March 28, 1950, 70 years ago: City College of New York defeats Bradley University, of Peoria, Illinois, 71-68 at Madison Square Garden in New York, to win the NCAA Basketball Tournament. They are the 1st team based in New York City to do so.
On March 18, also at The Garden -- "the Old Garden," at 49th Street and 8th Avenue, replaced in 1968 by "the New Garden," at 32nd Street and 7th Avenue -- they won the Final of the National Invitation Tournament, beating Bradley in that game as well, 69-61. This made them the 1st team ever to win the NCAA and the NIT in the same season.
From its founding in 1938 until 2022, the NIT was played entirely at Madison Square Garden. As a result, in the 1949-50 season, CCNY played 20 of their 29 games at The Garden, going 24-5.
CCNY was coached by Nat Holman, himself a great player in the 1920s, with one of the earliest great professional teams, the Original Celtics. Longtime St. John's University coach Joe Lapchick was a teammate. Aside from the Celtics name, the Boston team that was founded with the NBA in 1946 has no connection to them.
The leading players on the 1950 CCNY team were center Ed Roman, forwards Irwin Dambrot and Ed Warner, and guards Floyd Layne and Alvin Roth. They were a multiracial, multiethnic, multifaith team, truly representative of what was good about New York.
Unfortunately, they were also a part of the seamier side of the City. The following season, they were enmeshed in a point-shaving scandal that could have ruined college basketball, and pretty much wrecked it in New York.
As a result of the scandal, CCNY were banned from ever playing at The Garden again. And the NCAA ruled that teams could only play in the NCAA or the NIT, not both. CCNY's double will remain the only one, forever. And any pretensions the NIT still had to being the bigger of the 2 tournaments were shattered.
CCNY, and their arch-rivals, New York University (NYU, also based in Manhattan), cancelled their programs, only to come back later as NCAA Division III teams. Long Island University (LIU, in Downtown Brooklyn) and Fordham (The Bronx) came back to Division I, but have never really been the same. St. John's (Jamaica, Queens) took about a decade to recover, before Lapchick put together one more good team in the mid-1960s, and Lou Carnesecca brought them back to the national spotlight in the 1980s.
NYU made what would now be called the Final Four in 1960, and St. John's in 1985. These remain, through 2022, the last 2 Final Four berths by New York City teams. From the New York side of New Jersey, Princeton made it in 1965, Rutgers in 1976, and Seton Hall in 1989.
For the record, the following schools have won the NCAA and the NIT, but not in the same season:
* Utah: NCAA 1944; NIT 1947.
* Kentucky: NIT 1946, 1976; NCAA 1948, 1949, 1951, 1958, 1978, 1996, 1998, 2012.
* Holy Cross: NCAA 1947, NIT 1954.
* La Salle: NIT 1952; NCAA 1954.
* University of San Francisco: NIT 1949; NCAA 1955, 1956.
* North Carolina: NCAA 1957, 1982, 1993, 2005, 2009, 2017; NIT 1971.
* Indiana: NCAA 1940, 1953, 1976, 1981, 1987; NIT 1979.
* Louisville: NIT 1956; NCAA 1980, 1986, 2013.
* UCLA: NCAA 1964, 1965, 1967, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1995; NIT 1985.
* Ohio State: NCAA 1960; NIT 1986, 2008.
* Michigan: NIT 1984, 1997, 2004; NCAA 1989.
* Stanford: NCAA 1942; NIT 1991, 2012, 2015.
* Villanova: NCAA 1985, 2016, 2018; NCAA 1994.
* Connecticut: NIT 1988; NCAA 1999, 2004, 2011, 2014.
* Maryland: NIT 1972; NCAA 2002.
* Virginia: NIT 1980, 1992; NCAA 2019.
* Baylor: NIT 2013; NCAA 2021.
Holman called Dambrot "the greatest player I ever coached." But Dambrot was 1 of 7 players caught up in the scandal in 1951, all pleading guilty to misdemeanor conspiracy charges, and all (including Dambrot) except one receiving suspended sentences.
Dambrot became a dentist, and most of the guilty players also went on to careers that provided some sort of service to their communities, which speaks to the true measure of their character, as well as to Holman's teaching. As of March 28, 2022, Layne and Ron Nadell are still alive. (UPDATE: Layne died in 2024, leaving Nadell as the last survivor.)
An interesting postscript: In 1954, Bradley got back into the NCAA Final, but lost to La Salle University. So now, they had lost to the first team from New York and the first team from Philadelphia to win the NCAA title.
One more note: Later in 1950, the New York Yankees won the World Series. This made New York the 1st city to win the NCAA Tournament and a major league championship in the same calendar year.
No comments:
Post a Comment