CCNY Basketball Ups and Downs, 1950-51

My friend Otis Jefferson Brown reminds me of the crushing sports-and-morals tragedy of our joint childhoods. It all took place in 1950/51, when I was a creeping like snail to sixth grade in P. S. 217 and Otis, a child of Bay Ridge, was trudging his shining morning face to P.S. 102. Our guys, our local heroes, the CCNY basketball team, won both of the major basketball tournaments, the NIT as well as the NCAA. The city -- New York City, especially Brooklyn  -- was electric with excitement. Headlines, victory parades, and demonstrations in all the neighborhoods. 

The twin wins -- it never had happened before and will never happen again -- were great events in the public sphere but of even greater moment in our 9th Street home.  Back in the 1920s, my father had attended CCNY for a year, but like so many of the sons of impoverished immigrants, had to drop out to help put potatoes and black radishes on the family table. While at City, he had played on the freshman basketball team. Would he have made the varsity? Who can tell? He was a strong man, a fine natural athlete, very graceful in his movements even into his 70s, and very serious about basketball.

His coach had been Nat Holman (one of the earliest stars of professional basketball), and Nat was still the City College coach twenty-five years later. So whenever CCNY played, everything in our family came to a halt, and we all gathered around the wooden Philco to listen as my father's team went down to the wire against Bradley or Kentucky or Toledo. My father, generally a restrained man, was as partisan and as jubilant as I ever knew him to be. Not only were the victories a fulfillment of his own hopes, but they were all achieved by a bunch of local players -- Jews and "Negroes" from the Bronx and Brooklyn who, in those days, would not have been welcome at most of the big basketball powers. Ed Roman and Ed Warner and Irvin Dambrot and Normie Mager and Floyd Lane were household names as familiar and as admired as those of Koufax and Campanella. 

It was the very next year that it all blew up in our faces. The CCNY players, or many of them, confessed to taking bribes from the gamblers and bookies and to shaving points and managing the spread. There were indictments, "perp walks," headlines, indignant editorials. O the shame!

My father was devastated. Although in size he was just a scrappy guard, in person he was a tower of rectitude, and it was beyond his ken that our guys, even poor guys who desperately needed cash, would compromise their integrity and their futures for a few bucks.

My father turned the disgrace into a morality play. Every day, for years it seems in retrospect, I listened to still another passionate sermon about keeping to the straight and narrow. (Not that there was anyone in the world who would pay me to miss a shot; I could miss shots on my own. But I knew what he meant.)   

I've now read Charles Rosen's Scandals of '51, how the gamblers almost killed college basketball [New York, 1971]). It's a shoddy, melodramatic, disheartening book, but it does help to put things in perspective. Rosen makes it clear that there was more than a little American nativist glee about taking CCNY and its upstart culture down a peg. It was sad to read that players from many other colleges were also indicted (I hadn't remembered), but discouraging to learn that their defenders were happy to extol heartland values and to scapegoat the corruption onto big city immigrant depravity. It was also sad to be reminded that the only basketball player who served hard time was Sherman White, the biggest, the best, and the blackest of all the athletes. Nor was it pleasant to discover that although there were apparently point-shavers at St. Johns, a Catholic college, DA Frank Hogan brought no indictments because the evidence against the Red Men was "inadvertently" destroyed.

The events were a blight on my basketball-loving childhood. And still a great sadness after all these years. But I must say that we, as a family, engineered a strong comeback. It was only a few years after the scandals that one of those 13" black and white TVs with the rabbit ears made its first appearance in our home. And along with the Zenith came the NBA. I think that my father was on perpetual alert for signs of malfeasance, but our faith in the game and in humanity was restored by a new set of New York heroes: Harry Gallatin, Connie Simmons, Carl Braun, Dick McGuire, Bud Palmer, Vince Boryla, Sweetwater Clifton, Max Zaslofsky.   

Comments

[Otis Jefferson Brown]

1951 was a hell of a year. First, our favorite basketball players are arrested and our favorite teams disappear. Next, Truman fires MacArthur and his approval rating drops to about 20% (about 4% in Bay Ridge). Finally, Bobby Thomson.

[Otis Jefferson Brown]

In my bedroom still hangs a team photo of those CCNY "double champs," personally addressed to me by Nat Holman (wishing me a speedy recovery) and signed by the entire squad. I think that Clair Bee's L.I.U. team of 1950-51 - clad in their quarter-sleeve uniforms - was probably the best in the country: Sherman White, Ray Felix, Hal Uplinger, Leroy "Jackrabbit" Smith (my favorite), and the balding Dolph Bigos.

[Don Block]

Palmer and Glickman (a P.S. 217 graduate) were great announcers. In later years, along came a guy named Les Keiter who was a nice buffoon. "It tickles the twine." "He really rammy-cackled that one." "Up comes Mays waving the old shelalegh." (I could never spell that one.) "He beat the ball. He beat the ball."

[Marcia Yeager]

We have been led to believe that our father played basketball for CCNY in the 1920's. Is there a site I can go to in order to verify? Thanks, Marcia Yeager

[Joe Muir]

when I was a teen I admired CCNY as being one of the great basketball teams in USA
I also remember University of Louisville playing them and winning .For years I have wondered what happened to CCNY
After reading this article , I assume all sports were banned at the school
I also remember that you had to win The NIT in order to play in the NCAA this making the NIT the top tourmy at that time

[Otis Jefferson Brown]

And Dick McGuire and Ernie Vandeweghe. Those Knicks, coached by Joe Lapchick, were an early example of good team play in the NBA, but they were never quite good enough to beat the Minneapolis Lakers with big George Mikan. Bud Palmer did the Knicks play-by-play on TV. On radio it was Marty Glickman, the best announcer ever. Whenever Vince Boryla sank a long set shot (a rare event), Marty would say: "Boryla bombing... good! Like Nedick's!"