The City Game

  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.