A-Tisket, A-Tasket
By D. W. BROGAN SIXTY-ODD years ago a zealous Y.M.C.A. instructor in Springfield, Mass., was perplexed by the problem of what to get his lads to do in the long New England winter. Outdoor games were impossible, and Satan, even in New England, even in the Y.M.C.A., was up to his usual tricks with idle hands and legs. So James Naismith invented basketball, an invention, at the moment, as economically. important in the United States as the Naismith steam-hammer ever was.
It was quite a while before basketball became a serious sport. To compare it to football (American style) or baseball, even to such effete British diversions as Association, Rugby or cricket, would have seemed absurd. It was the kind of game that you would expect to be played in a Y.M.C.A., and it was a game played in more and more girls' high schools. Even thirty years ago the idea that basketball would become a major sport, still more that it would in many places replace football as the college sport, was too absurd to be considered. As Dr. Johnson was falsely reported to have said : " Sir, in order to be facetious, it is not necessary to be indecent."
But that time has come. Basketball is now " big time," and, in the past few weeks, news of it has been crowding Stalin and Korea off the front pages of the New York papers as police and detectives wait at inter-collegiate games to pick up the star players and remove them to the hoosegow or, at any rate,,for rigorous questioning by District Attorney Hogan, who is getting more publicity out of the basketball scandals than Mr. Thomas Murphy got out of convicting Alger Hiss.
FOr it must be admitted that, for a game invented in the Y.M.C.A., basketball has gone far. Its basic advantage, that it could be played indoors in the winter, it still possesses, and that advantage is appreciated even more in the Middle West than in New England. So for twenty years past, in Indiana, for example, it has been more popular than college football, and in a university like Purdue it is the basketball coach who takes precedence, and it is for basketball talent that loyal alumni scout. For, once the game became popular, the gate became important. Great field-houses were built, and the money rolled tn. This, in turn, meant that tall young men with good eyesight Were at a premium. Had Charles de Gault grown up in the Middle West in the past twenty years, it .4 probable that he could have had his pick of colleges only too anxious to help him to get an education. And, if there was money in it for the colleges, there was money in it for the professionals. So professional basketball teams began to appear, and to recruit from the college stars, who, as a result of proficiency in this field, could not only get a college education free (at least), but often Were given chances to earn a pod many thousand dollars a year as professionals.
The game came east again, and was peculiarly suited to the needs of the colleges in and around New York: These institu- tions could not afford to have first-class football teams. Only Columbia, very rich and very respected, could really hope to compete in prestige or gates with Harvard, Yale, Cornell, Prince- ton, Pennsylvania. But City College, Manhattan College, Long Island University could do very well with basketball. For was there not, in Madison Square Garden, an ideal road-house, whose overhead was borne by its owners, but which could be hired for games between the amateur teams of the local colleges? And where else could you get such ready fan support from spectators able to pay an entrance-fee, if not to show any recent connection with the higher learning? After all. Madison Square Garden is neither a garden nor at Madison Square • so what about another fiction or two? " The Garden " had no objection, and basketball soon drew bigger gates than anything but a first-class boxing match.
This phenomenon attracted the attention of another group of forward-looking Americans, the turf commissioners, anglice bookies. These gentlemen pursue an illegal career, but normally are little troubled by that fact.- You can't have horse-races all the year round, not in the north at any rate. So basketball was pennies from heaven. For it could be played at the deadest part of the racing season, and amateur basketball appealed to many who might have shied off from betting on professional basketball. There was one last and final advantage. In basketball, from the better's point of view, it is not merely a matter of backing a winner or a loser. What matters is by how many points does the winner win. The advantage of this is obvious. It is one thing to ask a young man to play less than his best and get , his college defeated. He might well be insulted by this implica- tion of disloyalty to an alma mater which he had probably chosen , out of half-a-dozen institutions anxious to educate him in return for services on the terrain. But not to win by too much! Pshaw, what does that matter? The win's the thing (except for the bookies and backers).
All went well until a fixer approached a promising young player who, in his astonishment and naive indignation, reported the attempted bribe. The player who tipped off the authorities is a negro, possibly not yet adjusted to all the realities of American academic life. Investigation began, and it is a dull , Saturday that does not see more arrests, confessions and turning- , over of some of the ill-gotten goods. The public reactions have been interesting. Attendance at Madison Square Garden has fallen off very badly. College authorities have cancelled further games (in one case with remarkable slowness). The student bodies have rallied in the main to the cause of the arrested players. (" After all, they didn't try to lose games ; merely helped to give a lot of suckers an uneven break.") There has been a good deal of higher moralising, and some persons have asked what light does all this cast on the meaning of college education. Do the colleges exist for games (and the bookies) or for some higher or different purpose? If they do, what is it? The character-building side of games is not, at the moment, being stressed. Is there a solution?
Well, one was suggested twenty years ago in that neglected masterpiece of Mr. Joel Sayre, Rackety-Rax. Mr. Sayre tells of a great gang-leader who, having been dragged to a college football game, comes to the conclusion that there is money in it and founds his own college. £anarsie. There are no students ; his mobsters make up the football team ; the chorus girls from his night-clubs the " co-eds." Canarsie mows down all opposi- tion till it meets another new college, Lake Side in Chicago—only to learn, too late, that Lake Side was founded by Mr. Capone. There's the solution. Let some entrepreneur found Naismith College, solely devoted to basketball ; others will follow suit. Basketball will flourish, and some educational institutions can go back to teaching. But can they afford to? For it is the profits of the gates at the big football games, the big basketball games, that pay for the rest of the character-building activities of the colleges. The revenue from big games can ,fpn into hundreds of thousands of -pounds, and American colleges have enough financial troubles, at the moment, without hiving to find large sums for coaches, fieldhouses, &c. Yet, if they don't, the public may take their moral pretensions less seriously than is to be wished. The scandal has not shocked the country quite as much as was perhaps desirable. For many millions of Americans the final cause of the higher education is sport ; the sidelines, mathe- matics, history, &c., are only a concession to an old tradition. This attitude is not confined to America, but fortunately the revenue from the Boat Race is nil, and the partisans who back light blue pr dark do so from no vulgar passion for pelf. But the scandals have reminded older Americans of the great baseball row of thirty-odd years ago, when it was discovered that a professional baseball game had been " fixed " (in Chicago). An anguished boy demanded of one of the accused players, " Say it ain't true Al, say it ain't true." There has been no such anguished appeal from the disillusioned young today. But, of course, the students who defended their erring brethren may have been thinking that they, at any rate, had more sense than to risk money on amateur sport when there were nice, reliable, honest ways of losing it, like backing horses or playing the stock market. Good may come of all this, but a lot of Americans, like little Wilhelmine, are doubtful.
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