LJWorld.com

Basketball's Bobby Knight is an avid history buff whose reading experiences have included "War and Peace" and all sorts of military biographies, featuring icons like George Patton.

For one of his latest projects, he'd do well to peruse more of the annals of his chosen sport.

Knight, now the successful Texas Tech coach, has been testifying in court about the relationship of the collegiate NCAA and the New York National Invitation Tournament with Madison Square Garden as its hub. Never a devoted fan of the NCAA, Knight has been telling legal eagles that the NCAA is out to destroy the NIT.

Four schools which run the tourney and have a financial interest in the New York project contend they are being short-shrifted on talent for their carnivals because the NCAA manipulates the top teams and weakens the NIT. The plaintiffs say that's by design, that they want protection. Knight agrees on all counts.

So what else is new? How come this hit Bobby after those years during which he coached at Army and Indiana before going, after being canned at Indy, to T-Tech? One of the major reasons Kansas University's Phog Allen and Northwestern's Dutch Lonborg busted a gut to set up the NCAA and promote its tournament was to kill off the NIT.

That was the case as early as 1940, and the NCAA is no less relentless now in helping the NIT find the exit. Well, maybe not as blatantly as Phog and Dutch used to do it while branding the NIT and the Garden as cesspools detrimental to the welfare of college basketball. But the NCAA goal remains the same.

Doc Allen contended after his travels to the East in the 1930s and 1940s that New York was a hotbed for gamblers who worked hard at fixing games being played in the top arenas such as Madison Square Garden. So when he, Lonborg and the other NCAA founding fathers began orchestrating the NCAA rise to eminence, they made it clear they wanted to get rid of this collegiate cancer and its New York influence.

Many, particularly oddsmakers who loved the way the money rolled in, labeled Allen an old fool and tried to laugh it off. Bear in mind, that back around 1940, the NIT was a far superior tournament to what the NCAA event was in its early years. There was great glamor in the Garden, and coaches and players loved to get to the Big Apple and live it up.

World War II came and went, and by 1950 there were five nationally ranked teams in New York City. The Garden was the mecca for the sport. College ball ruled the city so potently that the professional Knicks were forced out of the Garden by Saturday afternoon college doubleheaders.

Native Kansan Adolph Rupp had led Kentucky to NCAA titles in 1948 and 1949, then in 1950 City College of New York accomplished what many still consider one of the top achievement in sports history: CCNY won both the NCAA and NIT championships and beat Kentucky along the way. All the while, Phog Allen of Kansas kept saying New York was loaded with potential for disaster and said the Garden was the focal point of illegality.

District Attorney Frank Hogan began dropping bombshells in 1951 with a rash of indictments. Between 1947 and 1951, 32 players at seven schools became implicated in plots to fix 86 games. Included in the scandal were 1950 CCNY stars such as Al Roth, Ed Roman, Herb Cohen, Irwin Dambrot, Norm Mager and Floyd Lane; Long Island's brilliant Sherman White; Kentucky stars Dale Barnstable, Ralph Beard and Alex Groza. Ultimately the stain on Kentucky got so deep that UK was forced to cancel its entire 1952-53 season.

Phog and the boys back in the sticks didn't have to say "I told you so." They'd been hustling to wipe out the NIT and Garden dominance for some time. That venue had a drastic fall from grace. Even though much has happened, the Garden never has quite regained its once-exalted college status; the NIT has been an off-and-on tournament ever since. Playing in both the NIT and NCAA at season's end has been banned for years.

Big-time college ball managed to survive near destruction in 1951, thanks to people such as leaders like Allen and Lonborg. There was another major scandal in 1961 and lesser ones in the '70s, '80s and '90s. But the NCAA Tournament that Phog, Dutch Lonborg, Walter Byers and Wayne Duke built from the ground up is humongous and has the potential to weaken the NIT even further.

Bobby Knight is right. The NCAA continues to try to wipe out the NIT and has been at it for at least 65 years.

As for the gambling and its influence, that also has exploded. The Nevada State Gaming Commission noted that nearly $175 million was wagered on college and pro ball in the state in March of 2000. That April, after the NCAA Tournament ended, that dropped to about $54 million. Just as the tournament has mushroomed, so has the gambling loot and, doubtless, the point-shaving. We'll see more fixing.

Bobby Knight doesn't like that, either, as is the case with a lot of us.

¢ The Kansas City Royals baseballers are malingering in a Hades that's mind-boggling. So why not forget their miseries and focus on a nostalgic video project that Linda Haskins of Take Ten Inc. in Lawrence and Dave Pomeroy are preparing for an April, 2006, debut? It's titled "Kansas City Athletics Baseball: The Lucky 13 (1954-67)".

Does it seem like a half-century since Arnold Johnson bought the Philadelphia Athletics and relocated them to Kansas City? Johnson died in 1960, Crazy Charlie Finley took over and did a lot of nutty things before moving the team to Oakland. The team rosters had characters galore and K.C. could claim that it was big-league.

Haskins has been in television for 25 years and Pomeroy recently retired as program director at KTWU in Topeka. They have an incredible wealth of material, much of which nobody's ever seen or heard, and they'll willingly listen to anyone who has more unique data and stories.