Barney Polan's Game (Harvest Book)

The United States love sports. The heroes of diamond, court, and gridiron are worshiped like gods, and when they fall, the impact can crack the foundations of American culture. In 1951, college basketball was rocked by scandal; players, coaches, gamblers, and mobsters had conspired to fix games on a massive scale, bringing the sport to the brink of collapse.

Charley Rosen--the author of Scandals of '51, the classic nonfiction account of these events--has written a novel that attempts to dig beneath the headlines and explore the deeper implications for both individuals and the nation. The central character is sportswriter Barney Polan, a would-be Faulkner who finds poetry in college basketball. Polan is a hero in the Willy Loman mold, feeling adrift in a world where the old certainties are disappearing and the nobility of the sport he loves is being swallowed up by greed. His crumbling idealism in the face of scandal and corruption mirrors the broader themes woven through the novel.

Rosen allows other characters to take center stage in first-person-narrated chapters that present events from a myriad of perspectives, including those of the players and Johnny Boy Gianelli, the gangster who set the wheels of corruption in motion. This brings a documentary weight to a work that is balanced by rapid-fire, expertly paced writing, particularly in the basketball scenes, making Barney Polan's Game much more than a retelling. Rosen takes one of the great myth-making factories of American culture and uses it to reflect on the enormous changes that swept the country at the beginning of the 1950s--a time when racism and political paranoia began to bubble up though America's postwar optimism. In the clumsy conspiracy of petty gangsters and fresh-faced college boys, Rosen finds a microcosm of the rapidly souring American dream.