Cheating the Spread: Gamblers, Point Shavers, and Game Fixers in College Football and Basketball

4. Do No Evil, See No Evil, and Hear No Evil: Coaching and Presiding over College Basketball

four Do No Evil, See No Evil, and Hear No Evil Coaching and Presiding over College Basketball Scandals in the 1950s The year 1951 was scandalous in college athletics: Widespread fixing had been revealed in college basketball, and academic fraud and illegal recruiting had been exposed in college football.1 After the basketball scandal broke in January of that year, colleges, with the aid of many writers, were quick to label the players’ misdeeds “criminal” and to attribute them to players’ lack of moral values and flawed characters.2 LIU basketball coach Clair Bee, who also served as LIU’s acting president, said that “the present mess is one of individuals and not the result of policy.”3 Bee had been a particular target of New York General Sessions Court judge Saul S. Streit when he stated, “The naiveté, the equivocation and the denials of the coaches and their assistants concerning their knowledge of gambling, recruiting, and subsidizing would be comical were they not so despicable.”4 In September 1951, Life published an editorial, “Football Is a Farce,” that laid the blame for the pervasive corruption in college athletics 42 Chapter 4 squarely on the shoulders of college coaches, athletic administrators, boards of trustees, and presidents. The editors argued that behind a curtain of hypocrisy, college football and basketball players had become pawns in a commercialized system characterized by falsified admission records, fraud, academic forgery, recruiting violations, proselytizing, and subsidizing.5 And Yale basketball coach Howard Hobson, writing in Collier ’s at the end of the year, cited a conversation between a reporter and a college official whose players were involved in a gambling scandal. The college official stated that he could not believe that “our boys could do such a thing.” The reporter replied, “Why not? You paid them for campus jobs they didn’t work at; you gave them passing grades for classes they did not attend. You bribed them to play for you; the gamblers bribed them not to play too well. What’s the difference?”6 The players who rigged games in the 1951 scandals paid an inordinate price for crimes that would soon be dismissed and forgotten. Shattering the myth of amateurism in college sports would carry a sentence even greater than losing the opportunity to play professional sports: a lifetime label as a dumper and condemnation that would follow them until death.7 But their coaches escaped the taint of scandal. Said Ed Roman , a member of the 1949–50 CCNY Grand Slam team, “All of [the head] coaches yelled their innocence from the rooftop, but we [players] took the rap.” Teammate Floyd Layne, who later became the head basketball coach at his alma mater, saw through the coaches’ pronouncements of innocence: “If you told the truth, as the players did in their confessions, you were crucified. But if you lied and maintained an air of respectability as the head coaches did, then you could ride through and everything would be okay.”8 Basketball coaches’ baseless proclamations of innocence reflected their mentality as victims of a conspiracy between their players and the gamblers. Given the choice of detecting or ignoring the fixing, every coach whose players rigged games chose the latter to preserve his career and the money associated with winning.9 Understanding how basketball coaches at the University of Kentucky, CCNY, and LIU made that choice shows the essential role their passive complicity played in the size and shape of the scandals. Do No Evil, See No Evil, and Hear No Evil 43 The sport that brought the University of Kentucky the regional and national attention it desired was basketball, and the coach was Adolph Rupp. Born on a farm in Kansas in 1901 to a German Mennonite family, Rupp played basketball at the University of Kansas under pioneering basketball coach Forrest “Phog” Allen, then coached at the high school and college levels before being hired at Kentucky. Rupp built a strong basketball program at Kentucky, unlike those at the other Southeastern Conference (SEC) schools, which focused more on football. Arriving in Kentucky in 1930, Rupp immediately began to field winning teams, produce conference champions, and garner high national rankings, including NCAA titles.10 Coinciding with Rupp’s arrival and success, Kentucky state legislators began to demand that presidents of the university build a football program that “the university could be proud of.”11 They found their man in Herman Lee...