The City College of New York basketball scandal is a scandal that, like Watergate, people will never stop talking about. Just the other week, when N.B.A. players and a coach were caught taking Mafia payoffs to fix "prop bets" (wagering on such things as a player making a foul shot) and entice high rollers to join them in rigged poker games, The New York Times illustrated an article, "New York Is the Center of Basketball. And Basketball Betting Scandals.," with a photo of the 1949–50 CCNY Beavers.
Seventy-five years after the fact, the scandal remains fixed (so to speak) in the popular imagination because City College, in the 40s and 50s, was both the "Harvard of the Proletariat" and a great basketball school. The team was made up of non-scholarship New York City kids, Jews, Blacks, and Italians, who became the only team to win the NIT and NCAA championships the same year.
Beavermania engulfed New York—until 1951, when it came to light that gamblers were bribing basketball players to "shave points" so they could bet against the "spread," the number of points a team is favored to win by. Seven players were accused of taking payoffs; four were permanently barred from playing in the N.B.A.; and two went to prison.
Beavermania engulfed New York.
When I was a student at City College in the 1970s, it was apparent that the scandal remained a sore point with the school. One of my creative-writing professors, James Toback (whose career was later destroyed by the #MeToo movement), wrote the screenplay for the 1974 film The Gambler, starring James Caan as Axel Freed, an English professor with a bad gambling habit. The plot, in part, involved Freed paying off basketball players to shave points. Not surprisingly, the administration wouldn't permit the filmmakers to shoot on campus. (The part of City College was played by Fordham University.)
With City College point shaving back in the news, I discovered a 1998 HBO documentary about the scandal, City Dump, that you can watch for free on YouTube. It was fun to see a shot of Observation Post, the newspaper I used to edit (and am writing a book about) with a headline that captures the excitement of the Beavers winning a double championship.
And for those of you who just can't get enough City College point shaving, film director John Sayles is writing a book, Gods of Gotham, about New York City circa 1951. In part, it's about the CCNY Beavers fixing games.
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