crestfallen Bee said, “I’ve learned through bitter experience that having a losing team is better than having no team at all. Anything is infinitely better than waiting beside a telephone at 3 in the morning while kids you know are in a police station signing a confession that will brand them as long as they live.”

Looking back, Bell is willing to forgive his larcenous teammates. “None of them had any real money,” he said. “A few thousand dollars was a big temptation for kids barely in their 20s but they all paid heavily for their mistakes.”

But Bell has no sympathy for Tim Donaghy, who reportedly was earning over $200,000 per season as a leading NBA official.

“I’ve always believed that any time you wear a uniform of a sports official, the job is sacrosanct, like that of a priest,” he said. “No excuse can be offered for breaking that trust. That’s it. Amen!”

Issue 2.42: October 18, 2007