Sitting lifeless above a bustling matrix of subway and railroad tunnels, between 7th and 8th avenues, is a garden among a concrete jungle. For the girl who asked for Big East Tournament tickets for her 16th birthday, it takes just 56 minutes and two escalator rides (two staircases, for the brave of heart) and there it is: Madison Square Garden. The sections are dotted with clashing jerseys colored in Syracuse orange, Louisville red and Georgetown Bulldogs blue. Here, even the rafter-scraping seats make fans feel as if they are playing left-bench.  

           This Madison Square Garden, though, is not the “Gah’den” of the Roaring 20’s, of the Great Depression or even of the 1951 point-shaving scandal. If this circular building’s walls — which were constructed in 1968, the fourth structure to bear its name — they would say nothing of the greatness of City College of New York or Manhattan College or Long Island University, each of which drew packed houses in the 1940’s. Instead, they witnessed the restoration and consolidation of New York basketball into a single New York team: the St. John’s Red Storm.             Through its prime, which began with the inaugural season of the National Invitation Tournament in 1938 before its revival in the 1970-80’s, St. John’s was a team achieving for New Yorkers by New Yorkers. St. John’s lived and died by New York; reaching an NCAA Final Four in 1985 with a locally-grown team and falling back into oblivion when backyard talent fled for the Big Ten and Atlantic Coast Conference. Today, New York’s “team” may be Syracuse as much as it is St. John’s for the true college basketball fans. But for the true New Yorker, the Johnnies will always be it. Regardless, while it was a lack of arrests that prevented St. John’s from irrevocable destruction after the 1951 point-shaving scandal, a year that arguably killed New York City basketball, it was strict adherence to a New York-style, locally developed program housed in the Garden that dictated the Red Storm’s success and, more recently, its failure to compete nationally.

            Perhaps it was the common ground basketball, an indisputably American sport, provided early-20th century immigrants or perhaps it was something more innocent, but basketball blossomed in New York City just forty years after its invention. Without room between brick buildings for sprawling football fields, pre-basketball college campuses were little more than the halfway houses for first-generation Americans en route to achieving the American Dream (“City Dump”). Dr. Reverend James B. Naismith, though, gave them something to cheer about in the meantime. The Knicks, the Yankees and the Dodgers were aliens to the Empire City. But college basketball — the Jews, the blacks, the Italians and Irish kids from up the block and around the corner — was every bit New York. From CCNY, All-American captain Ed Warner, 1949-50 leading scorer Ed Roman, NIT Most Outstanding Player Irwin Dambrot and Hall of Fame coach Nat Holman were each from the Bronx. From Brooklyn, there was 6-foot-4 guard Allen Roth and Norm Mager. And in 1950, CCNY’s dual-championship winning starting lineup comprised two black and three Jewish players (Burns, 1). The city’s college teams were diverse only by standards of their parents, playing just after the Holocaust, but were now unified by common history in the city — they were New Yorkers first.

              Then, in front of 18,000 people at Madison Sqaure Garden, CCNY became Jesse Owens in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, shoving it to the racists as Owens had to Hitler. On March 15, 1950, CCNY faced then-Coach of the Year Adolph Rupp and his Kentucky Wildcats in the NIT quarterfinals. “More vividly and eloquently than words, the figures tell the story of the worst defeat ever pinned on any Wildcat basketball team since the court sport was introduced at the Lexington university back in 1903,” reported the New York Times after a group of immigrants toppled the all-white blue-grass kids, 89-50 (Effrat, 1). In that same year, the city boasted five schools — Manhattan, CCNY, St. John’s, LUI and NYU — ranked among powerhouses like Kentucky, Syracuse and Bradley. So popular were the college basketball double headers, which drew 750,00 spectators to the cozy arena in 1949, that the New York Knickerbockers were forced into the Sunday afternoon timeslot. With an all-too New York, in-your-face style of play that showcased skilled ball handling and weaving, the city became “a two-sport team. On the streets, people talked baseball, but they lived basketball” (“City Dump”). In spirit and in execution, this basketball was an acting-out of the culture, one that embodied the city and put aside ethnic differences that plagued society off the court.

Then, in an instant, it all came crashing down.

            The 1951 point-shaving scandal was not the first and, certainly, would not be the last instance of cheating in college athletics. And yet, a single New York Times article written on February 18, 1951, fueled the death of a once thriving college basketball culture in New York City. District Attorney Frank Hogan carried out 32 arrests between seven schools for fixed games between 1947 and 1950 — including one from NYU, two from Manhattan, six from LIU and seven from the city’s basketball poster child, CCNY (Goldstein, 1). Apart from initial team sanctions and game cancellations, it had the power of sucking the spirit out of the Garden. So what did this scandal have that the others since (Ohio State football, more Kentucky basketball, etc.) have not? In December 1950, previously confused fans left a doubleheader at Madison Square Garden “furious” after the CCNY trio of Roman, Roth and Warner played poorly enough to lose to an Arizona team that could be called an underdog at best (Figone, 26). Each of the afore mentioned CCNY players, each a local kid that neighbors cheered for, was arrested. Basketball died because those kids were the heroes, the kids living out the American Dream on the hardwood, working hard and honestly to climb the socioeconomic ladder. They were LeRoy Smith, an LIU standout and former marine who was able to flee the streets to play ball thanks to the GI Bill (Goldstein, 1). Crime aside, cheating was an undermining of the hope basketball players instilled with each victory and of the faith loyal fans had put in them to do win one for New York.

***

            “God bless,” says the voice on the other end of the line with a New York accent that seeps through the phone, a melody of glory days past. Click.

            Jack Kaiser, the current Athletic Director Emeritus at St. John’s University in Queens, NY, has been a part of the University since his time across the street at all-boys, all-Catholic Saint John’s Prep, more than 70 years ago. In 1949, Kaiser, a three-sport athlete in soccer, basketball and baseball, was named the college Player of the Year as a captain of St. John’s first College World Series baseball team — he would take a second team to the CWS again as a coach. After an injury cut his professional career short, Kaiser served as a manager of his former team, the Boston Red Sox, before returning to his alma mater to coach St. John’s baseball to 366 wins and 11 NCAA tournament appearances. Today, as an Athletic Director and the face of record to prominent alumni at what he calls the “Gah’den” Kaiser is every bit a New York man, born, raised and returned — following a brief stint with the rival Boston Red Sox — in a city founded on the American Dream. Jack Kaiser embodies the formula for St. John’s basketball’s successes (and its failures) over the last half-century. He is St. John’s.

            Whereas CCNY represented the blacks and Jew of the city, St. John’s became a haven for another minority: the Catholics. If basketball, which was spread through muscular Christianity, was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, it grew up in New York. Facing “Irish need not apply” signs in a city where the anti-Catholic King James bible was taught in public school, the nearly one-million strong Irish began establishing Catholic schools in each diocese (Albanese, 46). From there, a one Bishop Sheil founded Catholic Youth Organization basketball, a program that arguably allowed Catholics to move from the periphery to the core of American society (Gems, 235). And so, today, St. John’s “is a food chain that starts on a million courts and spreads to include who knows how many players and coaches, a whole array of JV, high-school, CYO, and AAU teams, plus scouts, freelance college recruiters, would-be agents, playground touts, summer-camp organizers, and every other variety of warm-up-suit-wearing character in the city” (Jacobson, 2). For players like Kaiser, it is a matter of growing up wanting to play for St. John’s and walking to “the college across the street” (Kaiser). There was Chris Mullin and Mark Jackson and Daryl Hill — each of whom fit the standard mold. “When you play CYO, you’re thinking about St. John’s. Same in high school. When St. John’s is doing good, it gives everyone in the city a lift, because if you’re a player it says something about you, because you’re part of it,” Jackson, the 1980’s standout, said (3). As recently as 2008, despite a nation, competitive recruiting market, 10 of 16 players on the St. John’ roster hailed from the five boroughs (Lupica, 2). It is a trend that continues today, for better or for worse. It is the St. John’s signature.

           Coaching, though, may be more telling of the St. John’s mantra than those who played for the Red Storm. For the most part, St. John’s coaches have been Irish or Italian Catholic, and always from New York. Here, the pattern of live-and-die-by-with-New-Yorkers persists. Like Kaiser, St. John’s legend Luigi P. “Lou” Carnesecca, the Red Storm’s most successful and storied coach fits the model of New York coach to a ‘T.’ A product of a Catholic high school in Queens, Carnesecca graduated from the University that all too familiar year, 1950, and returned to his alma mater 15 years later as a head coach. Carnesecca took 24 St. John’s basketball teams to post-season appearances — he left the program briefly to coach the New York Nets in the early 70’s — including three Sweet 16 and two Elite Eight appearances, a Final Four bid in 1985 (the only in St. John’s history) and an NIT championship four years later. St. John’s mid-80’s success, finally, “brought college basketball back to Broadway,” the way it was meant to be all along (Lupica, 1). And when St. John’s strayed away from its coaching formula, it felt the consequences. In the early 2000’s the job was given to an “interloper,” Mike Jarvis who envisioned St. John’s recruiting outside of the city to compete with powerhouses like Duke and Kentucky. He just didn’t understand “St. John’s lives off getting the local kid who wants to stay home,” and so he was fired, and replaced with a black Catholic from New York, coach Norm Roberts (Jackson, 3). St. John’s is a New York team through and through, and, over its rich history, that has started with local coaching as much as player recruiting.

            Players and coaches have come and go, but what has remained a constant for St. John’s: Madison Square Garden. It must first be noted that the St. John’s basketball teams of the 1940’s (pre-1968 MSG IV) were at the pinnacle of NY hoops as much as their CCNY rivals. The Red Storm missed out on the first NIT, but appeared in a classic nine times in 12 years, winning back-to-back championships in 1943-44 (Rubin, 1). But since the opening of the latest Gah’den, only St. Johns — not CCNY, LIU, Manhattan or any other team involved directly with the point-shaving scandal — has had its home-court advantage one of most famous arenas world-wide. In addition to the luxury of inherent media presence surrounding it, St. John’s is the only New York City team to participate in Madison Square Garden’s prized basketball week: the Big East Tournament. As an AD, Kaiser was one of three founders, alongside Dave Gavitt of Providence and Seton Hall’s Richie Regan, to set up a basketball-based conference. The tournament moved around each year to the Carrier Dome in Syracuse and Pittsburg among other locations, but found its home in Madison Square Garden in the late 1970’s. With teams like Villanova, Georgetown and Syracuse all developing throughout the 90’s, the Big East became the premier basketball conference in the nation, and the spotlight was once again on the Garden. “Even though it has more competition now with the Barclay’s Center and Prudential Center (NJ), the Garden is still the Garden. It is world-wide known, and no one can take that away,” Kaiser said. Over the last decade, though, St. John’s has become a small fish in the big pond that is the Big East. Conference realignment will soon bring in recent top-25 programs in Butler, Xavier and Creighton. Ideas of switching into an easier conference like the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference (MAAC), though, seem preposterous to St. John’s faithful. It’s always been the Gah’den, with a New York accent to boot.

             From the ruins of New York basketball as a result of the 1951 point-shaving scandal rose up a singular New York team. “When the Red Storm takes a bad hit, New York feels it. This is because, more than those dim-bulbed Knick mercenaries over there at Dolan U., St. John’s is the true New York home team. It sits at the pinnacle of the sprawling, endlessly interconnected city-hoops universe,” wrote New York Magazine’s Mark Jacobson on the rise and fall of Red Storm basketball (2). St. John’s is no longer the backyard-grown basketball factory; it cannot compete with the North Carolinas, the Dukes or the Kentucky’s of the NCAA today, the powerhouses that recruit from the corners of the globe. But St. John’s won’t look far outside of the five boroughs. It doesn’t want to. After all, that’s not the market St. John’s caters to. Frank Sinatra puts it best, it’s all about being at the heart of that “New York, New York.”