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B4Sun Journal, New Bern, N.C. — Sunday, March 4, 1990i.Point-shaving is most dreaded scandal3ast scandals nearly destroyed college basketballpoint-The Associated PressIt is the most dreaded word inshaving.lJI^: I|| 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. 3f Now the game is riding again with record crowds and fabulous television contracts. But it is like a fragile house of cards, teetering on * that one dreadedword.4 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 thethe NCAA and NITtournaments.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 for some 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 year earlier became 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 the testimony 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 than that 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. It was 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 32 players 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. Molinas was 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 NBA again.Molinas, however, was 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 andnotsentenced to 10 to 15 years in prison.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 seemed strange, 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 thanthey 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 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 and Clyde 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 into the 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 the judge ruled evidence was withheld that would have helped in his defense — Williams was found 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.
Newspaper Details
New Bern Sun Journal
New Bern, North Carolina, US
Sat, Mar 03, 1990
Page 14
Full Page
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Anonymous
WV, USA 05 May 2020
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