Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 24, 1991 TAG: 9103240075
SECTION: SPORTS PAGE: C1 EDITION: STATE
SOURCE: HAL BOCK ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
They are operators, shady characters who are always looking for the edge. If you're going to bet on blackjack, poker, dice, anything, it always helps to have a little extra information. You know, an edge.
It was with that in mind 40 years ago, that the wiseguys invaded college basketball.
In 1951, college basketball was flourishing in New York. Madison Square Garden was the centerpiece of the sport with doubleheaders twice a week featuring the top teams in the country. Schools like Bradley, Kansas, Kentucky and Utah routinely passed through town. The National Invitation Tournament, not the NCAA, was the postseason event of choice. After all, it was in the Garden, the showplace of the sport.
Much of the excitement centered around CCNY, a team that a year before had swept both the NIT and NCAA titles - the only team in history to accomplish that particular perfecta. NYU, Manhattan College, Long Island University, Fordham and St. John's all played bigtime schedules, many of the games in the Garden. It was endless action. The fans loved it and so did the wiseguys.
And then, suddenly, it all came apart, collapsing like a house of cards when one of the operators went after the wrong player.
Junius Kellogg was a 6-foot-8 sophomore and the first black player at Manhattan College. In January of 1951, he was approached in his dorm room by Hank Poppe, an ex-Manhattan player. Poppe proposed that if Kellogg had a bad night in the upcoming game against DePaul and made sure Manhattan lost by more than the 10-point line, it would be worth $1,000.
Kellogg was outraged at the idea and took the attempted bribe straight to coach Ken Norton, who reported it to the police. The authorities wired Kellogg for subsequent meetings with Poppe and on Jan. 17, 1951, five men including Poppe and another former player, Jack Byrnes, were arrested, charged with trying to fix the score of the Manhattan-DePaul game.
It wasn't like this was a brand new scheme when Kellogg was approached. There had been buzz around town for years that college games weren't on the up and up and, in fact, on Jan. 30, 1945, five Brooklyn College players admitted accepting bribes to ensure a loss against Akron. Four of the five were expelled from school. The fifth could not be, because he had never been enrolled in the first place.
The difference in 1951 was that people talked. Poppe said he and Byrnes had dumped three games the previous season and that "doing business" was a widespread practice. That spurred an investigation and within a month, the house of cards came tumbling down.
At the center of the scandal was CCNY's NIT-NCAA champions. Seven members of that team were arrested on charges of taking bribes. Also involved were players from NYU, LIU, Manhattan, Toledo and Bradley. The investigation revealed that between 1947 and 1950, 86 games had been fixed and 32 players were implicated.
As the investigation began, Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp dismissed the scandal, calling the gamblers a big-city problem. "They couldn't touch my boys with a 10-foot pole," he piously proclaimed. When three players from his 1949 championship team were caught up in the sweep, it turned out that the bettors were much closer than that to Rupp's boys.
After winning the NCAA tournament in 1951 and being ranked No. 1 in 1952, Kentucky's program was shut down for a year, stained by the scandal. It was the death penalty, imposed 35 years before the NCAA invented the punishment.
College basketball staggered under the weight of the revelations. Sports pages printed pictures of indicted players, college kids, their faces frozen in fear. It was a numbing time for the game and some of the programs never recovered. The wiseguys did, though, and a decade later, they took down a new generation of players.
This time the man in the middle of the mess was Jack Molinas, who was a player at Columbia University and the leading scorer in the Ivy League when the 1951 scandals broke. Molinas played 29 games in the NBA with the Fort Wayne Pistons in 1953-54 before being suspended for gambling on games. It makes you wonder what he might have been doing at Columbia, at a time when everybody else seemed to be betting on college games.
Molinas surfaced again on May 17, 1962, arrested on charges he headed a ring that fixed college games. Players from Utah, Bowling Green, Alabama and College of the Pacific were among those who testified against him and on Jan. 8, 1963, he was convicted on five charges growing out of the latest scandal and sentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison.
In 1961, Manhattan DA Frank Hogan, who had spearheaded the 1951 investigation, arrested two professional gamblers, Aaron Wagman and Joseph Hacken for fixing games. Once again the house of cards fell apart, this time taking 37 players from 22 schools with it.
Caught in the crossfire was Connie Hawkins, a high school star from Brooklyn, N.Y., who had been imported by the University of Iowa to play basketball. Hawkins was never charged with fixing any games but was alleged to have introduced a gambler to another player. That was enough to get him thrown out of school and barred from playing in the NBA, despite the fact that he seemed to be nothing more than a victim of circumstances. It took seven years and a $6 million lawsuit to get the NBA to change its mind about him.
There have been other scandals.
In 1981, Rick Kuhn of Boston College admitted to fixing six games in 1978-79 for $2,500 per game. He served four years of a 10-year federal prison sentence.
In 1985, Tulane University shut down its program after it was stained by a point-shaving plot that included cocaine. By then, the gamblers were growing sophisticated. Money was old fashioned. Now the payoff was drugs.
In 1989, North Carolina State's program was the subject of point-shaving rumors that eventually cost coach Jim Valvano his job.
The four-year cycle of revelations is strictly coincidental. The wiseguys don't work by the calendar.
by CNB