JPS
04-21-2007, 01:23 PM
One area that I never really knew much about with respect to the 1951 Gambling Scandal was exactly what happened with regard to UK being banned from competition for the 1952-53 season, first by the SEC and later by the NCAA.
Recently, I was able to locate some of the newspaper articles from that time period, in particular some of the columns by Lexington Herald sports editor Ed Ashford.
What I found was that at the time the SEC voted, it was done mainly to get the NCAA of its own back, as it was widely acknowledged that the other SEC schools were just as bad, if not worse, when it came to recruiting practices etc. The general consensus was they were doing UK a favor, in that the vote allowed UK to schedule other teams which would be of greater national stature than their SEC games would have been. For the SEC, it allowed them to say they actually punished UK, and had the additional benefit that one of them would for the first time be able to compete in the NCAA tournament (up until that time no other SEC school other than UK had done so.)
The thought at the time was that UK would be able to schedule who it wanted to fill out its schedule. It was known that the NCAA might have it's own penalties, but it was thought that the NCAA's opportunity to do so had come and gone (as outlined by some Ashford columns that fall, which I may include later when I get a chance.)
Anyway, when the NCAA did decide to prevent UK from playing a schedule that year, it was somewhat surprising, and fairly late in the game.
Below is an excerpt from a book by NCAA executive director Walter Byers (Unsportsmanlike Conduct, University of Michigan Press, 1995) which has some interesting comments in it.
First of all, I didn't realize how strong of an influence SEC Commissioner Bernie Moore had on the NCAA's decision to go forward with extending the Kentucky ban. Byer's terms Moore's decision as 'courageous'. I have to question whether Moore, who was a former LSU coach, actually benefitted from the ban. Remember, at that time LSU was UK's stiffest conference competition with Joe Dean and Bob Pettit on the roster.
LSU did end up representing the SEC in 1953 (the year UK was not allowed to play) for their first NCAA appearance. The following year, LSU and UK were tied with perfect records and UK ended up winning the tie-breaking neutral court game. (LSU refused to play at Kentucky in 1954, saying that they deserved the home game. [LSU had played at Lexington in 1952 and UK was originally slated to play at Baton Rouge for 1953, before LSU voted to suspend UK's schedule.]) Of course, after UK won the play-in game, their top players were ruled ineligible for post-season competition and LSU returned to the NCAA once again (where they promptly lost to Penn State).
The second interesting tidbit was the admission by Byers that the NCAA's stance was on shaky ground, and they expected that if Kentucky had fought it, UK would have been able to overturn the ban. But, to UK's credit, they complied with the decision.
One area I wish Byers had gone into more detail with is why did the NCAA choose to go after Kentucky, when there were numerous other schools that had been caught up in the scandal. My assumption is that these other schools (CCNY, LIU, NYU etc.) had already begun deemphasizing their programs in response to the scandal, while Kentucky chose not to.
I think that there's validity to the idea, mentioned by many including UK alumn and Atlanta sportswriter Ed Danforth, that Kentucky would have been spared if Adolph Rupp had chosen to step down. (which thinking about it may have been what Moore's ultimate goal really was) I have to think that this was the price UK paid to retain their coach.
Anyway, here is the excerpt from the book. (pages 56-61)
Jon
------------------------------
On the night of October 20, 1951, the University of Kentucky's great Alex Groza and teammate Ralph Beard were picked up in Chicago by representatives of the New York district attorney's office.
They had been the heroes of the Kentucky basketball team that had won two NCAA championships and an Olympic gold medal. Almost simultaneously, Dale Barnstable was taken into custody at his home in Louisville. All were wanted for questioning in connection with point-fixing scandals.
Judge Saul S. Streit of the General Sessions Court, County of New York, heard the allegations of outright law breaking. His interrogation of the players and Coach Adolph Rupp went far beyond gambling. He probed into the financial arrangements in Lexington for the Kentucky basketball team. When it was all over, the scorecard read:
Five key basketball players were convicted of fixing points on basketball games over a three-year period; three were sentenced by Judge Streit.
Adolph Rupp was condemned by Judge Streit for "consorting with bookmaker Ed Kurd." One player testified that before a game in Cincinnati, Rupp came into the hotel and told the team, "I just called Kurd to get the points. Now these guys will be tough tonight so 1 want you to pour it on." Judge Streit blasted the school's athletics policy as "the acme of commercialism and overemphasis."
The Southeastern Conference and the NCAA later found that players had received illegal cash payments, some of which were made with the knowledge of Coach Rupp.
In another development, Coach Rupp of Kentucky had been fighting Indiana University over the Hoosiers' attempted recruitment of the top Kentucky high school basketball star, Cliff Hagan. Kentucky and Indiana were bitter rivals. Indiana had won the NCAA title in 1940 (second year of the tournament) and Kentucky won its first one eight years later. Rupp sanctimoniously charged Indiana Coach Branch McCracken with improper inducements and told McCracken to leave Hagan alone. McCracken replied: "I don't run away from good players like Hagan."
The highly prized recruit nevertheless chose Kentucky and became a minor part of Case no. 1, the maiden effort of the newly created NCAA Subcommittee on Infractions. I filed Case Report no. 1 September 20-21,1952.
Ten players were named as having received illegal outside aid. The report also indicated Hagan "probably was ineligible in 1951-52" because of a $125 gift certificate he had received, but no specific finding was made regarding him. He was not involved in the gambling.
With the report fmished, I felt heartbroken over the Kentucky scandal. As a good high school athlete and a mediocre college athlete, then as a sports reporter on my college newspaper and later for United Press in Chicago and New York, I loved college sports. I could scarcely believe that members of this great basketball team-still regarded as one of the most skilled of all time-had shaved points and played into the hands of gamblers. In that era, I do not believe there was the hardened expectation and cynical acceptance of misbehavior that permeates today's society.
I still see the 1950s and 1960s as a romantic era-at least in the minds of a public that was deeply shocked when coaches and young heroes it admired went wrong. Those ideals lived also in the minds of faculty and athletics officials who wanted to keep college sports the kind of campus and student activity they nostalgically remembered from their own younger days.
What was I to do about all of this? Luckily, Bernie H. Moore, the Southeastern Conference commissioner, was my great friend and strong supporter. He had served on the committee that hired me. We talked over the Kentucky case regularly as it developed.
At this time Bernie was playing a major role in NCAA policy. He had been head football and track coach at Louisiana State during the Huey Long years. He had dealt with the Kingfish not just in the governor's mansion but with Governor Long sitting beside him on the team bench at Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge on Saturday afternoons. Bernie was not one to be surprised by unexplainable quirks of human nature or political manipulation.
Neither of us were disturbed by the agonized editorials we read in the Lexington Herald, which condemned the SEC and NCAA investigations by recalling a biblical statement of Jesus. "The stone has been cast," the writer lamented, "and Kentucky was the target. Now it becomes the obligation of those who cast it to prove that they are without sin. "
I've heard that justification many times during the ensuing years of NCAA enforcement. Another persistent excuse is that a successful team, charged with violations, was turned in by its humiliated opponents to be stopped by unjust penalties. "If you can't beat 'em, suspend 'em," wrote sports columnist Ed Ashford of the Herald. "That evidently is the theory of the Southeastern Conference. "
Nonetheless, Bernie took a courageous stand against Kentucky's violations by suspending the team from conference basketball for one year. That didn't close them out, however, because they could build a full schedule with teams outside the conference. I was chairman of the NCAA Subcommittee on Infractions, which was willing to back Bernie's stand. But how? There had never been a vote by the NCAA Convention to impose a complete one-year boycott. Ashford sensed our weakness. In his column he crowed that we couldn't terminate Kentucky's NCAA membership for at least two years because the notice date required by the NCAA constitution had passed. "So Kentucky basketball fans now can quit worrying about the possibility of any immediate punitive action of the NCAA," Ashford wrote.
Bernie and I concluded, however, that terminating Kentucky's NCAA membership was not necessary. Our enforcement committee cobbled together a custom-made boycott, based on a constitutional provision that members had agreed to play games only with colleges that abide by NCAA rules.
Bowing to the Truth
We planned to enforce our 1952 death penalty by asking NCAA members to cancel games with Kentucky. That proved unnecessary because of developments that today I remember as courageous acts seldom repeated by later generations of university officials. It happened in a drab meeting room in Chicago's Sherman Hotel, where the NCAA Membership Committee, then the organization's judicial body, met to decide the Kentucky case. The unexpected happened.
Kentucky's representatives, A D. (Ab) Kirwan and Leo Chamberlain, did not cover up. They didn't need high-powered attorneys to speak for them. Unlike SMU officials three decades years later, they didn't attack the "system" or the NCAA. They stood before the committee and the NCAA Council telling the truth as they knew it.
Ab Kirwan later became my good friend and an outstanding chairman of the NCAA Infractions Committee. He served the University of Kentucky at various times as a history professor, head football coach, and acting president. To me he represented the best attitudes of chivalry and intellectual pursuit.
I telephoned Ab and Leo Chamberlain in their hotel room to tell them first of our admiration for their openness and integrity, then of the committee's verdict: cancellation of all intercollegiate basketball at Kentucky for an entire year.
Ab later told me how he and Chamberlain packed their suitcases in stunned silence and entered a taxi for the ride to the train station. Shocked and struggling to recover his humor, Chamberlain turned to his companion and said: "If we hadn't been so forthright and made such a good impression, Ab, I wonder what the penalty would have been?"
Despite the openness of the Kentucky representatives, we girded ourselves for battle over the shaky death penalty we had carpentered together. NCAA President Willett sent letters to all member institutions urging them to cancel games with Kentucky, explaining that a resolution to make the action mandatory would be voted upon at the January 1953 convention. We expected a fight there.
Meanwhile, Ab and Leo Chamberlain had talked it over on their train ride from Chicago. There was no question the violations had been real. The penalty did seem unduly harsh, but they would recommend that the university accept it. Because of them, the University of Kentucky bowed to the truth.
Had they fought us on the technical, legal grounds so many university-hired lawyers used in later years, Kentucky probably would have carried the day at the convention in January 1953. Instead, their decision to accept the penalty erased the haunting failure of the Sanity Code. It gave a new and needed legitimacy to the NCAA's fledgling effort to police big-time college sports.
Certainly, it did not spell an end to college sports crime-nor an end to it at the University of Kentucky. It did show that people of good will could at least begin the work of keeping the system clean. Central to that victory was the direct line of campus responsibility that the early NCAA made possible.
The NCAA had survived as a vehicle for national order, resolving doubts about whether the colleges themselves were capable of policing intercollegiate athletics. But that first Kentucky case and others like it led certain coaches to demand that we find a permanent way to end all this buying of players -"all this cheating."
To cure the problem, prominent coaches of that day had in mind the full-ride grant-in-aid, John Hannah's "athletic scholarship," magnified and made legal for all NCAA institutions. The recruiting wars and operating costs were about to escalate.
Recently, I was able to locate some of the newspaper articles from that time period, in particular some of the columns by Lexington Herald sports editor Ed Ashford.
What I found was that at the time the SEC voted, it was done mainly to get the NCAA of its own back, as it was widely acknowledged that the other SEC schools were just as bad, if not worse, when it came to recruiting practices etc. The general consensus was they were doing UK a favor, in that the vote allowed UK to schedule other teams which would be of greater national stature than their SEC games would have been. For the SEC, it allowed them to say they actually punished UK, and had the additional benefit that one of them would for the first time be able to compete in the NCAA tournament (up until that time no other SEC school other than UK had done so.)
The thought at the time was that UK would be able to schedule who it wanted to fill out its schedule. It was known that the NCAA might have it's own penalties, but it was thought that the NCAA's opportunity to do so had come and gone (as outlined by some Ashford columns that fall, which I may include later when I get a chance.)
Anyway, when the NCAA did decide to prevent UK from playing a schedule that year, it was somewhat surprising, and fairly late in the game.
Below is an excerpt from a book by NCAA executive director Walter Byers (Unsportsmanlike Conduct, University of Michigan Press, 1995) which has some interesting comments in it.
First of all, I didn't realize how strong of an influence SEC Commissioner Bernie Moore had on the NCAA's decision to go forward with extending the Kentucky ban. Byer's terms Moore's decision as 'courageous'. I have to question whether Moore, who was a former LSU coach, actually benefitted from the ban. Remember, at that time LSU was UK's stiffest conference competition with Joe Dean and Bob Pettit on the roster.
LSU did end up representing the SEC in 1953 (the year UK was not allowed to play) for their first NCAA appearance. The following year, LSU and UK were tied with perfect records and UK ended up winning the tie-breaking neutral court game. (LSU refused to play at Kentucky in 1954, saying that they deserved the home game. [LSU had played at Lexington in 1952 and UK was originally slated to play at Baton Rouge for 1953, before LSU voted to suspend UK's schedule.]) Of course, after UK won the play-in game, their top players were ruled ineligible for post-season competition and LSU returned to the NCAA once again (where they promptly lost to Penn State).
The second interesting tidbit was the admission by Byers that the NCAA's stance was on shaky ground, and they expected that if Kentucky had fought it, UK would have been able to overturn the ban. But, to UK's credit, they complied with the decision.
One area I wish Byers had gone into more detail with is why did the NCAA choose to go after Kentucky, when there were numerous other schools that had been caught up in the scandal. My assumption is that these other schools (CCNY, LIU, NYU etc.) had already begun deemphasizing their programs in response to the scandal, while Kentucky chose not to.
I think that there's validity to the idea, mentioned by many including UK alumn and Atlanta sportswriter Ed Danforth, that Kentucky would have been spared if Adolph Rupp had chosen to step down. (which thinking about it may have been what Moore's ultimate goal really was) I have to think that this was the price UK paid to retain their coach.
Anyway, here is the excerpt from the book. (pages 56-61)
Jon
------------------------------
On the night of October 20, 1951, the University of Kentucky's great Alex Groza and teammate Ralph Beard were picked up in Chicago by representatives of the New York district attorney's office.
They had been the heroes of the Kentucky basketball team that had won two NCAA championships and an Olympic gold medal. Almost simultaneously, Dale Barnstable was taken into custody at his home in Louisville. All were wanted for questioning in connection with point-fixing scandals.
Judge Saul S. Streit of the General Sessions Court, County of New York, heard the allegations of outright law breaking. His interrogation of the players and Coach Adolph Rupp went far beyond gambling. He probed into the financial arrangements in Lexington for the Kentucky basketball team. When it was all over, the scorecard read:
Five key basketball players were convicted of fixing points on basketball games over a three-year period; three were sentenced by Judge Streit.
Adolph Rupp was condemned by Judge Streit for "consorting with bookmaker Ed Kurd." One player testified that before a game in Cincinnati, Rupp came into the hotel and told the team, "I just called Kurd to get the points. Now these guys will be tough tonight so 1 want you to pour it on." Judge Streit blasted the school's athletics policy as "the acme of commercialism and overemphasis."
The Southeastern Conference and the NCAA later found that players had received illegal cash payments, some of which were made with the knowledge of Coach Rupp.
In another development, Coach Rupp of Kentucky had been fighting Indiana University over the Hoosiers' attempted recruitment of the top Kentucky high school basketball star, Cliff Hagan. Kentucky and Indiana were bitter rivals. Indiana had won the NCAA title in 1940 (second year of the tournament) and Kentucky won its first one eight years later. Rupp sanctimoniously charged Indiana Coach Branch McCracken with improper inducements and told McCracken to leave Hagan alone. McCracken replied: "I don't run away from good players like Hagan."
The highly prized recruit nevertheless chose Kentucky and became a minor part of Case no. 1, the maiden effort of the newly created NCAA Subcommittee on Infractions. I filed Case Report no. 1 September 20-21,1952.
Ten players were named as having received illegal outside aid. The report also indicated Hagan "probably was ineligible in 1951-52" because of a $125 gift certificate he had received, but no specific finding was made regarding him. He was not involved in the gambling.
With the report fmished, I felt heartbroken over the Kentucky scandal. As a good high school athlete and a mediocre college athlete, then as a sports reporter on my college newspaper and later for United Press in Chicago and New York, I loved college sports. I could scarcely believe that members of this great basketball team-still regarded as one of the most skilled of all time-had shaved points and played into the hands of gamblers. In that era, I do not believe there was the hardened expectation and cynical acceptance of misbehavior that permeates today's society.
I still see the 1950s and 1960s as a romantic era-at least in the minds of a public that was deeply shocked when coaches and young heroes it admired went wrong. Those ideals lived also in the minds of faculty and athletics officials who wanted to keep college sports the kind of campus and student activity they nostalgically remembered from their own younger days.
What was I to do about all of this? Luckily, Bernie H. Moore, the Southeastern Conference commissioner, was my great friend and strong supporter. He had served on the committee that hired me. We talked over the Kentucky case regularly as it developed.
At this time Bernie was playing a major role in NCAA policy. He had been head football and track coach at Louisiana State during the Huey Long years. He had dealt with the Kingfish not just in the governor's mansion but with Governor Long sitting beside him on the team bench at Tiger Stadium in Baton Rouge on Saturday afternoons. Bernie was not one to be surprised by unexplainable quirks of human nature or political manipulation.
Neither of us were disturbed by the agonized editorials we read in the Lexington Herald, which condemned the SEC and NCAA investigations by recalling a biblical statement of Jesus. "The stone has been cast," the writer lamented, "and Kentucky was the target. Now it becomes the obligation of those who cast it to prove that they are without sin. "
I've heard that justification many times during the ensuing years of NCAA enforcement. Another persistent excuse is that a successful team, charged with violations, was turned in by its humiliated opponents to be stopped by unjust penalties. "If you can't beat 'em, suspend 'em," wrote sports columnist Ed Ashford of the Herald. "That evidently is the theory of the Southeastern Conference. "
Nonetheless, Bernie took a courageous stand against Kentucky's violations by suspending the team from conference basketball for one year. That didn't close them out, however, because they could build a full schedule with teams outside the conference. I was chairman of the NCAA Subcommittee on Infractions, which was willing to back Bernie's stand. But how? There had never been a vote by the NCAA Convention to impose a complete one-year boycott. Ashford sensed our weakness. In his column he crowed that we couldn't terminate Kentucky's NCAA membership for at least two years because the notice date required by the NCAA constitution had passed. "So Kentucky basketball fans now can quit worrying about the possibility of any immediate punitive action of the NCAA," Ashford wrote.
Bernie and I concluded, however, that terminating Kentucky's NCAA membership was not necessary. Our enforcement committee cobbled together a custom-made boycott, based on a constitutional provision that members had agreed to play games only with colleges that abide by NCAA rules.
Bowing to the Truth
We planned to enforce our 1952 death penalty by asking NCAA members to cancel games with Kentucky. That proved unnecessary because of developments that today I remember as courageous acts seldom repeated by later generations of university officials. It happened in a drab meeting room in Chicago's Sherman Hotel, where the NCAA Membership Committee, then the organization's judicial body, met to decide the Kentucky case. The unexpected happened.
Kentucky's representatives, A D. (Ab) Kirwan and Leo Chamberlain, did not cover up. They didn't need high-powered attorneys to speak for them. Unlike SMU officials three decades years later, they didn't attack the "system" or the NCAA. They stood before the committee and the NCAA Council telling the truth as they knew it.
Ab Kirwan later became my good friend and an outstanding chairman of the NCAA Infractions Committee. He served the University of Kentucky at various times as a history professor, head football coach, and acting president. To me he represented the best attitudes of chivalry and intellectual pursuit.
I telephoned Ab and Leo Chamberlain in their hotel room to tell them first of our admiration for their openness and integrity, then of the committee's verdict: cancellation of all intercollegiate basketball at Kentucky for an entire year.
Ab later told me how he and Chamberlain packed their suitcases in stunned silence and entered a taxi for the ride to the train station. Shocked and struggling to recover his humor, Chamberlain turned to his companion and said: "If we hadn't been so forthright and made such a good impression, Ab, I wonder what the penalty would have been?"
Despite the openness of the Kentucky representatives, we girded ourselves for battle over the shaky death penalty we had carpentered together. NCAA President Willett sent letters to all member institutions urging them to cancel games with Kentucky, explaining that a resolution to make the action mandatory would be voted upon at the January 1953 convention. We expected a fight there.
Meanwhile, Ab and Leo Chamberlain had talked it over on their train ride from Chicago. There was no question the violations had been real. The penalty did seem unduly harsh, but they would recommend that the university accept it. Because of them, the University of Kentucky bowed to the truth.
Had they fought us on the technical, legal grounds so many university-hired lawyers used in later years, Kentucky probably would have carried the day at the convention in January 1953. Instead, their decision to accept the penalty erased the haunting failure of the Sanity Code. It gave a new and needed legitimacy to the NCAA's fledgling effort to police big-time college sports.
Certainly, it did not spell an end to college sports crime-nor an end to it at the University of Kentucky. It did show that people of good will could at least begin the work of keeping the system clean. Central to that victory was the direct line of campus responsibility that the early NCAA made possible.
The NCAA had survived as a vehicle for national order, resolving doubts about whether the colleges themselves were capable of policing intercollegiate athletics. But that first Kentucky case and others like it led certain coaches to demand that we find a permanent way to end all this buying of players -"all this cheating."
To cure the problem, prominent coaches of that day had in mind the full-ride grant-in-aid, John Hannah's "athletic scholarship," magnified and made legal for all NCAA institutions. The recruiting wars and operating costs were about to escalate.