By John Reagan
June 17, 2021



As an elder statesman of the National Football League, Paul Tagliabue isn't one to publicly criticize a league which is the single biggest revenue driver of sports in America. But the dark side of gambling on sports bothers him.

"I was always opposed to it, the gambling stuff, and I didn't want to have a team in Las Vegas," Tagliabue told USA Today this week. "The thing that always made me too hesitant to draw too many conclusions was that there were a lot of scandals but they were always in basketball, where the idea is that if you get to one or two players, you can affect the outcome. Football, if you get the quarterback in football, presumably you can affect the outcome of the game. But if it's not the quarterback and you get one or two guys, it may not affect the outcome of the game, which is why people explain there's [been] point-shaving in basketball but not football."

"I still worry about some young guy," Tagliabue said, "and someone says to him, take the money."

It's happened before.


"I was married, my wife was expecting a baby, my father had just died. I had to repay a loan, and I had nothing in the bank."

That statement came from Ray Paprocky, then a 23 year old junior at New York University, in the wake of a scandal which engulfed college basketball following the 1960-61 season. As many as 37 players nationwide would come under federal investigation for point-shaving, or the means by which a player would reduce his performance in a game so that gamblers could win on the margin. Paprocky admitted to taking $1,300 for point shaving in four NYU games in the 1960-61 season.

On the night of March 2, 1961, Paprocky stood on the floor of Madison Square Garden for the opening tip. Standing across the court from him was Paul Tagliabue.

"I played in a college basketball game that was fixed," Tagliabue said, recalling the 1961 game at Madison Square Garden against NYU. "We beat the hell out of NYU. It was the biggest victory in my three years of basketball at Georgetown. Turns out that guys at NYU were taking money to shave points."

As opposed to point fixing, which sometimes involves the throwing of a game, point shaving could be more subtle. For example, NYU averaged 72.3 points a game in the 1960-61 season. A bet that NYU would finish under 72 in a given game, for example, could be had by point shaving without setting off suspicion over the course of a game.

The 1961 game was, in retrospect, a perfect place to make a bet. Coming off a Final Four bid in 1960, NYU was an up and down team all season. Having won four straight, the Violets returned to Madison Square Garden for a mid-week game against Georgetown, whom NYU pounded 70-48 the season prior at Georgetown's McDonough Gymnasium. NYU entered the game 11-9, Georgetown 9-10. There was no TV coverage. Just 2,573 showed up to watch the game, so if there were suspicions, there weren't many to say so. The Washington Post recap of the game numbered just 12 words:

"Georgetown University poured it on New York University tonight, 92-69, in Madison Square Garden."

"[Ned] Irish's promotional savvy unwittingly transformed Madison Square Garden into a favored meeting place for gamblers, who gathered there to bet on basketball, hockey, boxing, and anything else amenable to wagering," wrote author James Piereson in 2017. "During basketball games, the bookies assembled on the sidewalk along Eighth Avenue, beneath the Garden's ornate marquee, or outside the popular Nedick's restaurant, to take wagers from arriving fans. Once inside, the bookies placed themselves in the bleachers behind the baskets, where they could observe the action, study the coaches, and badger the players. It was no secret to anyone there, whether local politicians and sportswriters or coaches and players, that wagering was going on."

It was this atmosphere that led to the point shaving scandal of 1951, which brought down the City College of New York program (the only school to win the NCAA and NIT in the same year) and forced a one year death penalty at the University of Kentucky. By 1961, it had returned - a little less visible, perhaps, but clues were in plain sight.

For this game, it was not that Georgetown was an unworthy opponent. "Georgetown looked tremendous in the role of spoilers," wrote The HOYA in one of the more detailed accounts of the game. "Although the Hoyas were rated as definite underdogs against the Violets by New York sportswriters, many minds were changed in the opening minutes of the game. [Bob] Sharpenter got the opening tip and the Hoyas immediately scored. The Violets looked as if they would open up their traditionally devastating attack at any moment but they had one rather large handicap: no rebounds. Paul Tagliabue and Bob Sharpenter, who hauled in a total of 26 rebounds together, left the Violets' Tom Boose and Al Barden grappling in thin air almost constantly."

"The addition of Mark Reiner to the NYU attack had given the Violets point ammunition from the outside, but Reiner seemed to be the only one hitting," it wrote.

Georgetown led 39-32 at the half.

"The opening minutes of the second half found the Violets scoreless for three and a half minutes while the Hoyas rolled up a 15 point lead, 48-32," continued the recap. "[Brian] Sheehan so demoralized Violet defensive ace Art Loche, who only a week ago had put the clamps on Wake Forest's great Billy Packer, that the disgusted Loche almost bounced the ball out of the Garden when the Violets were forced to call time out after GU had run up [a 16] point lead."

Georgetown led by as many as 30 in an eventual 92-69 win that nearly matched the worst loss of the season for NYU, a 93-69 loss at UCLA. And Georgetown was no UCLA, either--a year later, NYU beat the Hoyas 76-67 at McDonough Gymnasium.

The stat sheet from the game is worth a closer look.

Georgetown's numbers from the game were sterling, and as no one from Georgetown was ever alleged to have participated, they can be seen as authentic. Jim Carrino led all scorers with 24 points, followed by Brian Sheehan with 16 points and 11 assists, Bob Sharpenter with 11 points and 14 rebounds, and Paul Tagliabue with 11 points and 12 rebounds. The Hoyas shot 44 percent from the field (against their season average of 41 percent) and 64 percent from the foul line (against their season average of 67 percent)

By contrast, the Violets shot 30 percent from the field (against their season average of 40 percent) and just 46 percent from the foul line (against their season average of 68 percent). Paprocky, the only NYU player formally charged, was 4 for 12 that evening. Other players (neither alleged nor charged) had a bad night as well. Al Filardi, a 48 percent shooter on the season and NYU's leading scorer in the 1960-61 season, was 1 for 8. Al Barden, a 31 percent shooter on the season, was 1 for 10. The teams were even on free throws and fouls, but the result was anything but even.

In its wrap-up, The HOYA noted that "We see no point in spouting platitudes or analyzing the why's of the victory. The Hoyas were better, that's all." What else could they have said?


As in the 1951 scandal, New York was at the center of the vortex. Players from Columbia, St. John's, and Seton Hall were also charged and followed Paprocky into the district attorney's office, but they weren't the only ones.

In all, 37 players were arrested nationwide, among them players at Mississippi State, Tennessee, Dayton, Detroit, North Carolina, North Carolina State, Oregon, Tennessee, LaSalle and Connecticut. The first and only Final Four appearance at St. Joseph's was vacated by the NCAA when three players were implicated. Following its involvement, Seton Hall deemphasized the Pirate basketball program well into the 1970's. North Carolina dismissed coach Frank McGuire when the school was placed on NCAA probation. A new coach, a 30 year old named Dean Smith, was told to run a clean program above all else.

The mastermind behind the 1961 scandal was a former Columbia University basketball player, Jack Molinas. Sentenced to 10 years in prison, he served five, and was reportedly the inspiration behind the Burt Reynolds character in the movie, "The Longest Yard". After prison, he moved to Hollywood. In the early morning of August 3, 1975, while standing in his backyard, Molinas was shot five times in the back of his head.

Perhaps it's wishful thinking more than anything else to look back sixty years later and say that these kinds of things can't happen anymore, that the old days of touts collecting bets along Eighth Avenue died when the Garden moved to Penn Station. One certainly doesn't need to go to Hell's Kitchen to place a sports bet anymore--beginning this summer, a sportsbook is open in Capital One Arena, of all places. Thanks to the Internet and laws in 18 states, betting is available from everything from pro sports to political primaries to WWE pay per views, never mind that pro wrestling freely acknowledges that its outcomes are scripted in advance to follow a storyline. But people wager anyway.

What remains at risk by scandal is the integrity of sports. It's not about the self-policing that sportsbooks do when they see unusual movements in wagers, but what a scandal would to multi-billion dollar enterprises like the NFL, NBA, and NCAA. The NFL gets the contracts it does because of implicit trust in their product. What happens when that trust is shaken?

A greater risk remains in college, which is why student-athletes were easy marks then, and perhaps even more now. A pro athlete isn't taking a $500 offer to throw a game, but what's a missed kick worth in the college football playoff, or a pair of missed free throws in the last moments of a NCAA Tournament game?

Tagliabue is worried because even a whiff of scandal can turn fans away from sports. There was a time when boxing was the second biggest sport in America behind baseball. Horse racing used to draw millions of fans a year, too.

He's worried about scandal because he's seen it first-hand.