The Holy Land of Hoops

For the first time in a while, I flipped by ESPN. Opposite the Nationals-Giants game on FS1, ESPN2 had poker, and ESPN itself had a 30-for-30 on the Boston College point shaving scandal, which happened in the 1978-79 season (this followed a 30-for-30 which I missed about "Morganna - the Kissing Bandit").

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1978%E2%80 ... ng_scandal

The first test run of point shaving was apparently a BC game vs Providence in December 78. As a 10-year-old, I almost definitely would have watched this game with my brother, probably was on Channel-10 in Providence with Chris Clark announcing. The final game in the point shaving scheme was a nationally televised BC game vs Holy Cross in early 79.

Anyway, I don't remember the scandal in the news (story broke not til '80 or '81). But the amazing thing is that the scandal was cooked up with the actual Goodfellas movie guys... Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) and those guys were the ones giving orders to the BC conspirators. There was a BC player from Pittsburgh who was high school friends with one of the mob guys.

Pretty interesting but pretty scary.

I had this DVRd and got around to watching it last night, as is expected with all of the 30/30's it was a pretty awesome production.

I thought it was pretty crazy (although somewhat expected) how drastically different the viewpoints of the players and the mob members were of the agreements that were made at various times.

The craziest thing though was at the end of the day, there really wasn't a whole lot of money even made on it and it ended up putting Burke in jail for probably one of his more minor crimes that he may or may not have even been involved in.