Hoop Crazy: The Lives of Clair Bee and Chip Hilton

CHAPTER 1: The Extremes of Clair Bee

CHAPTER 1 The Extremes of Clair Bee The Bad and the Good Monday, 19 February 1951 Everything was beginning to unravel. Maybe they didn’t see it, or didn’t want to see it, a month ago when it was just the Manhattan College players involved. That was when Long Island University president Tristram Walker Metcalfe tried to make them see it, tried to make them deal with it. Metcalfe called a meeting of all of the administrators of metropolitan New York colleges with major basketball programs to discuss the gambling problem. Who came? Only the Manhattan people, and they were already in hot water.1 What was especially galling was that it was a season that could not have started better for New York City basketball. Nat Holman, coach of City College’s 1950 double champs, NIT and NCAA, was on the cover of the December 4 issue of Newsweek, photographed in color with his hands draped over a basketball, looking confidently into the future. And he had 1 reason to be confident. Crowds were still filling Madison Square Garden for the doubleheaders; most New York teams were stronger than ever. Talented players from any place in the country wanted to play in New York, to play for New York colleges in the Garden. But Holman, for one, knew what was going on behind the gilded image they had conveyed so successfully. Shortly before the news broke in mid-January that the Manhattan players were in on the point-shaving, Holman took Seton Hall coach Honey Russell away from their usual courtside seats during a doubleheader at Madison Square Garden, moved him to a secluded spot in the arena’s upper reaches, and told him that he was pretty sure his players were involved with the gamblers.2 Nothing more than that—a painful suspicion and more likely an admission. Maybe the rest of them didn’t see it last season, or in 1949 when a George Washington player, Dave Shapiro from Brooklyn, was approached by fixers. Instead of accepting the fix money, Shapiro cooperated with the district attorney’s office in New York City and pretended to go along with the point-shaving until the authorities could arrest the fixers.3 Like Holman, maybe they saw it all along but didn’t want to acknowledge it, something ugly and unspeakable, at least for the record, something that you could keep just below the surface and hope that it would stay there. But it was out there now, on top of them, nibbling at the core of the lives they had so carefully constructed. Clair Bee left his office at Long Island University in Brooklyn and drove down Flatbush Extension toward the Manhattan Bridge. Despite his meeting with his players earlier that morning, he was feeling uneasy. He showed them the headlines: “Nation-wide Link Probed—Helfand Mum on LIU Quiz.” There were the accompanying photos, the three players from City College, one from New York University (NYU), and Eddie Gard, last year’s LIU captain, all being formally charged—and a shot of the gambler, the money man, Salvatore Sollazzo, pulling up the collar of his overcoat 2 The Extremes of Clair Bee as if that could keep him anonymous. And the lead to the story on the front page of the Brooklyn Eagle: “Big-shot gamblers reportedly involved in a nationwide college basketball fixing ring took cover today as New York’s latest hoop bribery scandal, which erupted with the arrest of four players , a former star and an ex-convict, threatened to snowball into gigantic proportions.”4 But, of course, they had seen it. Everybody had; people who did not know a basketball from a beach ball were talking about it. If it were a game, he could control the ebb and flow. He could pull his starters early if things were not going the way he thought they should, send the second string out on the floor, gather the starters in the locker room and explain the adjustments they needed to make. He had done it numerous times, and it always worked.A mentally nimble coach, a good game coach, that’s what the sportswriters called him, someone who could make adjustments on the fly, someone who could take a blackboard and control the game. He had no control over this situation. But he tried. This season, for the first time in his...