Hoop Crazy: The Lives of Clair Bee and Chip Hilton
Clair Bee (1896-1983) was a hugely successful basketball coach at Rider College and Long Island University with a 412 and 87 record before his career was derailed in 1951 by a point-shaving scandal. In the trial that sent his star player, Sherman White, to prison, the judge excoriated Bee for creating a morally lax culture that contributed to his players' involvement with gambling. To a certain extent, Bee agreed with the judge's scolding, concluding that coaches, himself included, had become so driven to succeed on the court that they had lost sight of the educational role sports should play. His coaching career effectively over, Bee launched an effort to reform the ills he saw in college sports, and he did so in the pages of the Chip Hilton novels for young readers. He began the series in 1948, but it was the post-scandal books that he used as teaching tools. The books mirrored some of the events of the gambling scandal and were Bee's attempt to reform the problems plaguing college sports. He used his fiction to posit a better sports world that he hoped his young readers would construct and inhabit. The Chip Hilton books were extremely popular and have become a classic series, with over two million copies sold to date. Hoop Crazy is the fascinating story of Clair Bee and his star character Chip Hilton and the ways in which their lives, real and fictional, were intertwined.
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Hoop Crazy: The Lives of Clair Bee and Chip Hilton
Clair Bee (1896-1983) was a hugely successful basketball coach at Rider College and Long Island University with a 412 and 87 record before his career was derailed in 1951 by a point-shaving scandal. In the trial that sent his star player, Sherman White, to prison, the judge excoriated Bee for creating a morally lax culture that contributed to his players' involvement with gambling. To a certain extent, Bee agreed with the judge's scolding, concluding that coaches, himself included, had become so driven to succeed on the court that they had lost sight of the educational role sports should play. His coaching career effectively over, Bee launched an effort to reform the ills he saw in college sports, and he did so in the pages of the Chip Hilton novels for young readers. He began the series in 1948, but it was the post-scandal books that he used as teaching tools. The books mirrored some of the events of the gambling scandal and were Bee's attempt to reform the problems plaguing college sports. He used his fiction to posit a better sports world that he hoped his young readers would construct and inhabit. The Chip Hilton books were extremely popular and have become a classic series, with over two million copies sold to date. Hoop Crazy is the fascinating story of Clair Bee and his star character Chip Hilton and the ways in which their lives, real and fictional, were intertwined.
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Hoop Crazy: The Lives of Clair Bee and Chip Hilton

Hoop Crazy: The Lives of Clair Bee and Chip Hilton

by Dennis Gildea
Hoop Crazy: The Lives of Clair Bee and Chip Hilton

Hoop Crazy: The Lives of Clair Bee and Chip Hilton

by Dennis Gildea

Hardcover

$39.95 
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Overview

Clair Bee (1896-1983) was a hugely successful basketball coach at Rider College and Long Island University with a 412 and 87 record before his career was derailed in 1951 by a point-shaving scandal. In the trial that sent his star player, Sherman White, to prison, the judge excoriated Bee for creating a morally lax culture that contributed to his players' involvement with gambling. To a certain extent, Bee agreed with the judge's scolding, concluding that coaches, himself included, had become so driven to succeed on the court that they had lost sight of the educational role sports should play. His coaching career effectively over, Bee launched an effort to reform the ills he saw in college sports, and he did so in the pages of the Chip Hilton novels for young readers. He began the series in 1948, but it was the post-scandal books that he used as teaching tools. The books mirrored some of the events of the gambling scandal and were Bee's attempt to reform the problems plaguing college sports. He used his fiction to posit a better sports world that he hoped his young readers would construct and inhabit. The Chip Hilton books were extremely popular and have become a classic series, with over two million copies sold to date. Hoop Crazy is the fascinating story of Clair Bee and his star character Chip Hilton and the ways in which their lives, real and fictional, were intertwined.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781557286413
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
Publication date: 11/01/2013
Series: Sport, Culture, and Society
Pages: 402
Product dimensions: 6.30(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

Dennis Gildea, a former sportswriter, is a professor of communications at Springfield College.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction xiii

Chapter 1 The Extremes of Clair Bee: The Bad and the Good 1

The Early Years: 1896-1931

Chapter 2 Grafton and Valley Falls: 1896-1920 17

Chapter 3 Dick Dalton Goes to College: 1920-26 35

Chapter 4 Professor Bee and Coach Bee at Rider: 1926-31 47

Bee at Long Island University: 1931-52

Chapter 5 Making the Blackbirds Proud 65

Chapter 6 Defying Hitler; Losing to Luisetti 83

Chapter 7 The Innovator and the NIT Championships 99

Chapter 8 Jim Crow and the Spit Bucket 121

Chapter 9 Thanksgiving 1939: Ringers and Ambition 141

Chapter 10 World War II, Postwar Boom, and the Creation of Chip 159

Chapter 11 Chip Hilton and Race Relations 173

Chapter 12 Sixty-Four Manhattans and a Few Wives 187

Chapter 13 The Fix and the Fixers 201

Chapter 14 Sherman White and Coach Bee 221

Chapter 15 Journalist Bee Confronts the Scandal 235

Chapter 16 Bee the Psalm Singer 249

Chapter 17 Chip and the Scandal 267

Life after Long Island University: 1952-83

Chapter 18 The Bullets and Beyond 289

Chapter 19 Bobby Knight, Another Championship, and Blindness 305

Epilogue 319

Appendix 323

Notes 331

Bibliography 377

Index 383

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