Episode 3: Hooked on a Feeling

Jack Molinas has it all: a brilliant mind, a hustler's instinct and a killer hook shot. Drafted fourth overall by the Fort Wayne Pistons, he's voted an NBA All-Star as a rookie. But Jack never plays in the game. His dangerous obsession catches up with him before then. Schooled by Bronx bookies and hooked on a feeling he can't shake, it turns out Jack isn't just playing the game — he's rigging it, too.

CREDITS

Created by: Bo Belanger

Written and Produced by: Bo Belanger

Theme Song: "Blame" by Gabriels

Additional Song: "Hooked on a feeling" [DH remix] by DekuHero

Music: Bo Belanger and Udio

VO: Shawn Hawkins, Bo Belanger and ElevenLabs

Sound Design and Mix: Dave Wagg and Collin Thomas

Art: Lincoln Lopes

Special Thanks: Shawn Hawkins, Dave Wolf, Charley Rosen and Kristen Farnam Belanger

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:24

Welcome back to Connie and Jack, a ringged game. This is episode three, hooked on a feeling, in which we're going to get acquainted with Jack Melinus and Joe Hacken. And a note before we jump in. Many of Melinus's quotes come from one source, Charlie Rosen's The Wizard of Odds. Melinus's stories are wild, and they very well could be true, but I was not able to verify them with another source. So please, take them with a grain of salt.

Boy Genius of the Bronx

SPEAKER_05 0:58

Not a captive if it's well wanna be in 1953, when Connie was 11 years old and finding his confidence in the basketball court, Jack Molinas was drafted fourth overall by the Fort Wayne Pistons. His future couldn't have been brighter. The all-American out of Columbia, already the toast of New York, was even toastier now that he was heading to the fledgling National Basketball Association to make a career doing what he loved, playing hoops. He made the All-Star team as a rookie. He was that good. The problem was, the money wasn't. Jack's NBA salary was chump change for him. When the All-Star game was played on January 21st at MSG, Jack was no longer in the league. Jack grew up in the Bronx. Both his parents were of Turkish descent. His mother Betty was born in Manhattan to Turkish immigrants. Lewis, his father, was a Sephardic Jew born in the Ottoman Empire, present-day Turkey. At the outbreak of World War I, the Ottoman Empire ratified an alliance with Germany, and Lewis escaped to avoid being called into combat. Traveling in steerage on a freighter, he landed in New York City. Lewis had the classic immigrant hustle. Years later, when he and Betty had two boys, Jacob and Julian, he was determined to give them a good life. Jacob was the oldest, though he'd go by Jack to avoid discrimination that many Jewish people experienced at the time. The rest of his life, Jack would tell people he was Irish or Greek or Spanish or Turkish, but never Jewish. He was born on April 16, 1932, during the depths of the Depression, when over 20% of Americans were unemployed. Lewis wasn't one of them. He provided his family with financial security, but was a cold, domineering father who showed almost no love toward his two boys. Betty, a beautiful woman with classic dark Mediterranean features, provided all the warmth for the boys. She'd tried to get her husband to be friendly with their sons, but he would only lecture them, just as his father had done to him. When the boys misbehaved, Lewis spanked them with a bare hand or a strap. Many believe this relationship's dunted Jack emotionally. He and his father never had a meaningful conversation until he was an adult. And even then, it was strictly about business.

SPEAKER_09 3:27

As Charlie Rosen wrote in The Wizard of Odds, Years later, several of Jack's friends would place a significant portion of the blame for his felonies and malefactions squarely on Lewis's shoulders. Jack's father was a tough, tough man, said Alan Sidon, a teammate of Melinas's. He saw everything in extremes, either black or white. I think the old man's rigidity was instrumental in pushing Jack off the edge.

SPEAKER_05 3:51

Jack's house growing up was the opposite of Connie's. He had enough food on his plate and clothes in his closet, but the overwhelming emotional presence was cold and tough. It was clear early on that Jack was bright. He displayed an extraordinary memory at a young age. He was reading English by three and Spanish by four. A neat party trick for his parents. Underneath Jack's dark hair and winning smile was unquestionably a big brand. The way he chose to use that brand the rest of his life baffled family and friends. At first, as Jack told Bruce Kaiden of the Philadelphia Inquirer, My parents wanted me to be a dentist. Instead, he chose an industry where people also lose teeth, but in a less opt-in manner. While the Molinases lived on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx during the school year, they rented a summer home in Coney Island where Lewis owned and operated the Eagle Bar on Surf Avenue, as Frankly wrote in the Daily News.

SPEAKER_09 4:49

It was at his dad's bar that Jack first rubbed elbows with the gamblers and mobsters that were to fascinate him the rest of his life.

Jack's Mentor Joe

SPEAKER_05 4:57

Jack saw the kickbacks his dad made to the police. One weekend, Lewis was too busy to step out and pay them, and he was arrested. Perceptive young Jack was getting schooled in the art of life. Sometimes the good guys are the bad guys. And then Jack met a mentor. Whereas Connie met Eddie Simmons and Gene Smith, who helped change his life for the better, Jack had a chance at Connor with a man that would change his life for the worse. His name was Joe Hacken. Solomon Joe Hacken immigrated from Austria-Hungary with his family in the early 1930s. Solomon chose the name Joe when he landed in the States because he wanted to sound American, not foreign, grabbing some camouflage like Jack. Joe never took to school. He had an accent he couldn't shake, but more than that, what he was learning in the streets was more interesting. He graduated high school, but the menial jobs that were available to him weren't nearly as attractive as the money he could make as a professional gambler. This was a Bronx specialty at the time. Often, Brooklyn kids turned to stealing and drugs to make money, whereas Bronx kids turned to gambling. It wasn't a bad career choice if you were going the illegal route. Gambling, especially in football and basketball, became more popular after World War II thanks to the invention of the point spread by Charles McNeil. McNeil was a math teacher turned securities analyst who quit his day job when his gambling winnings dwarfed his paycheck. Robert H. Boyle wrote about McNeil's invention of the point spread in his 1986 SI article titled The Brain That Gave Us the Point Spread, saying, Before McNeil, gamblers bet on football games using a standard system of odds, 2 to 1 that USC would beat Notre Dame, 4.5 to 1 that Army would beat Navy, etc.

SPEAKER_09 6:49

McNeil's idea was a variation of his own personal system for analyzing bets. He would rate two teams and then estimate by how many points one would defeat the other.

SPEAKER_05 6:58

He called them wholesaling odds. The popularity of the point spread exploded and became mainstream.

SPEAKER_03 7:04

McNeil once said, There are three things a gambler needs: money, guts, and brains. If you don't have one, you're dead. I've got all three.

SPEAKER_05 7:13

So did Jack. Gambling was more socially acceptable in Melinas's and Hackens' day. Every Bronx neighborhood had their own bookie, and they made payouts to the cops to look the other way. It was just part of life. Haken realized at a young age that he had a knack for being a bookie.

SPEAKER_09 7:29

Charlie Rosen wrote in The Wizard of Odds: An honest bookie, Haken gained the respect and trust of such important mafiosi as Frankie Carbo and Blinky Palermo. Those who dealt with Haken lauded his sense of humor, his loyalty, his ability to tell a good story, and his high seriousness. The bookie was a stocky five-foot-eight with a pudgy face. It probably didn't hurt him that his full head of dark brown hair and dark swarthy features easily convinced strangers that he was Italian.

SPEAKER_05 7:58

Hakken was cunning. He drove an old car to give the appearance of less wealth, and this earned him the nickname of Joe Jollop. He operated out of a pastry shop named Bickford's, which Jack passed by on his walk to junior high school. Hacken was a half-generation older than Jack. When they met, he taught Jack about gambling, but also provided some much-needed paternal warmth. Haken saw something in Jack and took him under his wing and taught him things. But it wasn't the birds and the bees, it was the fees and the point spreads. Jack plays his first bet with Hacken when he was 12 and soon caught the gambling bug, making bets regularly as a young teenager.

SPEAKER_09 8:44

Charlie Rosen wrote in The Wizard of Odds, It was two or three dollars on a baseball game, a buck on which raindrop would run down the window first, five dollars on whether or not the Dodgers Giants game would be rained out.

SPEAKER_05 8:56

Jack was also an accomplished craps player by 13. He brought friends along his muscle to other neighborhoods to help collect his money when he inevitably cleaned out the older kids.

SPEAKER_13 9:06

His friend Alan Stein accompanied him on a trip and told him afterward, You're only 13, but it's very clear to me that you're either going to wind up a millionaire or wind up in the electric chair.

SPEAKER_05 9:18

Stein wasn't far off on either side. Hakken appreciated Jack's intelligence, but he also liked that Jack was turning into a hell of a basketball player. Hacken ran a local All-Star team, which Jack joined. Hakken would give Jack a$10 bill after a game to grab some food. Jack thought it was because they were friends, but Hakken had other motives. Like Haken, school couldn't hold Jack's attention. He coasted and got A's and B's at Stuyvesant High School in Manhattan, one of the top schools in New York City. He also excelled in the basketball corps for the Pegle's. His hookshot was the real deal. He had extra large hands like Connie and could palm the ball when he was 14. He grew to be 6'6, which was tall enough back then to do serious damage in the paint. Like Connie, he had a nice feel for the game. He was excellent in the open floor for a big man, ran well for a size, and became a highly touted recruit. Many colleges wanted him and were willing to pay to get him. Charlie Rosen wrote in The Wizard of Uds.

SPEAKER_09 10:17

When the University of Kentucky found out that eastern Kentucky offered him$50 a week, a Kentucky assistant offered him$100. Michigan also offered a hundred a week. Almost every school offered him a car and a set of new clothes.

The Ivy League Hustle

SPEAKER_05 10:30

Although Jack wanted the money and the car that Michigan offered him, his family didn't need it, and Lewis insisted he go to Columbia in Ivy League school. As always, Jack gave in to his father, and even made his parents happy by enrolling as a pre-dental student. It was an impressive head fake by the youngster. Jack, of course, was not allowed to play on Columbia's varsity team as a freshman, though it was still an eventful year. He met Peggy Eisenhower. Peggy had no relation to the retired five-star general and soon-to-be president, though coincidentally, Dwight Eisenhower was president of Columbia at the time, a brief stint between the Army and the White House. Jack felt hard for Peggy. He wanted to marry her. She was beautiful, smart, and sweet. But there was an issue. She was a Gentile, and Lewis not only forbade the marriage, he didn't want Jack seeing her. The relationship lasted five years, but like the Columbia vs. Michigan choice and hundreds of decisions before that, Lewis ultimately won.

SPEAKER_09 11:26

Jack's brother Julie told Charlie Rosen, Peggy was the love of my brother's life, but he didn't have the courage to marry her in the face of our father's opposition. I don't think Jack ever recovered from the whole situation.

SPEAKER_05 11:43

As a sophomore, Jack played varsity and quickly became one of the Ivy League's top scorers and rebounders. He led his team to a conference best record, 21-1, with Columbia ranked third nationally. And if life couldn't get any better for Jack, Hakken also fed him surefire winners to bet on across different sports, so Jack had lots of spending money. Hacken asked Jack to throw a game as a sophomore, and Jack politely said no. It was a fortunate decision. The first college betting scandal, which we discussed last episode, broke at that time, and Hakken's old runner, the man who placed all his bets, Neil Kelleher, was at the center. In fact, Haken and Jack almost got pulled into the mess.

SPEAKER_09 12:22

Rosen tells the story in The Wizard of Odds. Kelliher was arrested in his car, which was parked on 188th Street across the street from Bickford's. Hacken and Molinas had also been in the parked car, just shooting the bull and casually discussing spreads and dumps, but had left together barely 30 minutes before the police arrived to bust Kelliher.

SPEAKER_05 12:42

The first two years at Columbia, everything seemed to be coming up Jack. Beautiful girl, hero on the court, and making fistfuls of cash off of it. The good luck wouldn't last. Jack was suspended at the end of the sophomore year. He told the story to Bruce Kaiden of the Philadelphia Inquirer years later.

SPEAKER_11 13:13

The next night, a bunch of them started ragging me. How come the big basketball star was afraid to join in the fun? I said, Because it's stupid, you want to see how much smarts it takes to throw something out of a window? Here. There's a glass of water on the desk, and I opened the window and threw it out the window. I said, big deal, right? It was a stupid thing to do, but I was 19 years old. Anyway, I looked out the window and I saw an old man standing down there looking up. Right away, I knew the water had hit him, but I didn't think about it much. I was on the seventh floor, and I didn't think he could see me. The next day, I found out that the old man was Professor Mark Van Doren. The Dean of Men told me. He also told me to absent myself from school.

SPEAKER_05 13:57

What Jack didn't mention was that Professor Van Doren was a world-renowned poet and Pulitzer Prize winner, a prize jewel of Columbia's faculty. He also didn't mention that the glass shattered Van Doren's windshield, frightening the poet and his co-passenger. Draft was suspended for the first half of his junior year. He felt it was unfair punishment, and that Columbia's athletic director didn't come to his defense. When he returned to school, he had a chip on his shoulder. He dumped his first game as a college player against Holy Cross later that year. Haken gave him the thumbs down sign in pregame warmups, which was especially brazen since Hakken was a known gambler and the 1951 fixing scandal investigation was happening in New York at that time. Hakken's thumbs down meant that Holy Cross should beat Columbia by more than this spread. Haken offered Jack$5,000 to dump the game. Jack was so confident it would happen that he asked Haken to take his$5,000 and bet it on the game. So Jack doubled down and had$10,000 riding on the game. He lost a game and won the bet. Today that's the equivalent of over$120,000. And he'd make more in other games that season, taking home$50,000 in a game against Yale. That's a lot of walking around money for a college kid. Strange things occurred on the court at the end of some of these fixed games. It's hard to imagine what it must have been like to sit in the stands and see these wild sequences. Charlie Rosen wrote about one of these games, Columbia vs. Navy, in The Wizard of Odds.

SPEAKER_09 15:36

In the last seconds of the game, Melinas was on the foul line, poised to shoot the first of two free throws. He was prepared to tank one of the two shots, thereby preserving an acceptable under-the-number margin of victory. Suddenly, a voice rang out from the stands, shouting, Jack! And Molinas turned to look. It was Jolly Cholly, one of the Bickford's crew who earned his living by driving his own taxi. Jack! the cabbie screamed again. My shield's on the line! Don't do it! Figuring that Jolly Cholly had bet Navy with only six and a half points, Molinas obliged and deliberately clanged both foul shots.

SPEAKER_05 16:13

Can you imagine seeing that in person? What a time to be alive. By the end of his junior year, Jack had made, by his own estimate, about$100,000 working with Hakken. The kicker? By the end of that summer, he'd lost it all by betting on Major League Baseball games. So yeah, Jack had a gambling problem. He started betting$100 on baseball, but that was up to$5,000 by the end of the summer. His brother Julie noticed that something in Jack changed that summer. Rosen wrote in The Wizard of Odds.

SPEAKER_09 16:44

Increasingly, the money Molinas won or lost meant nothing. It was the gambling itself that appealed to him. Julie said, that was the summer when Jack totally lost control.

SPEAKER_05 16:56

Jack explained his gambling compulsion to Bruce Kaiden, saying, I didn't care about the money, I never did.

SPEAKER_10 17:03

Gambling was action, winning was glory. Money was just a way of keeping score. The real fun was moving the numbers around. I'll tell you something. When I was the so-called mastermind of this big gambling syndicate, the money didn't mean anything. I wanted to bet and I wanted to win. I didn't need the money.

SPEAKER_05 17:22

Jack's compulsion to gamble became the driving force in his life. He was remarkably gifted, intellectually and athletically, and he won often in his life, whether playing straight or fixing. But gambling always had his number. We're still not sure what causes compulsive gambling. It's believed that certain personality characteristics, like being highly competitive, a workaholic, impulsive, restless, easily bored, that they all might increase someone's risk. Jack certainly checked a lot of those boxes. He was drawn to risk and excitement, and playing this game within a game brought him more joy than playing it straight. And he was talented enough where he was actually becoming very good at it. The near misses, the tiny mistakes.

SPEAKER_11 18:05

Molinas talks about this in The Wizard of Odds, saying, I could miss a shot off the front rim or off the back rim. I could even make a shot roll around the rim and curl out. I could hold the ball game in the palm of my hand. It was a great feeling.

SPEAKER_05 18:19

Jack became hooked on that feeling. Gambling is hard for Americans to square. On one hand, we see the personal havoc it can do to people. Someone losing all their money and knowing they're losing all their money and not being able to do anything about it without the help of outside intervention is tragic. On the other hand, at its root, gambling is about risk, and taking a risk is an American ideal. In Pat Putnam's 1986 Sports Illustrated article, Another View of Gambling, It's Good For You, he spoke with James Frey, a professor of sociology at UNLV, who studied gambling.

SPEAKER_03 19:01

Frey told him, People don't want to admit it, but a great part of gambling is consistent with the American way. We admire people who take risks, and we have even treated the very colorful historical gamblers, such as Doc Holiday, in a positive way.

SPEAKER_05 19:16

Dr. Robert Custer, a national leader in the treatment of pathological gambling, told Putnam, The Americans came in as the pioneers, the risk takers.

SPEAKER_13 19:26

They don't mind taking the risk, and they will take the consequences.

Jack in Fort Wayne

SPEAKER_05 19:33

So while Jack spiraled deeper into the gambling world, he was looked down upon by judges in court, but not reviled by the public like other criminals. Americans' relationship with gambling, as with many topics, is best summed up in two words. It's complicated. Rolling into his senior year, Jack continued to win games at Columbia, but now also lost enough to make lots of money off them with Hakken. There was one change in his final year. His teammates began questioning his efforts in certain games, and there were suspicions about him throwing some games, but nothing came of it. Even with some, quote, off games, it was hard to argue with Jack's output. He held every Columbia basketball record when he graduated in 1953. The Golden Boy was still golden. NBA teens wanted Jack, and they wanted him bad. He played in some college all-star games that were held to showcase talent for pro scouts. Before one, a couple of NBA owners approached him individually, but with the same request. Take it easy in these games. We know how good you are, but we don't want the other owners to find out. Jack could only smile, NBA owners asking him to take a dive before he even set foot in the league. But he didn't listen. There was no money in it. He played hard and was drafted high. The Fort Wayne Pistons took him fourth overall and paid him handsomely,$9,600 for the year plus a$500 signing bonus. It was the largest rookie contract to date. Like Connie, Jack's offense was better than his defense. Many consider Jack a new breed of player.

SPEAKER_02 21:11

Teammate Don Meineke said, He was the first forward who could handle the ball on the run as well as a guard. Jack was the most versatile player in the league. He could play inside, outside, or in the corner. He could play fast or slow, wherever or however he could get his points.

SPEAKER_05 21:27

He was first and foremost an excellent scorer, and he was giving Pistons starting center Larry Faust all he could handle in practice.

SPEAKER_13 21:35

Bill Tosheff, who played for the Milwaukee Hawks, said, I would have loved to have played with Jack, and you better believe I would have given him the ball too. Get the ball to Jack, and we're eating steak. Get it to Larry Faust and we're eating hot dogs.

SPEAKER_05 21:49

Huey Brown, Hall of Fame coach and broadcaster, and an eventual teammate of Molinas, said of him, Molinas was the perfect player, and by that I mean he wasn't a special.

SPEAKER_12 22:00

He could handle and pass, play defense if he wanted to, and rebound in a crowd if he wanted to. He had a great assortment of head fakes and ball fakes. He was a savvy player with great timing, and his extra edge was his phenomenal hookshot, the best hookshot ever. There was nothing that Jack Molinas couldn't do on a basketball court.

SPEAKER_05 22:20

As much as Jack was to handle on the court, he was just as much to handle off of it.

SPEAKER_04 22:25

The New York Times wrote, He was a flashy dresser, drove oversized cars, liked to flash big bankrolls, and was almost always surrounded by beautiful women.

SPEAKER_05 22:35

He was simply an acquired taste that many of his piston teammates found difficult to acquire. His personality was as large as his body. He was cocky, brash, and he had a big mouth, which some suspected came from insecurities. He was never mean-spirited. In fact, his teammates appreciated how he kept things loose and fun, always joking and laughing. He was just a lot. And Jack was awed in other ways.

SPEAKER_09 23:02

Irv Bomoris, Jack's teammate at the All-Star Showcase, said, A couple of times we were in the locker room getting ready for our pregame chalk talk, and Jack was nowhere to be found. When the coaches dispatched somebody to search for him, they'd find Jack outside the arena scalping his tickets.

SPEAKER_05 23:18

Another thing his teammates noticed, Jack was always betting. One teammate said that every third word out of his mouth was about gambling. Haken told Jack that he had enough money put away and that he should play it straight in the pros. Jack didn't listen. Bruce Kaiden of the Philadelphia Inquirer explained why, writing, The Pistons signed him for a contract worth$9,600.

SPEAKER_03 23:41

That was likely a small percent of what Molinus earned as a bookmaker in his senior year.

SPEAKER_13 23:46

Frank Lombardi of the New York Daily News wrote, He was 22 years old, a magnet for women, the life of the party on the road, and always quick to pick up dinner and bar tabs. Too quick, some people suspected.

SPEAKER_05 24:05

Jack came off the bench for the Pistons, but throughout the first month, his minutes and production steadily grew. He put the league on notice on November 19th in a game in Syracuse against Dolph Shays and the Nationals. Syracuse had a comfortable 57-42 lead heading into the fourth. Then Melinas went nuts. He scored 20 points in the fourth, including a twisting layup past Shays to bring the Pistons within one with 48 seconds left. The Nationals hit two free throws on the other end, and Andy Phillips missed a jumper for the Pistons with 16 seconds left. The Pistons came up short in the end, but it was Melinas' coming out party.

SPEAKER_09 24:43

Sports writer Harry Grayson wrote, Experts declare him to be the best rookie to break in the National Basketball Association since Bob Cousy came out of Holy Cross. He is the slickest to emerge from the Ivy League since that ancient group took up the winter sport, invented by Dr. James A. Naismith, students of New York basketball claim Melinas ranks with Coozie, Adolph Shays, and Dick McGuire as the slickest to come out of the big town in the last 10 years.

SPEAKER_05 25:08

If there was one person who knew how talented Jack was, it was Jack. Before a game against the Knickerbockers at MSG, Pistons coach Paul Birch grabbed Melinas by the arm in a pregame huddle and said, Watch yourself with that Harry Gallatin.

SPEAKER_09 25:23

He is big and tough. Stay away from him until you learn your way around the league.

SPEAKER_05 25:27

Melinus looked up at Gallatin, then back to Birch and said, Uh-uh, don't worry, Skipper.

SPEAKER_11 25:33

I can take care of him.

Tapping the Phones

SPEAKER_05 25:34

It was good advice. Harry the Horse Gallatin was a perennial all-star and would be on the all-NBA first team that year. Except Melinas made good on his word. He went out and hit two long set shots, then went inside and spun past Gallatin for a layup. Next time down it was a hook shot. Molinus came up with every rebound that he and Galladin battled for. Finally, Knickerbocker's coach Joe Lapchik had seen enough and took Gallatin out. Molinas walked to the sideline and yelled at Birch, What did I tell you? Pistons owner Fred Zollner and Coach Birch knew they had a great talent on their hands. Jack was voted to the All-Star team, a rare honor for a rookie. There was just one issue with Jack and the team generally: consistency. By the end of November, the Pistons were just 9-7, including a recent trouncing by Mike and the Lakers. Could it just be that the team was young? Zolner wondered. Birch heard rumblings of more nefarious causes. He thought something was off about Jack. Rookies are often inconsistent, but what bothered him was how Melinas was inconsistent. It wasn't that he was missing shots or that he looked tired, it was that he wasn't trying. Birch became suspicious of things Melinas was doing during games. One night Jack scored 20. The next game he took only one shot. By early December, rumors circulated that Jack was betting on his own games.

SPEAKER_09 26:57

Jim Murray of the Los Angeles Times wrote, One NBA coach was warning his players against fraternizing with Jack Molinas of Fort Wayne back in early December. More than$50,000 a night was being bet on Fort Wayne games before the bookies grew wary.

SPEAKER_05 27:12

On December 15th, the Pistons played the Celtics in MSG. It was reported that bookmakers stopped taking bets on the game because odds favoring the Celtics jumped right before the game. Jack played a great first half, scoring 18 points. The Pistons led the Celtics by 11. In the second half, Jack's performance fell off a cliff. He scored just two points. The Celtics outscored the Pistons 31-13 in the third quarter and won comfortably 82-75. NBA Commissioner Maurice Potilov received a tip from Ike Ellis, the sports editor at the New York Post, that Jack was doing business. Potilov saw how the 1951 college betting scandal damaged college basketball and knew a blow of that sort would be fatal to his young league. If he had to make an example out of someone, he would. Potolov passed the information to Zolner, who questioned Jack when he returned to Fort Wayne. Jack responded to the owner, My mother should die if I had an association with gamblers. But Zolner had more information on Jack, which came out later in testimonies. Zolner's head coach Birch told him that a stranger tried to see Jack in the dressing room before the Celtics game. He was not let in, but then sent in a note to Jack that read, Joe sent me. Jack claimed that in the second half of the Pistons and Celtics game mentioned by Zolner, he ran out of steam because he had been out late the night before. He denied receiving any note, but claimed that a friend contacted him to let him know that he had a date with a girl that evening. Potov hired private detectives to follow the pistons. Jack didn't know any of this. His long distance calls to the Bronx were traced to a candy store whose owner was a middleman for a boogie. Potolov brought Jack into his office for questioning. Rosen wrote in The Wizard of Odds that Jack was more honest in Potolov's office than he was on the court, telling the commissioner.

SPEAKER_10 29:01

Yeah, occasionally I make a wager on the pistons. Whenever I think we're going to win, I bet$100 or maybe$200 with a guy in New York. That's all. I never dumped games or shaved points.

SPEAKER_05 29:15

It was a remarkable admission to the commissioner.

SPEAKER_08 29:20

Run the low, run the lights, slide the new.

SPEAKER_05 29:27

Part of the reason Jack was honest was that lots of NBA players at that time were betting on games. It was especially popular for guys to bet on their own team to win because it was morally ambiguous. If anything, so their argument went, it made them play harder. It was widespread. Almost the entire Baltimore Bullets team was doing business. A handful of Knicks players were too. Even referees were fixing games. A few years before, referee Saul Levy was sentenced to up to three years in the New York City penitentiary for conspiring to rake games. Jack's own coach, Paul Birch, was betting on games, and star players like Jack were outright dumping games. An anonymous player said in the Wizard of Uds.

SPEAKER_09 30:08

One of my teammates was a famous superstar who had an unstoppable pet move to the basket. Whenever he was doing business, he would take three dribbles away from the basket and throw up a low percentage hookshot. We heard he was making half his yearly salary every time he fixed a game.

SPEAKER_05 30:26

Gambling was a way for guys to supplement their meager NBA salaries. The league was still in its infancy, and less eyeballs meant less money. Frank DeFord wrote in Sports Illustrated.

SPEAKER_09 30:37

In the league's early days, if the Knicks made the playoffs, they would invariably be kicked out of Madison Square Garden, because the circus would be in town, and it drew much larger crowds. The Knicks would then have to play their most important games of the season at the ratty old National Guard Armory on Lexington Avenue.

SPEAKER_05 30:53

Players had second jobs to boost their income. Again, this is from the anonymous player in the Wizard of Oz.

SPEAKER_09 31:00

Most guys got paid about$3,500, plus$7 a day for meals on the road, and believe me, it wasn't easy to live on that kind of money, especially if you had a wife and kids. Most of the owners had other sources of income besides their basketball teams, and it's a good thing they did, or they would have been as broke as we were. A lot of good players couldn't afford to play in the NBA. At the same time, a lot of us had no other choice. There were no other career options available. We had to make a living, you know, and that's why so many NBA players in the late 40s and early 50s were doing business.

SPEAKER_05 31:34

In 1953, the average annual income for men in the US was$3,200, just a few hundred dollars than what most NBA guys were making. Today, the average American makes$59,000 versus$11.9 million for the average NBA player. Another way to say it, NBA players' salaries in 1953 were about on par with the rest of society. Today's NBA salaries are 200 times higher than what the average American makes. Due to how common gambling was amongst NBA players, Jack expected a slap on the wrist from Commissioner Potov when he admitted to betting on his own games. He thought the commissioner was only after guys who were dumping gains. Jack was wrong. Potilov immediately suspended him. He recounted the scene to the New York Herald Tribune saying, Jack said, give me another chance.

SPEAKER_01 32:24

I said to him, Jack, if our positions were reversed, with me in your spot and you in my position, would you give me another chance? And he said, I wouldn't. You'd be too much of a gamble.

SPEAKER_05 32:35

Jack even offered to play without pay if the league would give him a second chance. Paulov said no. Jack told the Associated Press afterwards that he had only bet on his team to win. I've never done anything dishonest in my life, he exclaimed, almost in tears. So there Jack was in 1954, young, rich, and banned. Like Connie seven years later, he was exiled from the game he loved. Unlike Connie, Jack's ban was legit. He broke rules. And he was booted from the game he loved because he loved playing a game within the game even more. Jack was at a crossroad. Yes, he could choose another profession and probably be highly successful, but a straight career never stood a chance for Jack. Gambling was too exciting. He was hooked on that feeling.

SPEAKER_06 33:25

I'm high on the leaders.

SPEAKER_00 33:32

On the next episode, we'll go back to Connie's story and show how a very large man did him a very large favor when he needed it most. Our oversized underdog finally catches a break.