Ne Ys Gambling Termites
Rock Collegiate Cage World

NEW YORK, Dec. 26—Do you detect an odor? Do you smell something
funny?

Whether you smell it or int something’s beginning to stink, and it’s the
bigtime gambling rackets which are moving in on amateur and, in particular,
on college sports. A few weeks ago the University of Kansas basketball coach,
'Dr. Forrest C, »Phog« Allen, popped off again—this time about gamblers who,
‘have become a threat to college athletics. Specifically, Allen pointed to the
case of the Utah coach, Vadal Peterson, who was accosted in his hotel room

= = just before a Madison Square Garden
(NCAA tournament) game last spring,
and asked: »How much will it cost m2
to have you see fo 1t
that your boys lose
to Dartmouth?< Pe-
e terson slammed the
door.

Allen offered fans
th er information,
without laying him-
self open to libel,
about two college
athletes who already
had sold out to pro-
-fessional gam-
blers for a price.
Lastly, Allen sug-
gested that there’s a scandal in the
making that will make the Black Sox
mess in baseball look like a penny
pickpocket affair.

Mostly, what Allen was talking about
was Madison Square Garden, where
the biggest basketball business in
America is being carried on every
winter by impressario Ned Irish. Hun-
dreds of thousands of dollars change
hands on results of Garden games and
wherever there’s that much money in-
volved, somebody’s going to be ap-
proached. mea iia

Irish has made an effort to run
gamblers out of the Garden, but the
fact is if he stamped them out, he
Garden_basketball c¢ wd. ot ati
those 17,000 ‘people were at the Garden
the other night because Muhlenberg
or St. Francis were dear to their
hearts. They were there for the same
reason they go to horse races and that
ain’t to watch nags ruh.

The hardest question to answer
about such gambling is »So what?« It's
true gambling leaves a bad stench on
any game. Landis did a good job keep-
ing baseball divorced from rackets,
and it might be a good idea if oe
attacked the problem of wiping
tamblers — athleti¢s
= ee woe

 

 

 

*PHOG’ ALLEN