“They’ve been known to dog it from time to time. Maybe they were trying to beat the spread so it wouldn’t look as though they were trying not to beat the spread.”
“In other words, if they dog it somebody might think they’re shaving points. You think that goes on in the NBA?”
“Shaving points? I don’t know. Again, with their salaries, how could you bribe them? Kev, I think you’re probably right. They weren’t even aware of the spread, and they played hard because that’s the way they play.” He picked up his coffee cup, set it down. “When you played,” he said, “were you ever approached?”
“Approached? Oh.”
“Were you?”
“God, why would anyone come to me? I was lucky to be on the team.”
“Don’t sell yourself short. You were damn good.”
“I would have been okay somewhere else. I know, Duke was all my idea, but I’ve never been sorry I went. Even if I did ride the bench for four years. I never had more than eight minutes of playing time, so there were never any guys with bent noses trying to get me to dump games.”
“And your teammates were too busy trying to get into the NBA.”
“Trying to get into the Final Four. They knew they were going to get into the NBA.”
The waiter came, and Kevin Parmalee put his hand over his cup. “Just a half a cup for me,” Richard Parmalee said, and was silent until the waiter withdrew. Then he said, “I was approached.”
“Really?”
“Not by a guy with a bent nose. His nose was as straight as yours or mine, and you wouldn’t have marked him as a gangster, not by his appearance or by his manner. Although I suppose that’s exactly what he was.”
“And he wanted you to dump games?”
“Not to dump games. ‘I would never ask you to lose a game,’ he said. It was fine with him if we beat the other team. Just so we didn’t beat the spread.”
“Did you report him?”
“No,” Richard Parmalee said. “No, I didn’t report him.”
“Oh.”
“I took the money,” he said, and raised his eyes to meet his son’s. “And did what I could to earn it.”
“You shaved points.”
“I shaved points. If we were favored, and if Harold gave me the word, I did my best to see that we didn’t cover the spread.”
“How did you do it? Miss shots that you could have made?”
“I missed shots. I don’t know that I could have made them if I hadn’t had a reason not to. Another way, I’d be wide open and I’d pass off instead of taking the shot. There are a million things you can do without being too obvious about it.”
“I can imagine.”
“I got five hundred dollars a game. And this was 1957 we’re talking about. That was a lot of money in 1957.”
“Sure, it must have been a fortune.”
“When I graduated, my first job was as a management trainee with Kaiser & Ledbetter. Starting salary was five thousand dollars a year. And that wasn’t bad money. That’s what you paid a promising college graduate in a job with a future. So every time we didn’t manage to beat the spread, I was making a tenth of a year’s salary, and that’s not counting taxes.”
“I guess you didn’t declare the money that — Harold?”
“Harold. I never knew his last name, and no, I didn’t declare it. He paid me in cash and I didn’t know what the hell to do with it. It’s funny. I was doing it for the money, but I didn’t do anything with the money. I kept it in a cigar box, and I kept moving the box around because I was afraid somebody would find it.”
“You couldn’t put it in the bank?”
“Kev, I didn’t have a bank account. I lived at home with my parents. They gave me a scholarship to play basketball, but all that covered was tuition. I thought the extra money would come in handy, but I didn’t spend a dime of it.”
“You saved it in a cigar box. What did it add up to, do you remember?”
“Forty-five hundred dollars, and how could I forget? He always paid me in twenty-dollar bills. Twenty-five of them at a time, so what does that come to? Two hundred twenty-five? Is that right? Well, it’s close enough. Not enough bills to fill the cigar box, but a good-sized handful.”
“Nine games, that would have been.”
“Nine games,” the father said. “Nine college basketball games, and all I had to do was hold back a little bit, and how hard was that? And who did it hurt? I mean, who gave a damn if we beat St. Bonaventure’s by ten points or three points? The fans didn’t care. The only people who got hurt were the ones who bet on us, and they were breaking the law in the first place by gambling on a basketball game. What the hell did I owe them?”
“It’s not as though your team lost.”
“We did lose one game. We played Adelphi at home, and we were favored, and Harold gave me the word. And I did what I could to keep us from getting too far ahead, and then in the third quarter Adelphi started playing way over their heads, and before I knew it they were out in front, and we never did catch up. Would they have beaten us anyway? The way they were playing I’m tempted to say they would have beaten the Knicks that night, but I don’t know. Maybe yes and maybe no.”
“It must have been weird, watching the game slip away from you.”
“It was awful. I never played harder in my life than in the last five minutes of that game. We were all knocking ourselves out. I remember one shot that went around the rim and out, and the look on the face of the kid who put it up. I’d had my suspicions about him, and his expression confirmed it.”
“You know, I’d been thinking you were the only one doing it, but of course there must have been others.”
“And I never knew how many, or who they were. That one boy, on the basis of the look on his face, but which of the others? Not that I spent a lot of time thinking about it. And I certainly didn’t let myself think about the consequences.”
“Of losing the game?”
“Of doing what I was doing and getting caught at it. It was a crime, you know.”
“I guess it must have been.”
“Oh, no question. There’d been some scandals a few years earlier. A fair number of young men had their lives ruined, and a few went to prison for it. I didn’t worry about it, and it turned out there was nothing to worry about.”
“What happened to the money?”
“Nothing for a couple of years. Then when your mother and I got married, we had expenses. Young couples always do. So the money came in handy after all.”
“Did Mom know where it came from?”
“All she knew was that the bills got paid. Nobody knew that I shaved points. Until tonight, I never said a word about it to anyone.”
“It’s hard to believe,” Kevin Parmalee said, after a moment. “Not that you never said anything, but that you did it. It seems—”
“What?”
“Out of character, I guess.”
“It seemed that way to me at the time. I don’t know that I can explain it. Maybe Harold was a persuasive guy, or maybe I was easily persuaded.”
“How come — no, never mind.”
“What?”
“I just wondered how come you decided to tell me.”
“I hadn’t planned on it.”
“Really? Because I had the sense there was something.”
“There was, but that wasn’t it.”
“Oh?”
“If I’d called for my pipe,” Richard Parmalee said, “I could fuss with it, and tamp the tobacco down and relight it, and kill a surprising amount of time that way. Sometimes I think that was as much of an addiction as the nicotine. I went to the doctor about six weeks ago for my annual physical, which is a misnomer, because I’m doing well if I get around to it every other year. He called me two days later to tell me my PSA was a little high, if you know what that is.”