CCNY Beavers
From Hoopedia
The City College of The City University of New York (known more commonly as City College of New York or simply City College, CCNY, or colloquially as City) is a senior college of the City University of New York, in New York City. It is also the oldest of City University's twenty institutions of higher learning. City College's thirty-five acre campus along Convent Avenue from 131st Street to 141st Street is on a hill overlooking Harlem.
Men's Basketball
CCNY may be best known as the only team in college basketball history to win both the National Invitation Tournament (NIT) and the NCAA Division I Men's Tournament in the same year, 1950, as their official literature states. Or they may be best known for the betting scandal that destroyed both CCNY's basketball program and, arguably, major college basketball in New York City for the ensuing quarter century.
CCNY captured the NIT and NCAA titles in 1950 by winning seven games in sixteen days. Hall of Fame Coach Nat Holman had managed to recruit the cream of New York City's high school talent and taught them to play as a team. Ed Roman, Herb Cohen, Al Roth, Floyd Lane, Norm Mager, Ed Warner and Irwin Dambrot were the core of this all-star assemblage. A year later all seven had been convicted of accepting bribes to shave points. Players at several other New York colleges were also involved, as were players at the University of Kentucky.
It is worth noting that they were never accused of throwing any games. Rather, some of them took money to make sure that the final scores of some games benefited their patrons. Some were punished for knowing that their teammates were shaving points and not reporting them. All that mattered was that now the public knew that many of the games they had watched with rapture had been "fixed." Confirmation of this fact had tremendous ramifications.
The social and ethnic implications of college basketball in this era cannot be overstated. The Culture Wars did not start in the 1990s. CCNY was known then as "the Harvard of the poor," no idle boast when you consider that it produced nine Nobel prize laureates. Their basketball team was New York City's team: Jews, African-Americans, Catholics--"ethnics." They were the children of immigrants and of slaves. They had succeeded in imposing their will against teams from the rest of America in the quintessentially American game--basketball. They triumphed over Ohio State, Bradley and San Francisco. But the sweetest victory came against Adolph Rupp's University of Kentucky team--a team from a segregated school made up exclusively of white Protestants. Furthermore, Rupp had never been shy about voicing his low opinion of Jews and African-Americans and other denizens of New York. (For some, the only silver lining in the whole scandal was that three Kentucky Wildcats were also convicted.) So when the scandal erupted and New York's heroes stood convicted, New York's heart was broken. Some would argue that New York never recovered.
College basketball had been king in Gotham. Madison Square Garden had been regularly hosting college basketball doubleheaders since 1934. With national powers CCNY, New York University, Long Island University, Manhattan College and St. John's University right in the neighborhood, scheduling sell-out games was no problem. Out-of-town teams were eager to come play and reap that big payday, get some national publicity, and see the big city. But once the point-shaving scandal broke, interest and attendance fell off the cliff. Consequently, many New Yorkers turned their attention to professional basketball and the New York Knicks. The Knicks had been treated like step-children. They were forced to vacate their home court at the Garden when their games conflicted with college games, playing instead in a leaky armory.
Now all those once-fabulous New York teams slunk off to obscurity. But once they had been at the center of the college basketball world.
See Also
- City Dump: The Story of the 1951 CCNY Basketball Scandal An HBO documentary.
