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The chapter discusses the Italian American presence in a popular, widely televised sport—NCAA college basketball—noting that that (differently from baseball and boxing) has been much more conspicuous among coaches than players. Italian American basketball coaches of the 1980s and later appear as the most credible interpreters and mediators of an inherently black culture—the best basketball playing—for the wider interracial markets of fans. What black and white spectators alike really “buy” with Italian basketball coaching is authenticity, an heritage of racially and class-inflected identities, and the entire universe of memory and cultural references that has been built in consumer culture around the urban experience of Italian Americans. As an economic and cultural phenomenon, NCAA owes overwhelmingly to the labor and artistry of African American athletes. Yet, as big-time college basketball has become blacker, it also has become more Italian, even as Italian Americans have been among the white ethnic groups whose on-court athletic presence has radically diminished.

This chapter shifts the focus from the players to the coaches. After the basketball scandal broke in January of 1951, colleges, with the aid of many writers, were quick to label the players' misdeeds “criminal” and to attribute them to players' lack of moral values and flawed characters. Yet the blame for the pervasive corruption in college athletics did not rest on the shoulders of the athletes alone. The chapter argues that the college coaches, administrations, and other such authorities were also in part responsible for the gambling issue, although unlike the players, they were largely able to escape the taint of scandal. Thus, this chapter argues that how basketball coaches made their choice to ignore game fixing reveals the essential role their passive complicity played in the size and shape of the scandals.

The introduction begins with a thumbnail sketch of some of the schools that played in the 1958 NCAA College Division Basketball Championship and the varying identities with the NCAA that each represented. The 1958 tournament included liberal arts colleges, regional and small state schools, and historically black colleges, each of which pursued athletics differently from, and often in opposition to, the big-time commercialized model that gained the majority of media and public attention. These varying groups and their agendas ultimately created conflict within the NCAA and all of college athletics over the function of college sports within American higher education and American culture. The chapter examines the historiography of early college sports and reform efforts, showing the primacy that college football plays in existing scholarly interpretations while also noting the fairly limited examinations and scholarly depth of early college basketball. Both strains of scholarship tend to imply a certain inevitability of the varied roles of college football and college basketball, an inevitability rejected by Before March Madness.

This chapter discusses point shaving in college basketball and the violations of academic standards by football coaches at the College of William and Mary. These were sources of immense concern to presidents of the members of the Southern Conference. Soon after the William and Mary scandal became public knowledge, they held a meeting to consider actions to maintain a healthy balance between academic and athletic goals. The presidents agreed on several measures that they hoped would prevent overemphasis on sports, the most visible and controversial of which was to prohibit participation by Southern Conference football teams in bowl games. This recommendation, which was later formally adopted as conference policy, aroused the opposition of a few members. Led by the University of Maryland's Harry C. “Curley” Byrd, the dissenters began to weigh the possibility of abandoning the Southern Conference and establishing a new league.

This chapter looks at the increased popularity of college basketball after World War II. At the tail end of the conflict “big men” had come to dominate a game already revolutionized by changes in rules and equipment and a faster, higher-scoring style of play, greatly increasing the spectator appeal of the sport. Many gamblers who favored the horses before the war switched to college basketball and football in the early 1940s. But the switch was not always easy, though the future of college basketball nevertheless looked bright after the war, despite frequent and disturbing reports that players had been offered bribes to fix games. By then many basketball players and gamblers remained cozy bedfellows, and fixing had become such a time-honored tradition that even students were aware that some players rigged games with gamblers.

This chapter traces how basketball grew in popularity since its invention in 1891, and how this popularity eventually made college basketball an ideal hotbed for gambling operations. As basketball's popularity increased, colleges began to view the sport as a source of income. Large gymnasiums and field houses appeared on campuses, and with more spectators and more money, more gambling appeared. The chapter looks at how a combination of factors—including the addition of new rules in college basketball, a decline in the American economy, the introduction of new technology in the form of radio broadcasts, among others—came together to facilitate gambling in college basketball games.

This chapter recounts the 1961 basketball scandal, arguing that Jack Molinas was not the only one to blame for the scandal. It remarks on the similarities between both scandals, arguing that the scandal would have occurred without Molinas' involvement. Corruption had become more rather than less pervasive after the 1951 scandal, as many major colleges continued with their self-imposed mandate to provide professionalized entertainment for the American public. As in the 1951 scandal, coaches and college authorities ran professionalized sports operations, recruiting players not qualified to be students, paying them to play, and ignoring obvious signs of rigging, all to win championships and national rankings and in the process earn money for themselves, their institutions, and their boosters. In this environment of hypocrisy and corruption and widespread popularity of gambling and organized crime, the chapter thus argues that a scandal was inevitable.

This chapter discusses the 1951 college basketball gambling scandal, arguing that, contrary to popular belief, the largest gambling scandal in the history of sports up to 1951 was not an isolated incident, but a product of a disease that had been growing unchecked since the early 1900s. In the 1951 college basketball scandal, a total of thirty-five active and ex-players were accused of accepting $50,000 to fix eighty-six games. Sixteen players reported that they had spurned bribe offers totaling $22,900. Twenty-one gamblers and go-betweens were also implicated. Yet, as the chapter shows, at the close of the 1940s, corruption in college basketball games was so rampant that it had become the norm.

This chapter discusses the racial integration of college sports starting in the 1950s. The racial integration of teams, accelerating in the North and beginning in the South, altered the quality of games as well as the composition of rosters. By the 1970s, football and track squads contained two dozen or more black athletes, and on some basketball teams blacks constituted a majority. To a considerable extent, the opening up of these rosters spelled the decline—or at least inability to compete at the highest levels—of historically black college teams. Meanwhile, coaches, though they lost some of the battles against assertive black athletes, and though their sensitivities on race matters were raised, most often emerged with their authority not only intact but enhanced by control of scholarships and by increasingly independent athletic departments. The college athletic enterprise was opening a new playbook in which money and media would be involved as never before.

This chapter covers the 1978–79 Boston College basketball scandal, which involved a case of game fixing that notably implicated not only three Boston College players, but members of an organized crime syndicate as well. The Boston College scandal illustrated that even after decades of investigations and prosecutions, gamblers and fixers could still use vulnerable college athletes to manipulate the outcome of games. These players were willing to expose themselves to danger and to compromise their futures for relatively small sums of money. The NCAA's failure to investigate gambling in the late 1970s reinforces the view of critics who argue that the organization's primary goal has been to convince the public that college sports are uncorrupted by professionalization and commercialization.