The City Game: An Excerpt

The few films that still exist of the City College Beavers playing basketball in the late 1940s are black and white, grainy, soundless. By today’s standards the players don’t 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 team’s style of offense, which features lots of passes, very little dribbling, a profusion of shots rarely seen anymore – set shots and hook shots and underhand foul shots – and 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 each other, 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 team’s 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 of major league baseball – and at a time when the newly formed National Basketball Association included not a single black player – the 1949-50 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 mainstream – to 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, and another a house painter; one drove a seltzer truck; one plied his trade as a blacksmith, shoeing horses that still pulled wagons on the streets of Brooklyn. Among the four black players on the team, three had mothers who worked as domestics for wealthier families; the other one 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 if 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 relocated 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 fans – not 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 with soda fountains to make egg creams and malteds, where often times the proprietor was happy to handle a bet on a local sporting event.

They were a smart, tough group 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 city’s brightest hopes for itself – of 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.

For decades members of the team would live in the shadow of scandal, building their lives away from the glare of public scrutiny, haunted by the notion that a potential employer had said no because he recognized a name, or that the whispering in the far corners of restaurants and cocktail parties was about them; forever after most would maintain unlisted phone numbers. They lived with dignity but also, privately, with a lingering sense of shame and anger and frustration. Their story, they always believed, was far larger than they were.

It begins, though, with basketball: in a small gymnasium in a college on a hill, where a head coach and his assistant are watching fifteen players practice. Overhead a spider web of steel trusses spans the entire ceiling, giving the room an oddly industrial feel; gray afternoon light pours down from the Gothic windows, making bright rectangles on the varnished yellow hardwood. Sounds echo in the vaulted space, the gym almost silent but for the ragtag music of the game: an occasional grunt or exhalation of breath, the squeak of rubber sneakers, the dull percussive thud of a ball being dribbled, and then a brief pause and the cymballine swish of the shot.