Basketball v. Learning

A fortnight after he sentenced five college basketball players to prison for accepting gamblers' bribes, Manhattan Judge Saul S. Streit handed down his judgment against three others. The players, all from Bradley University in Peoria, Ill., had admitted accepting an offer of $500 apiece for throwing a Madison Square Garden game. But this time all got off with suspended sentences. The real culprits, according to Judge Streit, were not present in his courtroom.

"At Bradley," said he, "we have a typical example of commercialism and overemphasis--with some of the attendant evils: illegal recruiting, subsidization of athletes, evasion of scholastic standards, corruption of the athlete, the coach and the college official, and impairment of the standards of the integrity of the college." More to blame than the players, said Streit, was President David B. Owen, a onetime public relations man at Bradley who took over as head of the university in 1946 and "who no doubt confused public relations with academic administration."

President Owen not only accompanied the team on almost every trip, said angry Judge Streit, but also allowed the local Boosters Club to subsidize players. One of the players, William Mann, said that he had received at least $300 from the club; another, All-American Eugene Melchiorre, told how club representatives would pass out $10 to $15 to players whenever the team went on a trip. The club recruited players, paid their tuitions, and lent them money. To all this Owen acquiesced, thus giving "official university sanction to [the players'] moral debasement."

But President Owen did not stop there, said the court. When players needed easy academic credits, he allowed them,to take courses in "handball, basketball, volley ball, touch football and individual gymnastics." Defendant George Chianakis got credit for "elementary badminton, elements of tumbling, golf and boxing." Melchiorre, who needed an extra credit to graduate, "selected an hour of social and square dancing" with a class of Bradley coeds. "It was," said he, "an entertaining course."

Owen's whole attitude, according to Judge Streit, seemed to be that basketball was more important" than anything else. Once, he even advised a player not to honor an out-of-state subpoena to appear as a witness at a murder trial, because of a conflicting basketball schedule. Said Streit: "The inference here is clear that the president of the university impressed the athlete that it was more important to play basketball that day than to serve the administration of justice in a murder case. Such an impact on the athlete's moral fiber may prove irreparable."

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