Hoop Crazy: The Lives of Clair Bee and Chip Hilton

Epilogue

Epilogue I’ll begin with a statement that no one can dispute: When Wallace Stevens wrote his iconic poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” he did not have Clair Bee in mind. And while there may not be thirteen ways of looking at a Blackbird coach, Clair Bee’s career and writing did elicit a number of different ways of looking at him, of understanding him, or at least of trying to understand him. These views often are as contrasting as many of the elements of his life. Commentary on Bee’s career seems to have fallen into four distinct and disparate categories. To Rogers McAvoy, who in 1991 wrote his magazine piece “Mr. Basketball,” Bee was “the hometown hero who could do no wrong.”1 For sports reporters such as Dick Young, Lenny Lewin, and Stanley Frank, he was a friend and fellow traveler on the roads of American sports culture. The historical view of Murray Sperber, Albert Figone, and Charley Rosen is based largely on the events of the point-shaving scandal and Judge Saul Streit’s excoriation of Bee—“the Bee as hypocrite” school. Finally, there is the adulation of the Chip Hilton readers who emerged in droves following Jack McCallum’s piece in Sports Illustrated. These represented the opinions and feelings of 319 middle-aged men who knew Bee only through the pages of the Hilton books. Sperber wrote: “Chip and his pals did not die of time, they imploded. Because their form of the classic athlete-hero was pure fantasy, when the reality of postwar college sports kept bursting into the daily news, including shrill headlines about Bee’s LIU player-fixers, it became difficult and finally impossible for readers to believe in Chip and his teammates.”2 Or, conversely, maybe because Chip was delightful and a desired fantasy, he achieved a sort of immortality in the hearts of his readers. Consider the words of a reader responding to McCallum’s profile: “Chip Hilton truly is a hero for all times, and one must wonder if there are any athletes like him still out there someplace.As Clair Bee said,‘Yes, I believe there are.’ I have to believe it.”3 Even and especially from the men who played for Bee, diametrically different takes on Bee exist. Here are examples: —“I learned more from him in a month than I learned my entire basketball life. I also learned the way he lived— his thinking, the values he lived—he embodied what we should all become.” Hal Uplinger, of the 1950–51 team.4 —“Don’t make him out to be a saint; he was a human being. He used players like corporative executives use peons in their organizations.” Vincent (Jim) D’Agostino, one of Uplinger’s teammates that season.5 —“Mr. Bee never even hinted to us that he thought we were pulling any funny stuff.” Sherman White, 1951.6 —“Much as I respect Clair Bee, you tell me that he didn’t know the difference between a guy controlling the game and not controlling the game.” Sherman White, 1998.7 People are prone to look at things in terms of black and white, and I’ll confess to being no exception—at least in the early days of my research on Bee. Even before I read Sperber, I came to similar conclusions on Bee. I was convinced that the Hilton books represented a fraudulent excursion into sport fantasy; they were embarrassing when contrasted with the reality of his coaching career. Then I re-read the post-scandal 320 Life after Long Island University Epilogue 321 novels, especially Dugout Jinx and Freshman Quarterback, and I read them through the prism of Bee’s confessional piece in the Saturday Evening Post. The most accurate measures we have of his post-scandal thinking are the magazine article and the Hilton books. Significantly, they mark a major change in Bee’s feelings about sport in American culture. But he is insincere, some will argue. I would counter by saying read the tales and look at the post-scandal events of the teller’s life. Nevertheless, a revealing observation about Bee is that even in the pre-scandal days when he was unabashedly a “win ’em all” coach, when he was using ringers for his LIU football team, when he made sure that some academically deficient athletes such as Eddie Gard were admitted to the...