Matthew Goodman - The City Game: Triumph, Scandal, and a Legendary Basketball Team

(Song for the City College of New York)

O youngest of the giant brood

Of cities far-renowned;

In wealth and power thou hast passed

Thy rivals at a bound;

And now thou art a queen, New York;

And how wilt thou be crowned?

Weave me no palace-wreath of pride,

The royal city said;

Nor forge an iron fortress-wall

To frown upon my head;

But let me wear a diadem

Of Wisdoms towers instead.

And so upon her island height

She worked her will forsooth,

She set upon her rocky brow

A citadel of Truth,

A house of Light, a home of Thought,

A shrine of noble Youth.

Stand here, ye City College towers,

And look both up and down;

Remember all who wrought for you

Within the toiling town;

Remember all they thought for you,

And all the hopes they brought for you,

And be the Citys Crown.

H ENRY V AN D YKE , June 1909

The few films that still exist of the City College Beavers playing basketball in the late 1940s are black and white, grainy, soundless. By todays standards the players dont look very athletic: Few of them are muscular, some are too skinny or stocky, and all wear shorts that seem impossibly short and are held up by belts. But more striking still is the teams style of offense, which features lots of passes, very little dribbling, a profusion of shots rarely seen anymoreset shots and hook shots and underhand foul shotsand nearly constant movement by all five players. Back and forth the ball flies, heading this way and that, the players moving swiftly around the edges of the court, circling around behind one another, occasionally breaking free for a rush toward the basket. At times the action proceeds in a regular, predictable rhythm, and then it abruptly turns staccato, the passes becoming shorter and quicker, the movement broken up with feints, shifts, stops, and starts.

Unlike most college teams of the era, the Beavers ran very few set plays. At its essence the offense was improvisatory, created by the players themselves during the course of a game: built from a sideways glance, a nod, a quick tilt of the head that told a teammate in which direction a pass would go. At a time when bebop was just coming into its own, the City College of New York basketball team operated something like a five-man jazz combo, with each player improvising off a few basic patterns, sometimes deferring to another player and sometimes taking the lead, the group momentarily breaking down into duets or trios before building back up again, together creating something fast and complex and unpredictable.

The teams assistant coach, Bobby Sand, liked to refer to this style of offense as spontaneous play. On the court, he advised, a player should be alert at all times, moving and watching his teammates and anticipating what they are likely to do, responding intelligently to each new situation as it develops.

Every play in basketball, Sand once wrote, is a constant revelation in skill, speed, and judgment.

They were a college basketball team unlike any that had ever been assembled. They played not for a powerhouse state school such as Kentucky, Kansas, Indiana, or Oklahoma A&M, but for a tuition-free, merit-based college in Harlem known far more for intellectual achievement than athletic prowess. Only two years after Jackie Robinson broke the color line in Major League Baseballand at a time when the newly formed National Basketball Association included not a single black playerthe 194950 CCNY starting five comprised two black and three Jewish players, the first such team ever to play at tournament level. Of the fifteen players on the varsity team, eleven were Jewish and four were black. They were, every one of them, the children of immigrants, from Eastern Europe and the West Indies; they were only a generation or two removed from the bonds of peasantry and servitude, and for them City College represented the opportunity to move into the mainstreamto become, as the saying went, as American as the Americans.

Their fathers worked mostly as laborers, many in jobs with a distinctly Old World flavor. One was a window washer, another a house painter; one drove a seltzer truck, one plied his trade as a blacksmith, shoeing horses that still pulled wagons along the streets of Brooklyn. Among the four black players on the team, three had mothers who worked as domestics for wealthier families; the other was an orphan.

They played most of their home games not in the small City College gym but at Madison Square Garden, where the stands rose up from the court sheer and high and each night were filled with eighteen thousand spectators, many of them serious gamblers who cared less about whether a particular team won than whether it had covered the point spread. Among team sports in New York in those days, only baseball was more widely watched and passionately debated than college basketball. Football was still a decade away from truly capturing the popular imagination, and the National Basketball Association was in its infancy. On nights when the Garden had scheduled a college doubleheader, the New York Knicks were relegated to the small, dilapidated 69th Regiment Armory down on Twenty-Fifth Street; the college game was by far the bigger attraction. The way college basketball draws, Garden promoter Ned Irish was once heard to say, the Knicks are nothing but a tax write-off anyway.

When the game was over the players would return home on the subway, back to tenements and walk-up apartments and two-family houses in crowded, boisterous neighborhoods trimmed with ragged shrubbery, ringed by factories and pocked with empty lots. The City College players inhabited the same city as their fansnot the downtown city with its soaring stone skyscrapers but the New York of low-slung brown brick apartment houses and chained-in playgrounds and tiny candy stores where the proprietor was oftentimes happy to handle a bet on a local sporting event. They were a bunch of kids from the outer boroughs, not all of them poor but none of them rich, and together they achieved extraordinary, even unparalleled success. They were celebrated from one end of the city to the other, lauded in banner headlines, feted at testimonial banquets, invited onto radio programs, hailed by the mayor as our athletes. For a while they seemed to embody the citys brightest hopes for itselfof racial harmony, civic virtue, the triumph of the outsider. Later, though, their names would appear on the front pages of the newspapers again, under equally astonishing circumstances, and almost overnight they came to represent only disappointment and disillusion. Once they had been the most celebrated basketball players in New York; now they were the most notorious.