Marvin Kalb: The Year I Was Peter the Great: 1956 - Khrushchev, Stalin's Ghost, and a Young American in Russia

I was so excited I had trouble coming up with a lead for my story. Many flashed through my mind until, finally, one seemed right: “Murder Took Place Last Night before 18,000 Witnesses at Madison Square Garden.” It was not the one that ultimately worked its way through the editing process, but it captured the spirit of the game. Under a banner headline, “ ‘Five’ Plows under Kentucky, 89–50,” my edited story began: “The anticipated battle between two of the greatest basketball strategists in the country took place last night at the Garden. Nat Holman won, and his sensational Beavers murdered 2nd seeded Kentucky by the incredible score of 89–50 in full view of 18,000 astonished fans.”

“We were sky-high for Kentucky,” said a grinning Layne. “We were above the rim all night.”

Holman, searching for a special way of saying thanks, took the entire team to Broadway, where they saw the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific . Rupp led his moping marauders back to Kentucky, where the state legislature ordered the flag to be flown at half-mast.

On Saturday night, for the NIT championship game, it was City College vs. Bradley, considered by many sportswriters to be the best college basketball team in the country. Students stood on their seats, convinced that City would win, somehow, even though the bookies were betting heavily on Bradley. What did the bookies know? God was smiling down on the Beavers, and City College beat Bradley and then went on to beat Bradley again in the upcoming NCAA tournament. The next morning, the Times led its story with “Hats off to a real champion.” Forward Irwin Dambrot was quoted as saying, “The team went crazy, the school went crazy and New York City went crazy. It was an unbelievable experience.” The Beavers proved that Jews trying to make it in America, and blacks trying to make it in America, could make it in America—that we were as worthy as anyone else, even Rupp’s favored Wildcats.

Immigrant parents might not have appreciated the full scope of City’s basketball accomplishment until they watched the Ed Sullivan Show on CBS, their weekly exposure to American culture. When they saw, first, that Coach Nat Holman had been invited on the program, second, that the ovation for him from the studio audience was so loud Sullivan had to repeat his introduction of him three times, and, third, that Holman was there to discuss City’s basketball triumph with Ed Sullivan, no less, then they understood that something truly momentous had happened at their children’s college. From one end of the country to the other, City College was now recognized as the college of national champions. Even kids in San Francisco were chanting the college’s famous “allagaroo” cheer.

For the next ten months or so, City College students lived in two worlds: one of sugared memories of basketball championships, and the other of grim news from Korea, an almost daily reminder that Lippmann’s warning of a Cold War was real, that a new and dangerous chapter in global relations was unfolding before their eyes. China, torn by civil war, was now in communist hands, and the Soviet Union had broken the American monopoly in nuclear weapons. At home, Republican senator Joseph McCarthy railed against the State Department, Hollywood, and the northeastern intellectual elite. McCarthyism, for a few years, intimidated our national political discourse—perhaps everywhere except in the City College cafeteria, where all shades of communism, fascism, socialism, and democracy were debated with youthful vigor. We were hardly indifferent to the challenges of the Cold War, but we tried, when the draft did not intrude, to tend to our own gardens—to graduate school, to marriage, to careers.

And so, when, in the early-morning hours of February 18, 1951, WQXR, the classical music station in New York, broadcast the news that three City College basketball players had been arrested, I did not believe it. “No,” I groaned, “there must be some mistake.” I was then in my senior year, no longer sports editor, concentrating instead on Russian language, literature, and history. But my life still rotated around the Campus , and I felt I had to get there. My brother Bernie gave me a lift to the college. As we sped up the West Side Highway, he asked me questions about “point spreads” and “shaving points”: What was that all about? My answers were skimpy on detail. I realized that I should have explored this corner of college basketball when I was still covering the team, but it had never occurred to me. I was certain that our team would never have had anything to do with point spreads or Mafia mobsters. Maybe other teams, but not City College.

At the time, reporters had not yet been infected by the skepticism of later years, the distrust of government and large corporations. The Vietnam War was far over the horizon, Watergate a political nightmare yet to happen. We still lived in a post–World War II optimism about ourselves and our country. We felt that our government protected us, and our team played for the glory of the game. We were still innocents at home and abroad.

I found the Campus newsroom strangely quiet, as if everyone were attending a requiem for a lost dream. Reporters knew they had to cover the story, but they seemed frightened by what they might find out. After a while I started making a few calls and learned that the New York district attorney, Frank Hogan, had sent two detectives to Philadelphia for the CCNY–Temple game the night before. They were Abraham Belsky and George Jaeger. After the game, which City won easily, the detectives joined Holman and his players on the train ride back to New York. Quietly, they informed Holman that they intended to arrest three of his players as soon as they entered New York’s jurisdiction. Holman was stunned but offered no objections. “I have no sympathy for them if they are guilty,” he said.

When the train passed through Newark and entered the tunnel to Penn Station, the detectives also told the three players that they were going to be booked on a charge of illegal point-spread manipulation in three Garden games, against Missouri, Arizona, and Boston College. The players had been cooperating with a once-jailed mobster named Salvatore Sollazzo and a former Long Island University basketball player named Eddie Gard. The players, in a state of shock, said nothing.

Moments after their arrival in New York, standing together on a damp, dreary platform, a devastated Holman told his players that if they had nothing to do with the gambling charges, he would support them “fully, to the best of my ability,” but if they did have something to do with gambling, then he would let “the chips fall where they may.” As the detectives hustled the players toward a police van for the short ride to the Elizabeth Street Station in downtown Manhattan, Holman walked off by himself, his coat collar pulled high around his neck, his head filled no doubt with denials and questions.

He walked into the misty darkness at the end of the railroad platform. It seemed like a scene from Anna Karenina .

The players were questioned by police detectives for several hours and then whisked to the Criminal Courts Building on Center Street. They looked frightened, their heads down, their hands in their pockets, as they were hustled from one place to another. News reporters and photographers snapped pictures of these “fallen idols,” the title of a column I wrote that night for Monday’s edition of the Campus . (I would occasionally contribute a column to the paper, even though I was no longer spending a lot of time there.) I was deeply disappointed in the players. The arrests were a heartbreaking introduction to the complex frailties of human nature, one I was never to forget.