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B4Sun Journal, New Bern, N C. — Sunday, March 4, 1990Point-shaving is most dreaded scandal I Fun-loving ValvanoPast scandalsnearly destroyedcollege basketballThe Associated Presspoint-It is the most dreaded word in college basketball shaving.There was a time 40 years ago when the game was king, routinely selling out doubleheaders in New York’s Madison Square Garden and packing campus arenas. Then the wise guys got to some kids, fixed a score here and there and sent the sport reeling. It took years for college basketball to recover.Now the game is riding high again with record crowds and fabulous television contracts. But it is like a fragile house of cards, teetering on that one dreaded word.Point-shaving.They are kicking that word around again, this time at North Carolina State, sending a shudder through the sport as it heads into the most exciting time of the season, the NCAA and NIT tournaments.Each year, at his first practice, Coach Lou Carnesecca gathers his St. John’s University team and before he diagrams the first play, he breaks out the scandal scrapbooks passed down from the administration of Joe Lap-chick. They are a history lesson for kids who never heard about this dark side of the game.The pages are worn now, yellowed by the years, but the message is still fresh. There are the faces of college kids frozen in fear, the headlines screaming of scandals, of investigations and indictments by the district attorney, all of it the fallout of shaving a few points.There had been rumors forsome time that funny business was going on in college basketball but the first tangible evidence came in January, 1951, when Junius Kellogg of Manhattan College reported a $1,000 bribe offer. Two of his teammates and three gamblers were arrested.A month later, the City College of New York team was traveling home by train from aCharles Shacklefordgame against Temple. This was a marvelously talented team, a team that one vear earlierbecame the only one in history to sweep both the NCAA and NIT tournaments. On the train, an investigator from the Manhattan district attorney’s office approached Coach Nat Holman to tell him he had orders to pick up some players for questioning.College basketball was about to take the witness stand and thetestimony would be tawdry.In Lexington, Ky., Coach Adolph Rupp harumphed at the investigation, calling the gamblers a big-city problem. “They couldn’t touch my boys with a 10-foot pole,’’ he proclaimed.It turned out, though, that the bettors were much closer thanthat to Rupp’s boys.After winning the NCAA tournament in 1951 and being ranked No. 1 in 1952, Kentucky’s program was shut down, stained by the betting revelations that had become a national scandal. Itwas the death penalty, imposed 35 years before the NCAA invented the punishment.The investigation revealed that between 1947 and 1950, 86 games had been fixed. Seven schools —CCNY, Long Island University, New York University, Manhattan, Kentucky, Bradley and Toledo — were involved and 32players were implicated.The worst part was nobody believed that the probe got to thebottom of the scandal.College basketball made a slow recovery and by 1961, the embarrassment of 10 years earlier had been all but forgotten.And then it happened again. This time the man in the middle of the mess was Jack Molinas, who was a player at Columbia University when the 1951 scandals broke. Molinaswas good enough to play in the NBA and spent 29 games with the Fort Wayne Pistons in 1953-54 before being suspended for gambling on games. He never was convicted of the charge but he never would play in the NBAagain.Molinas, however, was not finished with basketball.On May 17, 1962, he was arrested on charges he headed a ring that fixed college games. Players from Utah, Bowling Green, Alabama and College of the Pacific were among those who testified against Molinas and on Jan. 8, 1963, he was convicted on five charges growing out of the latest scandal andsentenced to 10 to 15 years inprison.The 1961 scandal touched 37 players from 22 schools. One of those caught in the fallout was a talented teen-ager from Brooklyn, N.Y., who had been recruited to play at Iowa. Connie Hawkins was supposed to have introduced a gambler to a fellow player. He was tossed out of school and barred from playing in the NBA, despite the fact that he never had been charged with fixing a game. It took a bidding war with a new league, a $6 million lawsuit and seven years to get the NBA to change its mind about him.After two scandals in 10 years, college basketball was reeling and its recovery took some time. Whenever a result seemedstrange, when a team favored by 10 points won by two, people would nod their heads as if they knew something was going on. That’s because point-shaving is like a skeleton in the sport’s closet, hidden from view but always there, always waiting for a new generation of players who might be persuaded into cutting some corners for a price.That price often is higher thanValvano savs he’s innocent ofStatesthey anticipated, though. Call it disgrace.Ask Rick Kuhn, a former Boston College player sentenced to 10 years in federal prison in 1982 after being found guilty of conspiring to shave points andfix six games in 1978-79. The gamblers paid $2,500 per game.Ten years for $15,000.U.S. District Judge Henry Bramwell imposed the sentence on Kuhn after dismissing pleas for leniency. “A strong argument can be offered that a substantial term of incarceration imposed on this defendant will be recalled in the future by another college athlete who may be tempted to compromise his performance,” he said.Sadly, that turned out to be wishful thinking.Three years after Kuhn went to jail and a year before he was granted an early release by Judge Bramwell, the basketball program at Tulane came apart under the burden of another fixing scandal. This one was tinged by the plague of a new generation drugs.The trouble at Tulane began when starters Jon Johnson andClyde Eads told authorities they got involved in a point-shaving plot after purchasing cocaine from another student. Two other players, David Dominique and Bobby Thompson, were implicated as was the star of the team, center John “Hot Rod”Williams, who was brought intothe plot, the others said, because it could not work without him.Williams was the Connie Hawkins of his day. He was portrayed by his defense attorney as a victim of circumstances, a youngster from a deprived environment. woefully unprepared for college, hidden out in cinch courses to protect his eligibility. After two trials — the first one was ruled a mistrial because theruled evidencejudge ruiea evidence was withheld that would have helped in his defense — Williams wasfound innocent of any part in the scandal. But his professional career was delayed a year by the proceedings and the testimony at his trial was as damaging to Tulane as the allegations.nrnhlemsserious about scandalThe Associated PressJimmy Valvano always had the gift of gab. He camewith a quip on hisequipped lip.Ever hear the one about aconversation he had with anofficial?“I asked a ref if he could give me a technical for thinking bad things about him and he said, ‘Of course not.’“I said,‘Well, I thinkyou stink.’ Hegave me atechnical. Youcan’t trustthem.”Ever hearthe one abouthis playingdays at Rutgers, when Valvanohe was assigned to guard thethe guy schoolother team’s star?“The coach said was 6-foot-2, a All-American, goes left, goes right, pulls up at 30 feet, had a 3.8 GPA and on top of that he’s good looking, too.“I didn’t know whether toguard him or ask for a date.” At first, when he arrived in 1980 to coach North CarolinaState, his new constituency didnot know quite what to makeof Coach V. He was a cityslicker, a fast-talking New Yorker reared on skyscrapers and subways, transplanted to the trees and streams ofCarolina.He grew up on Long Island, a double dribble from street-where hissmart Queens father, Rocco, used to coach high school ball against Louie Carnesecca, later of St. John’sfame. Rocco Valvano’s point guard at Seaford High was his own scrappy son, Jimmy V.Valvano played at Rutgers and then began a coaching career that took him fromJohns Hopkins to Bucknell to Iona. Two straight bids to the NCAA tournament turnedsome heads, and on March 27, 1980, he was invited to take his act to the Atlantic Coast Conference and N.C. State.It was some act, filled withbig city bombast; The folks of Raleigh were accustomed to a more genteel approach. They never before had seen anything like him, a big-nosed kid from up north withmouth to match.Jimmy V had an answer forthem, though.Jokes.“I tell them jokes,” he said. “I tell them I can’t fly fish because it’s tough casting intoa fire hydrant.Get it?The locals loved the selfifeffacing routines.“When they realize you’ve come down there with that kind of attitude,” Valvano said, “they’re more likely to accept you.”Accept him? They fell in love with him.Coach V could have owned the state, especially after guiding N.C. State to the NCAA championship in 1983. When Lorenzo Charles jammed in Dereck Whittenburg’s shot for the winning bucket against Houston’s Phi SlammaJamma, the coach ran on the court, arms askew, looking for somebody, anybody, to hug. It made a great picture, the pure, unadulterated emotion of college basketball.Then things started getting adulterated at N.C. State.First, there was the matter of Chris Washburn, a player with basketball skills that far outdistanced his classroom abilities. Washburn wasromanced by N.C. State and admitted with Valvano’s enthusiastic support, despite scoring 470 on his Scholastic Aptitude Test, an exam that awards 400 points just for showing up. His stay at State was stormy and brief, pockmarked by scrapes with the law.Last week, in the wake of alleged point-shaving inCoach V wasgames,volunteering to leave as coach, too, if that’s whi sity wanted. *And this time no jokes.
Newspaper Details
New Bern Sun Journal
New Bern, North Carolina, US
Sat, Mar 03, 1990
Page 14
Full Page
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WV, USA 04 May 2020
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