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Will the wheel of fortune
grind up some NBA stars?
of TheColumnists.com
I got this chilly,
eerie feeling again when I read the story of the NBA referee,
Tim Donaghy, betting on games in which he had officiated.
Could this merely be the tip of an ugly iceberg, sinking the
Titanic of pro basketball with names like Michael Jordan, Kobe
Bryant, LeBron James, Jason Kidd and Tim Duncan being bandied
about?
Could Jordan have averaged 30 points a game while not even trying?
Could Bryant be more interested in the point spread than a girl
friend’s bed? Is the entire NBA, with stars like James,
Kidd and Duncan, subject to suspicion now that the gambling cat
is out of the bag?
Why would athletes making 10, 15 and 20 million dollars a year
care about gambling? For the thrill of it.
I have played in a poker game with pals for 40 years. I never
won or lost more than a hundred bucks in a night. Why do I keep
doing it? For the thrill of it.
I was writing a book about Pete Rose about 20 years ago. He was
on his way to a record 4,256 hits. He was more excited when the
phone rang in his home with a call from his bookie, I later finally
figured out, than when he doubled to left to add to his growing
total. He later admitted he gambled on his own team, the Cincinnati
Reds, while he managed them. He said he never gambled while he
played and he never gambled against his own team. Ahh, c’mon
Pete.
We hear a lot about athletes with drinking problems, athletes
with drug problems, athletes with female problems. We don’t
hear a lot about athletes with gambling problems.
Those of us who are fortunate or unfortunate enough to spend
a good part of our professional lives inside the locker rooms
of professional teams see the intensity of gambling all the time.
In baseball clubhouses they bet openly on the Final Four in basketball
during the boring days of spring training, the big horse races,
a boxing match being promoted on TV or a golf spread with a Tiger
Woods entry.
I have never seen an open bet on a baseball game inside a baseball
clubhouse. That would violate the golden rule of the game: Thou
shalt not bet on baseball. Since the 1919 Black Sox scandal,
only a few have been caught, most notably Rose. I do not think
he was alone. It has kept him our of Baseball’s Hall of
Fame. Others from the past, notably Ty Cobb, survived the crime.
Athletes drink, chase women, use drugs and gamble. They are mostly
young, wealthy, famous and flamboyant. There aren’t too
many professional athletes whose lifestyle would mirror the Cleavers.
My own gambling experience goes back to childhood, pitching pennies
on a street corner down from my Brooklyn home, running a baseball
betting pool in junior high school with other kids putting up
a quarter and taking three players who they bet would get six
hits (the Red Sox put me out of business when Williams, Doerr
and Pesky got 12 hits one game), an occasional bet on a big game
(the Brooklyn Dodgers always cost me money) and a few bucks on
a presidential race. I still think Stevenson will beat Eisenhower.
Then it all crashed over me at the City College of New York.
I was a sports reporter at the CCNY paper and fascinated by our
basketball team. Schoolyard basketball was our big sport in the
late 1940s and early 1950s.
I wrote glowing tales of Ed Roman, Ed Warner, Irwin Dambrot,
Al Roth and Floyd Layne of the CCNY basketball team. They were
the stars of the only school to win the NIT and NCAA titles in
the same glorious season of 1950.
Then came 1951. The police boarded a train from Philadelphia
back to New York and arrested Roman, Warner, Dambrot and Roth
for shaving points. They didn’t throw games. They just kept
the scores under the point spread.
They got $1,000, $1,200 or $1,500 for their troubles. Most of
them kept the money at home. Some of the cash was found in a
cardboard shoe box in a closet.
Layne was not arrested. Hundreds of us gathered to cheer him
on as the team promised to rally around him and bring more glory
to the CCNY Beavers despite this ugly scandal.
A few days later Layne was arrested. The air went out of all
of us.
Nat Holman was the Hall of Fame coach and claimed he knew nothing
about it. An assistant named Bobby Sand was the fall guy. He
recruited most of these kids for CCNY. A few really didn’t
have the grades to be in college.
It all got uglier and uglier as other schools were pulled into
the gambling web. A few of the kids went to jail and a few of
the gamblers did time as well. Any kid who ever played in Madison
Square Garden was suspect.
All I know about the NBA betting scandal is what I have read
in the papers. Let me tell you this. Other names will surface.
Some of them will be active players. It is always that way.
©2007 by Maury Allen. The Maury Allen
caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. The illustration is from
IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. East, San
Rafael, CA, 94901-5506,
USA.
This column first posted July 30, 2007.
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