The Game They Played

It happened in the 1949–50 college basketball season. The unranked City College team (“five street kids from the City of New York—three Jews and two blacks”) outstripped the competition from the Midwest to take the titles in both the NCAA championship and National Invitation Tournament. The feat was unprecedented, and never again duplicated. Sadly, the scandal that followed it—and ended with the indictment of twenty players (for shaving points) as well as fourteen fixers—left New York bereft of big-time college basketball. Cited by Sports Illustrated as one the twenty-five best literary sports books ever published and the basis for the award-winning HBO documentary City Dump, which has been optioned for a major film, The Game They Played comprises both a history of the fixed and dumped college basketball games from the late 1940s to the early 1960s and a morality tale that contemplates the nature of justice in America. It poignantly tells the story, too, of dreams that were lost, illusions broken, and kids betrayed by the sad truths of greed and corruption.