Catching the Fix

In Manhattan's Sunday Journal-American last week, Sports Editor Max Kase broke an exclusive story: "Another basketball scandal [is] on the verge of being blown wide open." Kase added that eight to ten men were being questioned, at least four of them "players from two outstanding Greater New York City teams." A few hours later, District Attorney Frank Hogan confirmed Kase's beat: he announced the arrest of players of the College of the City of New York and, later, of Long Island University (see SPORT).

Kase knew what he was talking about; he was the man who told the D.A. about it in the first place. Kase, 53, a veteran newsman, and sports editor of the Journal for 13 years, had suspected for a long time that Madison Square Garden basketball games were fixed to come out right for the gamblers. A few months ago, he began dropping in casually on gambling joints and sports hangouts, asking discreet questions and listening. With a few facts to justify his suspicions, Kase also turned his reporters loose on the job of trying to discover the "fix guy" who was arranging to bribe the players. One night a "source" gave Kase a name. After fitting his facts together, Kase took them to the district attorney one week before the first story of a fix involving Manhattan College players broke (TIME, Jan. 29). The D.A.'s men spent a month following up Kase's lead before they got the evidence to break the second, much bigger, bribery story.

Open Mouths. The scandal caught many of the nation's top sports editors open-mouthed in cheers for the wrong people. The authoritative Sporting News of St. Louis was off the presses and in the mail with a story naming L.I.U.'s pantherlike Sherman White, one of the bribetakers, as its "player of the year." Look hastily scratched White's name from its All-America team, chosen by the votes of 430 sportswriters. Collier's rubbed White's name from its own All-America squad in a story already in type.

Newspapers did some scratching of their own. New York Post Editor James Wechsler blamed the trouble on Madison Square Garden's profitmaking atmosphere, urged colleges to "take the game back to the campus." He also ordered the Post's sports section to stop running selections and probable winning points on the Garden games, i.e., the betting odds, which New York newspapers got from the bookmakers. Snapped the Post sports editor in the same issue: "I do not believe that the publication of such information in any way contributes to 'dumps' and fixes. Nothing could be more ridiculous . . .

[But] the editors of the Post . . . don't share this view . . . ; thus these sports pages will not carry points and selections." The World-Telegram and Sun also dropped points and selections, and sports editors as far from the crime as the Kansas City Star and the Nashville Tennessean announced they would give only local basketball scores over the telephone, lest gamblers be aided. The Milwaukee Journal stopped giving any at all.

No Blame. Most of the editorial writers, who sought to fix the blame for the scandal, vibrated noisily in their own keys. The good grey Times (which has never printed tables of basketball's betting figures) thought "the home, the neighborhood, the campus, the college" at fault for fostering "a crooked, distorted sense of values." The Chicago Tribune blamed it all on the New Deal. Manhattan's Daily Worker tied it in with "profiteering chairmen of Wall Street corporations, with bankers, big-shot politicians grabbing the war contracts."

Max Kase gave his own judgment in his "Briefkase" column: "A first blush of sympathy for the corrupted weaklings has given way to cold rage because of their lack of loyalty to school and a calloused greed for their Judas pieces of silver."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.