Hoop Crazy: The Lives of Clair Bee and Chip Hilton

CHAPTER 12: Sixty-Four Manhattans and a Few Wives

CHAPTER 12 Sixty-Four Manhattans and a Few Wives For much of his life, Clair Bee bounced back and forth between extremes. He was the romantic idealist who conceived of Chip Hilton; he was the rugged realist, as Stanley Frank described him, who would do virtually anything to avoid losing.1 He would flee from formal schooling as a teenager; he would as an adult earn multiple graduate degrees and thrive as a teacher. He was a man who enjoyed taking a drink, which he did on numerous occasions; he was a man who, while he was running his summer sports camps for boys, would not drink a drop until summer’s end when the camp was successfully concluded.2 He lived to be eightyseven , yet he was a man who, even in his coaching prime and before blindness developed, had to battle health problems such as a heart attack, a gall bladder operation, and ulcers.3 He was a coach and teacher who often was generous and caring in his relationship with his players; he was a coach who, if you crossed him, could seek revenge, as he did with Darwin 187 Gilchrist, a one-eyed player whose published comments he took exception to during the 1950 season. He was a man who lived and achieved his “Mr. Basketball” fame among the throngs of New York City; and he was a self-described “Blue Ridge Mountaineer at heart” who was totally at home on his farm near Elizaville, New York, and later on the CB Ranch on the top of a wooded, isolated hill at the edge of the Catskill Mountains.4 Night Life and Wild Turkey The story of Bee’s journey from the mountains of West Virginia to the canyons of Manhattan is a tale that involves many components, not the least of which is a testament to his ambition.“Back in the days when he was more of a gypsy and moving in and out of colleges, armies and jobs, the fellow often used to dream of this New York town and solemnly swear that someday he’d bask in the bright lights of Broadway until he was done to a turn,” a New York Post reporter once wrote of Bee.5 Maybe he did make that vow to himself, although nowhere is it mentioned in any of his personal recollections. In Backcourt Ace, though, Chip makes his first trip to New York City for a State University game in Madison Square Garden, and Chip is mesmerized by Broadway’s “dazzling theater lights, the shop windows, and the brilliant advertising signs which flamed into sight, blacked out, and flamed back again.”6 During Bee’s years at LIU from 1931 until his resignation in 1952, he did, indeed, bask in the city’s bright lights and robust night life. “He was a man who held four graduate degrees and served as assistant to the president of LIU, but he also had a fondness for night life and for Wild Turkey,” Joe Gergen wrote in Newsday. Following Blackbird games in Madison Square Garden, Bee would follow the same routine with near religious fervor. Or at least the spirit would so move him. “I’d go to Toots Shor’s or Leone’s,” Bee said. “Sometimes, I wouldn’t let them close up. Gene Leone would have to drive me home out of desperation.”7 188 Bee at Long Island University When Bee arrived at LIU in 1931, Prohibition was still the law of the land, although the Volstead Act did little to discourage drinking in New York. As Bee was putting his first LIU football team through its preseason paces in Brooklyn, metropolitan New York had—and sometimes boasted of— thirty-two thousand different places where a fellow or a lady could get an illegal drink.And that was by the police commissioner ’s estimate. New York’s speakeasies ran the gamut from high-toned spots such as the “21” Club, which opened on New Year’s Day 1930, to O’Leary’s on the Bowery, a drinking establishment that was “not for the squeamish.”8 New York City, as opposed to the more conservative upstate region, gained a reputation as an alcoholic paradise for the “wets,” and one of the leading proponents of the cause in the “wet” versus “dry” cultural and political battle was Fiorello LaGuardia, a former president of the city’s...