Hoop Crazy: The Lives of Clair Bee and Chip Hilton

CHAPTER 17 Chip and the Scandal

CHAPTER 17 Chip and the Scandal So, was the Clair Bee who wrote the idealistic Chip Hilton books a hypocrite? Many have argued that he was, and Murray Sperber leads that charge.“Up to the arrest of his players, a high wall separated Coach from Author, thus, the convenient ex post facto demolition of the barrier appears false,” Sperber wrote.1 The “demolition” Sperber refers to is Bee’s confessional piece in the Saturday Evening Post. A “high wall” may well have separated coach from author prior to the dumping arrests, but in Bee’s post-scandal books, the wall came down, the problems of big-time sports—including the gambling fixes— were addressed, and there was nothing false about Bee’s position in print. Perhaps more than any other figure in American sport culture in the last half of the twentieth century, Bee has had a figurative target on his back at which academicians and some basketball historians have taken delighted aim. Chalk it up to what many see as the ironic gulf between the reality of his intercollegiate coaching career and the idealism that flows 267 from the pages of his Chip Hilton series of juvenile sports fiction . While incredibly successful (.827 winning percentage), Bee’s collegiate coaching career ended with Long Island University’s deep involvement in the 1951 point-shaving scandal ; and when scholars write about Bee, invariably they do so in the context of the gambling scandal. Sperber, most notably, develops in a chapter in Onward to Victory: The Crises that Shaped Modern Sports what he calls “the deep contradictions within the two worlds of Clair Bee,” citing fictional coach Henry Rockwell’s advice to his players to stay away from summer basketball to avoid the temptations offered by “fly-bynight leeches” and the reality of the relationship between LIU stars such as Eddie Gard and Salvatore Sollazzo. Gard used his status as a star player to recruit potential fixers from the Catskill summer league.2 Author Bee, Sperber argues, is a financially motivated fraud who in his fiction creates an idealized sports world far removed from the reality of coach Bee’s sports world.“Coach Bee produced winning teams because he grasped the cutthroat realities of college basketball. The Author succeeded because he understood the fantasies of traditional athlete-hero fiction.”3 On a certain level, Sperber’s argument, as well as some of his evidence, makes sense. In his 1939 profile of Bee, Stanley Frank attributes the coach’s success at LIU to what he euphemistically terms “rugged realism,” quoting Bee as saying, “To hell with moral victories or a lost game well played.”4 Moreover, Sperber’s argument fits into a main thread of much sport-related scholarship in the United States, i.e., poking holes in the mass-mediated mythology of sport as a separate, purer aspect of the culture. And ripe for ironic poking, it would seem, are the twenty-three Chip Hilton books Bee wrote between 1948 and 1966. In addition to Sperber’s attack, Stanley Cohen in The Game They Played (1977), Charley Rosen in The Scandals of ’51 (1978), and Albert Figone in Cheating the Spread (2012) all take Bee to task, leaping gleefully into what they perceive to be the damning gap between reality and the Hilton fiction.5 268 Bee at Long Island University In all of these studies, especially Sperber’s, I argue that more focus is placed on coach Bee than on author Bee. If one is intent on making the point that within Bee’s world there exist “deep contradictions,” or what Sperber refers to as differences so great between coach and author that he wonders if Bee “suffered from multiple-personality disorder,” then it would seem that one has to examine the writings of author Bee as carefully as one examines the problems of coach Bee.6 All of these authors who emphasize Bee’s apparent hypocrisy, especially Sperber, did not read the Hilton books carefully. I am not denying that there are ultimately unresolved contradictions between coach Bee and author Bee, but I am arguing that there are important philosophical differences between author Bee and the seven Hilton books he wrote prior to the 1951 point-shaving scandal and author Bee and the Hilton books he wrote post-scandal, from 1952 on. In particular, I focus on two books, Dugout Jinx and Freshman Quarterback, both published in 1952...