Limited Popularity.

At the start of the 1950s basketball was a local and regional spectator sport in America. While it is true that this distinctly American game (invented by James Naismith, a Canadian at the Springfield, Massachusetts, YMCA Training College) had gained favor throughout the world, basketball remained a game that, for sports fans at least, simply filled the space in the winter between football and baseball seasons. National interest in basketball was restricted to the late spring, when both the National Invitational Tournament (NIT) and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Tournament were played.

Crooked Collegians.

College basketball saw perhaps both its finest and its worst hour of the decade in 1950. In the spring City College of New York (CCNY), which had gone 17-5 during the regular season pulled off the singular feat of winning both...