New College Point-Shaving Scandal Was Not a Surprise, Author Claims

Point-shaving scandals are cyclical crimes which will not stop until the structure of college sports changes, says the author of a book on game-fixing.

Charles Rosen’s “Scandals of ‘51” detailed the blackest year of college basketball, when players, coaches and referees were involved in altering games’ final scores.

“The arrests at Tulane (recently) aggrieve me to my heart, but they don’t surprise me,” said Rosen. “There are always gamblers looking for an edge.

“What’s been happening is that they punish the kids that get caught, like throw Rick Kuhn (from Boston College) into jail, and then it’s back to business as usual. The problem is that college players are getting mixed signals,” Rosen said in a telephone interview from his home in Woodstock, N.Y.

“The players at college are getting all kinds of illegal money from coaches and alumni and then they are offered illegal money from gamblers, and they are being told some illegal money is OK but not other illegal money.

“If the colleges want to change things, they’ve got to put the money on top of the table. The problem is that the amateur code in the United States is outdated,” said Rosen, who favors larger schools providing their athletes with a public stipend.

“Schools make a lot of money from their basketball programs, some schools make more than a million dollars. We need to remove the hypocrisy and take the pressure off coaches who have to go recruiting with a suitcase full of money,” said Rosen.

His book, published four years ago, said the point-shaving schemes were so widespread that prosecution was selective and many of the guilty weren’t brought to trial.

“There are guys who are now in the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Mass., who slipped through. Why? Because of political and religious and other reasons. Certain teams were warned, so when pulled in they had lawyers, while others players were pitted against each other and certain evidence was destroyed,” claims Rosen.

In his book he quotes one bookie: “‘It was a crazy time. There were players dumping (games), coaches dumping and referees dumping. There was one college game that really stood out. One of the refs was doing business and all game long he didn’t even make one call.”’

A former player at City College of New York told Rosen: “‘I hate to say it, but shaving points was a time-honored tradition at City. The choice was to go along with everybody else or tell the authorities. Most of us were broke and very naive. But in our hearts we knew it was wrong.”

Rosen said of those involved with the point-shaving: “Some guys suffered, some shook it off and learned from it, some carried it with them and let it destroy their lives.”

Ralph Beard, an All-America at the University of Kentucky, Olympic hero and NBA All-Star, confessed to fixing games while he was in college and is quoted in Rosen’s book as saying, “my life just disintegrated.

“I did manage to reenter UK and earn my degree, but whenever I walked around Louisville, I avoided anyone who might talk to me about basketball.

“After I graduated, I moved from job to job. I laid pipe, I loaded trucks and I sold cars. I lived in a void and thought of myself as a complete failure. I wanted to go away and die,” he said.