The Big Money (cont.)

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.

"How Much Respect?" Inevitably, the soul-searching led straight back to the whole question of big-time collegiate sport. Demanded Sports Columnist Joe Williams in the New York World-Telegram and Sun: "How much respect do you think a football player really has for a school which has outbid six or seven other schools for his services? Damned little, I'd imagine. Contempt, more likely."

Harold Stassen, president of the University of Pennsylvania, called for "a re-examination."* Said he: "The athletic scandals should cause our entire educational system to take a careful look in the mirror and take stock not only of its athletic programs, but also of its moral and ethical teaching of the youth of the nation." Stassen had the athletic-program problem right in his own backyard: Penn's big-time football team pays for 85% of Penn's $617,000 budget for intercollegiate and intramural athletics.

"We Love You." Is L.I.U.'s return to intramuralism the answer? It did not satisfy L.I.U. students. By week's end, more than 2,000 of them had signed a petition which read, in effect: "We want big-time sports." At a campus rally, they spotted Coach Clair Bee and hustled him to a desk top for a speech. Smiling wanly, Bee told them: "I admire your spirit. I'm awfully proud of you. We're coming back strong. We're not through." L.I.U. students waved a sign addressed to the arrested stars: "Sherm, LeRoy, Al--We Still Love You!" C.C.N.Y. loved its crooked heroes, too. Petitions, with faculty and student signatures, demanded that the boys be allowed to come back and get their college degrees some day.

Hardly anybody seemed to love Gambler Salvatore Sollazzo, the man charged with corrupting so many poor basketball players. The U.S. Government, after a prowl through his books, slapped a $1,128,493 lien on him, for evasion of income taxes.

This week Manhattan District Attorney Hogan was still on the trail, piecing together clues to more fixes, fixers and crooked college boys. Some of the clues go back five years. Some of them might lead to still more indictments. But at this point, there was no sign that the colleges were piecing anything together, or earnestly searching their souls about the commercial nature of college sports. There was no sign that they even knew that they, too, had been indicted. Yet puzzled, slow-spoken LeRoy Smith had given the clue to them in nine short words: "It seems more of a business than a sport."

-* C.C.N.Y. did, fielding a makeshift five in the half-empty Garden to beat Lafayette, 67-48. *For opinion by Pennsylvania's Stassen on another question, see NATIONAL AFFAIRS.

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