Matthew Goodman- The City Game

THE CITY GAME by bestselling author Matthew Goodman is the incredible underdog story of the 1949-50 City College Beavers basketball team, their unlikely rise to top and subsequent fall from grace. In this gripping, true-life account, Goodman uncovers the real story behind the greatest American sports scandal since the 1919 “Black Sox.” In 1950 the City College Beavers became the only basketball team in history to win both the NIT and NCAA tournaments in the same year. One year later the team’s star players were arrested for conspiring with gamblers to shave points. Overnight the players went from heroes to villains – but as Goodman shows, they were actually caught in a much larger web of corruption that stretched across major social institutions from City Hall to the police department, sports arenas, and even the universities themselves. It’s a historical story of duplicity and cynicism that’s all too relevant to big-money college sports today. Matthew Goodman is the author of three previous books of nonfiction: Eighty Days: Nellie Bly and Elizabeth Bisland’s History-Making Race Around the World; The Sun and the Moon: The Remarkable True Account of Hoaxers, Showmen, Dueling Journalists, and Lunar Man-Bats in Nineteenth-Century New York; and Jewish Food: The World at Table. A New York Times bestseller, Eighty Days has been translated into eight languages. Goodman’s work has appeared in The American Scholar, Harvard Review, Salon, and many other publications. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two children.