CABS – Matthew Goodman

Matthew Goodman
The City Game: Triumph, Scandal, and a Legendary Basketball Team

The City Game tells the thrilling and heartbreaking story of the City College Beavers, which in 1950 became the only team ever to win the NIT and NCAA basketball tournaments in the same year. The double-championship team was, by every measure, extraordinary. The City College of New York was known for intellectual achievement, not athletic prowess. Moreover, every single player as well as the coach was either Jewish or African-American. In 1951, the team’s five starting players were arrested for conspiring with gamblers to “shave points.” They were expelled from college and banned from the NBA for life. Overnight they turned from heroes to pariahs. Informed by interviews with every surviving member of the team, The City Game tells a complicated story: of scapegoats, corruption, and how at least one other college – protected by police and powerful religious and political leaders — managed to escape a shared scandal unscathed.

Matthew Goodman is the New York Times-bestselling author of four books of nonfiction: The City Game: Triumph, Scandal, and a Legendary Basketball Team (Ballantine Books, 2019); Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World (Ballantine Books, 2013); The Sun and the Moon: Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York (Basic Books, 2008); and Jewish Food: The World at Table (HarperCollins, 2005). Matthew has taught writing and literature at Vermont College, Tufts University, and Emerson College, and has been a visiting writer at the University of Missouri and the Fashion Institute of Techology in New York City. He has also taught at writers’ conferences including the Antioch Writers Workshop, the Cape Cod Writers Conference, and the Chautauqua Institution. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony (twice) and the Corporation of Yaddo. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, with his wife and two children.

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