Everybody, including the grafting, remorseful basketball players, agreed on one point: it is wrong to dump games. The soul-searching went on from there.
Said LeRoy Smith, arrested with two other members of the Long Island University Blackbirds for rigging seven games in Madison Square Garden: "I found myself sick of starting something I had never done before ... I couldn't eat ... You don't think of money . . . You think of all the people you will involve if you get caught . . . This wouldn't have happened if basketball had been kept on the campus ... It seems more of a business than a sport." Head down, Smith hoped the whole thing would be "a lesson to other guys."
The lesson came too late to be much help to Smith and his L.I.U. teammates, Adolph Bigos and Sherman White. Like the C.C.N.Y. players arrested earlier (TIME, Feb. 26), they faced possible prison terms under New York's law against fixing an athletic contest (maximum penalty: five years and a fine of $10,000).
Each man stands to lose more than his liberty. Ed Roman, the "A" student from C.C.N.Y., is a long way from wearing the Phi Beta Kappa key that he had almost won; gangling Sherman White, the best college basketball player in the U.S., is never likely to land the rich postgraduate contract with the pros that might have earned him up to $100,000. All had tarred themselves with a disgrace that is likely to dog them through their lives. In individual gestures of contrition, the boys dredged up payoff money from clothes and shoeboxes, turned it over to the district attorney. It came to $23,540.
"We Must Keep Going." Is there any way to keep this sort of thing from happening over & over again? The chief reforms advanced last week: to get games out of gambler-ridden Madison Square Garden and back to the campus, to eliminate the Catskill "borsch circuit," where some of the players were first approached, to persuade newspapers to stop printing betting odds (see PRESS), to pick a basketball czar ("like Judge Landis"), to double the penalties of the bribery law. One suggestion, from Doxie Moore, commissioner of the National Professional Basketball League, candidly seeks to make honesty more profitable than dishonesty: let each college post a purse of $5,000 for any player who turns in a would-be fixer.
On the rise last week was also a game-must-go-on-at-all-costs school, made up of coaches, some basketball writers and college students. By "the game," they meant the Madison Square Garden variety. Said Coach Nat Holman of C.C.N.Y.: "We must keep going.* The game has meant too much to the youth of the college, the nation, even the world, to be affected ,by half a dozen kids who have a price."
The trustees of L.I.U. disagreed. They ordered big-time basketball abandoned forthwith. Furthermore, since basketball has been paying much of the tab for other sports at L.I.U., the trustees ruled that the school would henceforth stick strictly to intramural sports.