 |
 |
| | Friday, November 10 | |||||
Special to ESPN.com | ||||||
| Fifty years ago, Mickey Corcoran marched past the glittering marquee over the old Madison Square Garden, past the thick cigar smoke in the lobby and straight to his customary press row seat. He unpacked his paper, pencil and started on a night's work. He learned the game under a high school coach named Vince Lombardi at St. Cecilia's in Englewood, N.J., and eventually passed the lessons down to a pupil of his own, a temperamental basketball star named Bill Parcells.
All along, Corcoran had a sharp eye for the game, a 27 year old trusted to scout the New York City powers and file reports to the coaches bringing teams to town. So, yes, the fixers had Corcoran fooled, too. On the way into the 1950-51 season, he hadn't missed a game for four consecutive seasons at the Garden. He watched City College of New York win the NCAA and NIT Championships. He watched the generation's best player, Sherman White of Long Island University, and those great teams out of New York University and St. John's and Manhattan.
He watched it all, but there was a part of him that never wanted to believe the mob had most of the top players in the city shaving points and controlling games. There was a part of him that still believed in the purity and innocence of college ball, that didn't want to notice the gamblers waving betting slips and screaming out point spreads.
"I never in my life wanted to believe it was happening," Corcoran says now. "When a lot of us look back, that was the end of the innocence. The scandal changed the way we looked at sports, the way we looked at everything."
On the 50th anniversary of that season, when the walls of college basketball came tumbling down with the uncovering of one of American sport's most salacious scandals, it's fitting a wounded sport started its season at the Garden again. The Coaches vs. Cancer Classic brought together St. John's, Kentucky, Kansas and UCLA for old fashioned Garden doubleheaders, just like the old days.
Fifty years later, the threats to the game aren't so different. Big money continues to rot its core, with gamblers and middleman singing a familiar song to this unpaid labor: Everyone is getting rich on these games but you. It worked 50 years ago, and odds are, it works today. Point shaving scandals still pop up, and insiders fear they probably happen more than we ever wish to know. Times have changed, but the lure of the gambler never goes away.
Fifty years ago, Adolph Rupp declared the gamblers couldn't touch his Kentucky players "with a 10-foot pole," just to discover the tentacles of game fixing had corrupted his Wildcats. Three stars on his 1949 national championship team were implicated and Kentucky had to suspend basketball for a season. The scandal destroyed college basketball in New York City, closing down programs, running legendary coaches out of town and sending the most famous college players of the time to prison. It reached out to Lexington, Ky., and Peoria, Ill., and Toledo, Ohio.
When it was over, 32 players from seven colleges confessed to accepting bribes to fix 86 games in 17 states from 1947-50. And nobody thinks for a minute they caught everyone. Twenty players and 14 gamblers were convicted. The beginning of the end was a couple of ex-Manhattan players approaching an old teammate, Junius Kellogg, about continuing the tradition of fixing at Manhattan. He rushed to his coach, reported the overture and worked with the D.A.'s office to set up the former fixers and the gamblers they represented.
On the night the gamblers expected Kellogg to dump for them, Jan. 16, 1951, Corcoran come to the Garden for a the start of a Manhattan-DePaul and LIU-Duquesne doubleheader, Corcoran turned to Jack White, a syndicated columnist for the Catholic News and said: "Hey, I hear there's some monkey business going on. I hear something is gonna break. Thank God those kids in green and white (Manhattan) would never be involved."
Incredulously, the columnist swung his eyes to Corcoran.
"What do you mean?" Corcoran asked. "These kids go to Mass every day, they wouldn't be involved."
"Mickey, you gotta be a fool if you think because a kid is Catholic, or Protestant, or Jewish, he's not gonna grab a $100 bill in his face."
If Corcoran hadn't believed that one of those good Manhattan boys could be swayed, he certainly never considered that Sherman White, out of the scout's hometown of Englewood, N.J., could be compromised. White was the best player of his generation, long and lean, the first big man to play the little man's game. The Knicks were dying to use a No. 1 pick on him. But if Corcoran watched the warm-ups for the LIU-Duquesne game closely, he could see Sherman motioning to one of his old LIU teammates and game-fixing conspirator, Eddie Gard, in the stands, trying to signal, "No way, no fix tonight."
Only, Gard was too brazen. He marched down to the court and right over to Sherman's side in the lay-up line. The Garden crawled with cops and detectives, and Gard was running his mouth like he was bulletproof. White had come into the scam late in his junior year and worried authorities were onto him.
"Eddie told us, 'Since we're doing this, why not take half the money and make a bet,' " Sherman said. "But when Eddie walked down to the court and I waved my hands to tell him the bet's off, he pointed to (mob fixer Salvatore) Sollazzo and Sollazzo gave me an intimidating look. (LIU teammate) Dolph Bigos had told me, 'I'd die before I did anything tonight.' By then (teammate) LeRoy Smith had been involved, too, but he told me: 'We're playing tonight, Sherman. We're going to play.' And we did."
"You better do what you're told, Sherman," White remembered Gard telling him courtside at the Garden.
White, Bigos and Smith combined for 64 points, as LIU destroyed Duquesne, 84-52. Reportedly, Sollazzo lost $30,000 on the game.
As Sherman left the Garden with his girlfriend, Doris, a long black car waited for him on the streets.
"Eddie walks over and tells me, 'Send your girlfriend home and get in the car.'" Sherman said. "It was Sollazzo's car. I got in and it was just me and Sollazzo. I thought it was over. I thought he was going to kill me. I said: 'Listen, we couldn't do the game. I can't do the game by myself. The guys didn't want to do the game. I told Eddie that before the game. The cops are all over the place.' He told me he lost a lot of money. He told me, in so many words, don't do this again."
The next day, the Manhattan conspirators were arrested and it was just a matter of time until everyone else went down, too. Over the next few weeks, as White drove his 1936 LaSalle home to New Jersey, he was constantly tailed.
"Detectives would park down the street from my house. Everybody was nervous. But by then, I think some of the guys wanted to be caught."
Fifty years ago, the walls were tumbling down on college basketball. There was no escaping it. Looking back, it feels like yesterday to Mickey Corcoran. He watched those games with a shrewd eye, but a disbelieving heart. After all, nobody wants to believe the end of the innocence has come for them.
Adrian Wojnarowski is a columnist for the Bergen Record and a regular
contributor to ESPN.com. | ALSO SEE NCAA hits Gophers with four years' probation | |||||