Sport: When Scandals Do Not Scandalize

Despite sordid charges, a basketball-fix trial stirs little interest

In federal court in Brooklyn, a tall, sad young man from Boston College has been on trial more than a month, accused of shaving points in six B.C. basketball games during the 1978-79 season. Perhaps he will learn the jury’s verdict this week. His name is Rick Kuhn, and except for the eyes, he seems younger than 26. He sits at the defense table alone, but in the company of four other defendants, men with even older eyes and Damon Runyon-sounding names, including convicted extortionist Jimmy (“the Gent”) Burke. The testimony has been a seamy accounting of gamblers, kids, bribes and beating Harvard by “less than twelve.”

Strangely, this is the first time a college player has ever actually stood trial on the charge of point shaving. Before, there were guilty pleas. But neither the press nor the public has appeared too interested in the trial. Except in Boston, little feeling has been stirred by the story. One wonders. The matter may be a simple one of honor forfeited at a young age, but it may also tell of the innocence of an age lost altogether.

Around college basketball, “scandal” is a word from 1951 or 1961, outdated now. Sportswriter Arthur Daley, writing of the ’51 fix charges involving 33 players at seven schools, observed: “All scandals are ugly, and this is a particularly vicious one because it touches the presumably untouched.” Can there be any such presumption in ’81?

Now the scandal may be that followers of college sports are incapable of being scandalized. The well-known climate of corruption, exploitation and hypocrisy is also well-documented, if only in the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s own rap sheets, so hard to keep up with these days. What was it again that was going on at the University of New Mexico? The University of Miami? The University of Colorado? Oregon State? Arizona State? Oklahoma State? All of these, and others, are now on N.C.A.A. probation.

Because of the nature of the game, basketball probably leads all sports in recruiting excesses. One great player can be enough for a championship. The usual rationale for rule bending—”everyone does it”—never was expressed so emphatically or officially as in a district court in New Mexico last July. When former University of New Mexico Coach Norm Ellenberger was convicted of defrauding the state and making false public vouchers (in order to use the money as a back-pocket fund for recruits), Judge Phillip Baiamonte pronounced sentence by wondering, “How fair is it to incarcerate in prison a coach who was basically doing what almost everybody in this community wanted him to do? Namely, win basketball games at any cost. . . I’m being asked to sentence a man because he got caught, not because his conduct was unacceptable.” Ellenberger got off with one year of unsupervised probation.

The original function of intercollegiate athletics as an extracurricular activity is a laughable thought today, long lost in the rush for ticket sales, television contracts and alumni contributions.

The stakes are certainly high enough to explain the under-the-table handouts to players: the cash, the cars and the altered transcripts of academic grades. And then to this atmosphere of expedience add the element of gambling.

What does shading a rule have to do with shaving a point? “For at least 20 years now, recruiting practices in college basketball have been completely corrupt,” says Bob Cousy, the great Celtics guard who coached at Boston College from 1963 through 1969. “When the example has been set by institutions, impressionable kids get the idea. Do it any way you can. Get the grade, get the votes, get to the top of the ladder—get the money. Should we be surprised if in the basketball games at school—or three or four years down the line in business—they follow those guidelines along the road of least resistance? We teach them how the game is played.

Why are we surprised when they play the game the way they were taught it?”

How does that chilling line go? Anyone who can be paid to make a shot can be paid not to make one.

Inured as people are to news of athletic improprieties, they are equally unconcerned about the gambling tone that pervades even the best newspapers’ sports sections: full of odds, point spreads and columns on how to bet. Jimmy (“the Greek”) Snyder furnishes television with both a gambling expertise and persona.

Yet betting on sports such as baseball, football or basketball is illegal everywhere in the U.S. except Nevada.

College basketball coaches worry and sometimes complain about the practice of publishing betting lines so blithely. Angrily, Indiana’s Bobby Knight likens it to listing the phone numbers of prostitutes.

Some coaches, including Lou Carnesecca of St. John’s, still begin every season by passing around a scrapbook of yellowed clippings from the ” ’51 scandals”—tattered stories of Sherman White (Long Island University), Floyd Layne (City College of New York) or Ralph Beard (Kentucky). But he may be making a different, unintended point as well. Those clippings are yellowed, and today’s scandals just do not make the same sort of headlines.

Coaches are always saying that kids nowadays are made of no better or worse clay than they ever were, even the captains of the team, the Rhodes-scholar finalists, like B.C.’s Jim Sweeney. Sweeney testified as a Government witness against Kuhn and the other defendants; he has admitted accepting money through Kuhn but denied going along with any fix. When Sweeney spoke of shamefully tacking the $500 in his closet, it recalled Ed Warner of C.C.N.Y. three decades ago, hiding the money in a shoe-box in an aunt’s basement. They must have felt about the same.

—By Tom Callahan