Barney Polan's Game: A Novel of the 1951 College Basketball Scandals - Hardcover

Rosen, Charley

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1888363568 ISBN 13: 9781888363562

Publisher: Seven Stories Press, 1997

Synopsis

A New York Times Notable Book

In Barney Polan's Game, Charley Rosen takes on the legendary point-shaving scandals of 1950 and '51, when the best of the college basketball players took money from gamblers in return for affecting the outcomes of games, never knowing that in the process they were trading in their innocence and love of the game-until they were caught, and the scandal moved them from the sports pages to the news pages across the nation. No one will walk away from the scandals unscathed; many of the guilty will have their lives and careers ruined, others among the guilty will end up in the Basketball Hall of Fame.

About this title

Review

The United States love sports. The heroes of diamond, court, and gridiron are worshiped like gods, and when they fall, the impact can crack the foundations of American culture. In 1951, college basketball was rocked by scandal; players, coaches, gamblers, and mobsters had conspired to fix games on a massive scale, bringing the sport to the brink of collapse.

Charley Rosen--the author of Scandals of '51, the classic nonfiction account of these events--has written a novel that attempts to dig beneath the headlines and explore the deeper implications for both individuals and the nation. The central character is sportswriter Barney Polan, a would-be Faulkner who finds poetry in college basketball. Polan is a hero in the Willy Loman mold, feeling adrift in a world where the old certainties are disappearing and the nobility of the sport he loves is being swallowed up by greed. His crumbling idealism in the face of scandal and corruption mirrors the broader themes woven through the novel.

Rosen allows other characters to take center stage in first-person-narrated chapters that present events from a myriad of perspectives, including those of the players and Johnny Boy Gianelli, the gangster who set the wheels of corruption in motion. This brings a documentary weight to a work that is balanced by rapid-fire, expertly paced writing, particularly in the basketball scenes, making Barney Polan's Game much more than a retelling. Rosen takes one of the great myth-making factories of American culture and uses it to reflect on the enormous changes that swept the country at the beginning of the 1950s--a time when racism and political paranoia began to bubble up though America's postwar optimism. In the clumsy conspiracy of petty gangsters and fresh-faced college boys, Rosen finds a microcosm of the rapidly souring American dream.

From the Back Cover

Rosen's new book, Barney Polan's Game, is a fictional account of the college basketball scandals of 1950-51, when players, coaches, bookies, and gangsters conspired to fix the outcomes of games. Their exposure affected the basketball world the same way the 1919 Black Sox scandal affected baseball. For all sports fans, the game was irrevocably corrupted by power and big money. Each principal character in Barney Polan's Game speaks directly to the reader, giving his or her perspective as events unfold. The most prominent voice is that of Barney Polan himself - the veteran sportswriter. Dubbed the "verse of the peepul" by a colleague, he borrows from Shakespeare and Brooklynese for his columns in The Brooklyn Sentinel. Each of the characters - coaches, bookies, players, family members - desperately tries to control the uncertain events around them in whatever way he or she can. Unsettling aspects of postwar America loom in the background: racism, class injustice, fears of nuclear annihilation, and the McCarthy hearings.

Edition details

• Publisher: Seven Stories Press
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 1888363568
• ISBN 13: 9781888363562
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336