One-Man Show

After the 1951 basketball-fix scandals were exposed--with Madison Square Garden as the center of the infection--some sportwriters glumly announced that the big-time game was dead for a long time to come. The report was, as it turned out, greatly exaggerated. Last week a packed house of 18,496 rooters, biggest basketball crowd ever at the Garden, turned up for the final of the National Invitation tournament. Before the final, the fans impatiently sat through a consolation game between Duquesne and Manhattan. By coincidence, though his team lost, the individual star of the consolation game (27 points) was Manhattan's Negro Center Junius Kellogg, the player who first broke the scandal wide open by refusing a bribe and reporting the offer to his coach (TIME, Jan. 29, 1951).

What the fans had really come to see was top-seeded Seton Hall's fabulous Walter Dukes, the skyscraper (6 ft. 11 in.) Negro center who paced his team to a major-college record of 27 straight victories. Arrayed against Dukes & Co. was the sentimental underdog, St. John's of Brooklyn, unseeded but not unsung after scoring three straight upsets over St. Louis, La Salle and Duquesne to reach the final round.

In the final against Seton Hall, St. John's just ran out of zing. Dukes, galloping up & down the court, dropping in hooks with either hand, passing off to teammates on scoring plays and gathering rebounds off both backboards, put on a one-man show. He scored 21 points (high for the game), and won the tournament's most-valuable-player trophy, as Seton Hall won handily, 58-46. The big man on everybody's All-America team, Dukes reportedly has his choice of signing with the professional National Basketball Association for $10,000 or the famed Harlem Globetrotters for $15,000. Dukes, who once spoke with disdain of pro basketball and talked of becoming a lawyer, now coyly parries all questions about his future with the professional entertainer's standard comment: "See my agent."

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