Sherman White, 82, an L.I.U. Star Caught in Point-Shaving Scandal, Dies (original) (raw)

Aug. 11, 2011

Sherman White, an all-American forward at Long Island University of Brooklyn whose prospects for a brilliant N.B.A. career with the Knicks were shattered by his involvement in the 1951 point-shaving scandal that shook college basketball, died Aug. 4 at his home in Piscataway, N.J. He was 82.

The cause was congestive heart failure, his wife, Ellen, said.

In the winter of ’51, his senior season at L.I.U., White emerged as perhaps the finest player in college basketball. An agile 6 feet 8 inches, he was leading the nation in scoring with an average of more than 27 points a game. He was adept at rebounding, jumping, handling the ball and running the court.

The Knicks were expected to select White in the N.B.A. draft, and he was told by his coach, Clair Bee, that they were going to offer a lucrative contract.

But only days after The Sporting News named him college player of the year, White and several L.I.U. teammates were arrested in February 1951 on charges of accepting bribes from a professional gambler. The players, in exchange for the bribes, affected the outcome of games, essentially by keeping margins of victory below the established point spreads to create betting coups. Players from powerful teams like City College, Bradley and the University of Kentucky were also implicated in what became a national scandal.

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White, an all-American at Long Island University, had his career ruined by his involvement in a point-shaving scandal.Credit...Associated Press

White, a consensus all-American in his junior year, was accused of taking bribes involving several L.I.U. games in his junior and senior seasons, one of them a loss to Syracuse in the 1950 National Invitation Tournament. He led detectives to $5,500 in bribe money he had hidden in an envelope taped to the back of a dresser drawer at his room in a Brooklyn Y.M.C.A.

White was sentenced to a year in jail in November 1951 on his guilty plea to a misdemeanor conspiracy charge and served nearly nine months. Together with the other players in the scandal, he was barred from the N.B.A.

“It wasn’t the money, it was peer pressure,” White told Dave Anderson of The New York Times in 1984. “I was naïve.”

White said: “I used to think about what I missed not playing in the N.B.A., but not much now. It took some time for the bitterness to go away, but you realize there are other values in life besides basketball.”

Sherman White was born on Dec. 16, 1928, in Philadelphia but grew up in Englewood, N.J., where he starred for an unbeaten Dwight Morrow High School team in 1947.

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Sherman White in 1998.Credit...Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

When Madison Square Garden marked the 50th anniversary of the college game there in 1984, White was named to its all-time team of collegians who had played at the old or new Garden, and he was introduced as “the virtuoso of New York basketball.”

In addition to his wife, White is survived by his daughter, Marcell White-Arcudi, from his marriage to his first wife, Doris, which ended in divorce; three stepchildren, Laurie Badami, Shelley Lane and Wilbert Lane; a brother, Robert; and a sister, Rebecca Davis.

White played basketball in the semipro Eastern League and worked in sales for a New Jersey liquor distributor, but he focused as well on coaching and mentoring inner-city youngsters. He did volunteer work with a community development center in Orange, N.J., and, as he related it to Charley Rosen for his book “Scandals of ’51” (1978), “I’ll tell a kid about my involvement in the scandals if I think it will do him any good.”

The basketball courts at Mackay Park in Englewood were named for White in 2010.

If not for the scandal, White might have propelled the Knicks to N.B.A. supremacy at a time when the Minneapolis Lakers and center George Mikan were dominating the league.

“Sherman would have put us over the top,” the Knicks Hall of Fame guard Dick McGuire told The Record of New Jersey in 1999. “We would have won championships with him. What you see now with Kevin Garnett, Marcus Camby and Lamar Odom, you saw Sherman doing back then. He was well before his time.”

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