The Price Was Right

"I knew what I was doing was wrong," said the star basketball player. But he did it anyway. In return for shaving points in four recent games, charged New York City's District Attorney Frank S. Hogan last week, New York University's Ray Paprocky, 23, took $1,300 from gamblers. He was not alone, said Hogan. Accused of accepting similar bribes were four former players at New York's St. John's University and New Jersey's Seton Hall University. They were only the latest bad sports in a nationwide basketball scandal, first revealed in March, that now involves 28 players and 17 campuses, from the University of Colorado to North Carolina State College.

Hogan charges that New York City Gambler Joseph Hacken. 41, was the fixer. His partner was David Budin, 28, onetime basketball captain at Brooklyn College and a junior high school physical-education teacher until last fall, when he was arrested and charged with trying to fix a Michigan-Oregon football game. To buy the accused basketball players, many of them products of New York high schools, says Hogan. Gambler Hacken and Teacher Budin supplied spending money, dates and ultimately bribes of $500-$1,000 a game. They even had a farm system to buy freshmen players before they reached the varsity.

Many a college coach and president was shocked at the extent of the mess--which is fast overshadowing the 1951 bribe scandal involving some 30 basketball players at seven colleges--and cast about for the causes. A sample explanation came from N.Y.U.'s Ray Paprocky. a blond, crew-cut management major who looks like anyone's All-American astronaut. "That money was worth more to me than getting caught," he said, candidly. "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."

Paprocky's was an explanation that pointed uncomfortably to the guilt of the schools in the scandal. Despite all the competition to get into college these days, admission for star athletes has seldom been easier. They go where the money is; and colleges that put up the money have little cause for shock at the consequences. As the New York Herald Tribune's Sports Columnist Red Smith put it: "Don't they realize that a boy who can be bribed to shoot baskets can also be bribed to miss them, if the price is right?"

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