The City Game
Ratings2
Average rating3.8
15
Ratings2
Average rating3.8
The powerful story of a college basketball team who carried an era's brightest hopes--racial harmony, social mobility, and the triumph of the underdog--but whose success was soon followed by a shocking downfall The unlikeliest of champions, the 1949-50 City College Beavers were extraordinary by every measure. City College was a tuition-free, merit-based college in Harlem known far more for its intellectual achievements and political radicalism than its athletic prowess. Only two years after Jackie Robinson broke the Major League Baseball color barrier--and at a time when the National Basketball Association was still segregated--every single member of the Beavers was either Jewish or African American. But during that remarkable season, under the guidance of the legendary former player Nat Holman, this unheralded group of city kids would stun the basketball world by becoming the only team in history to win the NIT and NCAA tournaments in the same year. This team, though, proved to be extraordinary in another way: During the following season, all of the team's starting five were arrested by New York City detectives, charged with conspiring with gamblers to shave points. Almost overnight these beloved heroes turned into fallen idols. The story centers on two teammates and close friends, Eddie Roman and Floyd Layne, one white, one black, each caught up in the scandal, each searching for a path to personal redemption. Though banned from the NBA, Layne continued to devote himself to basketball, teaching the game to young people in his Bronx neighborhood and, ultimately, with Roman's help, finding another kind of triumph--one that no one could have anticipated. Drawing on interviews with the surviving members of that championship team, Matthew Goodman has created an indelible portrait of an era of smoke-filled arenas and Borscht Belt hotels, when college basketball was far more popular than the professional game. It was a time when gangsters controlled illegal sports betting, the police were on their payroll, and everyone, it seemed, was getting rich--except for the young men who actually played the games. Tautly paced and rich with period detail, The City Game tells a story both dramatic and poignant: of political corruption, duplicity in big-time college sports, and the deeper meaning of athletic success.
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On the surface, The City Game is just a book about a long-forgotten college basketball scandal. In practice, it's a deep insight into New York City at the turn of the 1950's and how good people can be easily corrupted by money and so much more. Matthew Goodman does a really great job of making a story that happened 70 years interesting today and he does it in a brilliantly entertaining way. This book could be super boring, with drab descriptions of policework giving way to lifeless depictions of basketball games and so on until the story plays out, but Goodman's writing brings all of these events to life so that I could visualize every scene. His detailing of the police and crime scenes are solid, but where he really shines is in the basketball scenes. I've always found basketball to be a tough sport to translate to writing. In a real life game things happen so fast and there's so much of it at the same time that it's hard to convey exactly how a play looks with just your words, but Goodman has found a way to make me feel as if I were in Madison Square Garden watching these players, and that is a genuine feat. He does all of this while making each of the people involved in the scandal very human. I feel like I know Floyd Lane and Ed Warner and Nat Holman and Bobby Sand and so on. Goodman does not shy away from the misdeeds that marked many of these people for life, but he also gives us proper context to understand why they did the things they did. In a world where college sports make more money than ever while still not paying the athletes themselves a dime, the moral quandaries the CCNY players face throughout the story remain more relevant than ever. It's clear that Goodman did a ton of research into this story and it really paid off. All in all this is a book that functions well as both a very entertaining story and an informative narrative with real moral conclusions. I had a ton of fun reading it and I look forward to checking out more of Goodman's work in the future.
