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

Charley Rosen (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 9, 1997

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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 Publishers Weekly

Rosen, whose first novel, The House of Moses All-Stars, was highly praised, returns to the subject of his 1978 nonfiction Scandals of '51, this time in a penetrating fictional portrait of the men (and woman) who conspired to corrupt college basketball. Beginning with Brooklyn sportswriter Barney Polan, a self-described "champion of the underdog" who "looks like what sportswriters are supposed to look like," Rosen tells the story from multiple points of view, shifting back and forth as the corruption deepens and comes to light. Gangster Johnny Boy Gianelli and his moll, Rosie, are at the center of the scam, offering cash and sex to New York players who agree to maintain point spreads and even throw games while coaches and referees look the other way. Rosen's multi-voiced prose rings true as Jewish, Catholic and black players all find themselves involved?some eagerly, some reluctantly?in a complex conspiracy to defraud each other and save themselves. Wisely keeping the games in the background to build suspense, Rosen works from inside the heads of each of his characters, who bring to life such darker elements of the time as McCarthyism, the Korean War and racial tension. No special knowledge of the game is required to appreciate this very engaging novel (Rosen clearly relishes his historical expositions as much as the story itself). Even readers who are not basketball fans will have a hard time putting it down before the final buzzer.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Seven Stories Press; First Edition edition (December 9, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1888363568
• ISBN-13: 978-1888363562
• Product Dimensions: 5.8 x 1.1 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #613,952 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Charley's College Basketball, December 18, 2008

By 

Mid-Prairie Teen - See all my reviews

This review is from: Barney Polan's Game: A Novel of the 1951 College Basketball Scandals (Hardcover)

Barney Polan's Game is about college basketball scandals where people would pay off refs and other people so the team that they picked to win would win. Players even sometimes got involved with this and didn't usually get caught. The setting of this book is in the 1950's in Brooklyn. Barney Polan is the main character and at the start of the book Barney tells stories about his life, and how much of a sports fan he is. He says that he is a writer for the Brooklyn Sentinel.

This wasn't the best book that I have ever read but it was alright. The thing that I liked about it was all the history that was behind it, and how accurate it was. I knew exactly what they were talking about and why they said it. One of the things that Barney talks about a lot is McCarthyism, which is a word used to describe the anti-communist suspicion in the U.S. McCarthy was actually a leader and he was so anti-communist that he blamed just about everyone for being too communist. So that is how the word came up.

The author of this book has two books in the New York Times Notable Books of the year. His name is Charley Rosen and he has written eight popular books, and Barney Polan's Game is one of them. He has written many basketball novels and even another one that took place in the 1950's; it is called Scandals of '51. He has also co-authored Maverick with Phil Jackson, who is a famous NBA head basketball coach for the L.A. Lakers. He used to coach the women's basketball team at the State University of New York, and he also use to play basketball in the 1950's and 60's. So that's how he got inspired to write this novel.

3.0 out of 5 stars good book, June 17, 2003

By 

glen (NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Barney Polan's Game (Harvest Book) (Paperback)

Rosen's very good--and this is a fine and readable book of the early 50's scandals...it's nowhere near, however, the book that Rob Roberge's "Drive" is--by far the best basketball book of recent years. But this was agood read.

3.0 out of 5 stars College Student's Impression, October 8, 1999

By 

T. Stephensen (University of Kansas, Kansas) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Barney Polan's Game (Harvest Book) (Paperback)

I was given this book to read for a literature class at the University of Kansas. (Basketball is literature out here where it was born). The book starts out slow, instead of a begining that has some kind of hook, it muddles around with Barney Polan talking about his gut (Yawn) and the ancient barnacles that once roamed the sport's world. If you like reading the sports section, you'll like this book. Once you get through the first quarter of the book, it picks up speed and complications. By the end I stayed up to finish because I had to know who got caught in the tightening net,and I couldn't concentrate on my homework. The book has a really unique style; it is all first person, but it switches from person to person, so you get inside everyone's mind, sometimes even as they're having a conversation and you get to see their rationalizations, arrogance, fears, and thoughts on how to play basketball. It's also fascinating to see how they all try to outsmart each other, even when they're being outsmarted. Hoop it up Charley!!