Sports & Activities	UPDATED: Tuesday, March 14, 2006
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Glory and Disgrace

Posted on Wednesday, March 01, 2006

One of College Basketball’s Greatest Feats Remains Tarnished by Scandal

By Richard Daub
THE ERICKSON TRIBUNE

They trounced perennial college basketball powerhouse Kentucky 89-50 in one of the most humiliating defeats in Wildcat history and their worst ever under legendary coach Adolph Rupp. They also defeated teams ranked #12, #6, #5, #3, #2, and #1 that same postseason to become the only team in college basketball history to win both the National Invitation Tournament (NIT) and NCAA championships in the same year.

Who was this amazing team? Was it UCLA? Indiana? North Carolina? Duke?

Try the CCNY Beavers.

Say what?

The unranked 1949-1950 City College of New York team had one of the most storied seasons in college basketball history. Led by coach Nat Holman, nicknamed “Mr. Basketball” for being one of the first pro stars in the history of the game and one of its true innovators, the Beavers had an unremarkable 17-5 regular season—just good enough to earn a berth in the NIT, which at the time was considered the premier postseason tournament.

The starting five of Floyd Layne, Al “Fats” Roth, Ed Roman, Ed Warner, and Irwin Dambrot captured the heart of the CCNY faithful, who supported their Beavers by chanting “allagaroo-garoo-garah, allagaroo-garoo-garah, ee-yah, ee-yah, sis-boom-bah”—which Sporting News writer Joe Gergen explains as, according to school legend, “either a cross between an alligator and a kangaroo or a corruption of the French phrase ‘aalez gurre’ (on to the war).”

They opened the NIT by defeating the 1949 champs San Francisco before encountering Adolph Rupp’s #3 ranked Kentucky squad, who had won the 1948 and 1949 NCAA tournaments and at the time was considered one of the greatest college teams ever assembled.

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The Kentucky game wasn’t even close. CCNY opened a 45-20 lead by halftime and never looked back. They then went on to defeat #6 Duquesne and top-ranked Bradley in the championship game in front of 18,000 allagaroo-ing fans at Madison Square Garden. Ten days later, the Beavers defeated Bradley again at the Garden to take the NCAA tournament and a piece of college basketball history that still belongs exclusively to them.

The following year, however, things went horribly wrong. Seven CCNY players and 23 more from six other schools were arrested and charged with accepting money to fix games between 1947 and 1950. The investigation concluded that three of the five games CCNY lost during the regular season were fixed, and that points were shaved in others. All seven CCNY players were found guilty, as were players from most of the other six schools, including Kentucky, whose basketball program was suspended for the entire 1952-1953 season.

The scandal nearly destroyed college basketball. ESPN.com ranks it second only to the 1919 Chicago Black Sox on their list of all-time “Worst Sports Scandals,” and in 1998 HBO produced an award-winning documentary about it titled City Dump: The Story of the 1951 CCNY Basketball Scandal.

Although the corruption went well beyond CCNY, no basketball program out of those involved fell further or faster than the Beavers. They were banned from playing at Madison Square Garden and never again returned to college basketball prominence.

Today CCNY competes for the Dutch Shoe Trophy in the NCAA Division III City University of New York Athletic Conference (CUNYAC). The haunting sound of “allagaroo-garoo-garah” echoing through the rafters of old Madison Square Garden has been replaced by pep-rally cheers bouncing off the walls of Nat Holman Gymnasium in Harlem, capacity 2,700. While the postseason CUNYAC tournament may not hold the prestige of the NCAAs or NIT, that likely doesn’t matter to the current Beavers, who most recently won titles in 2001 and 2003.

In the end it probably didn’t matter much to Nat Holman either what title his players were competing for, as long as they respected the game that meant so much to him. He had been devastated by the scandal, but he continued to coach the Beavers until 1960—well beyond the school’s de-emphasizing of the basketball program in 1953. Away from the spotlight that attracted the gamblers and felons, he was able to continue teaching his beloved game without those around him threatening to destroy it.

It was much quieter in Harlem, but at least up there it was about the game and not much more. It still is today, which may be Mr. Basketball’s greatest accomplishment.