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Exactly seventy years ago this month, in November of 1949, an extraordinary college basketball team played their very first game together. Only two years after Jackie Robinson integrated major league baseball – and at a time when the newly formed National Basketball Association included not a single black player – the City College team was made up of eleven Jews and four African Americans. Less than a year later, though, three members of the team would be arrested by New York City detectives and charged with accepting payoffs, in the gamblers' term of art, to “shave points.” They were not trying to lose games — the competitive instincts of these athletes balked at that — but rather, simply to win by less than the point spread, the number of points by which a consortium of bookmakers believed they would win the game.
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