These Hawks Didn’t Fly Straight
They shaved points in the Final Four – March 24, 1961.
The St. Joe’s Hawks have made 21 appearances in the NCAA Basketball Tournament. You would think that at a place like St. Joseph’s, a school that identifies so much with the sport of basketball, that they might revere their one team that made it to the tournament semi-finals.
Sadly, the legacy of St. Joe’s only Final Four team to this day is one of scandal and shame. About a month after “the Big Dance” in 1961, the big story was that three of their players, including the team’s leading scorer, had taken money from gamblers in exchange for shaving points.
St. Joe’s was really good, but Ohio State was great.
Even if they played had the game straight (they lost 95-69), the Hawks probably weren’t going to get past Ohio State in the semi-finals.
Larry Siegfried was only the third-best player for the Buckeyes, and even he managed to average double figures over the course of an 11-season NBA career that included being a member of five championship-winning Boston Celtics teams.
Jerry Lucas got the most press among all the players on that Ohio State team, which was defending the title they had won in 1960. Lucas had a 17-year, Hall of Fame career in the NBA.
And Ohio State had another solid contributor who really blossomed when he got to the NBA. His name was John Havlicek.
But as great as they appeared to be, Ohio State stumbled and lost in the finals to the University of Cincinnati – the year after Oscar Robertson graduated. And nobody has ever suggested that Lucas, Siegfried, Havlicek et. al. were shaving points.
The Hawks, although never ranked in the top 10, did finish the regular season with a 22-4 record.
And in two of those losses, against Dayton and Xavier, the fix was in.
When he wasn’t shaving points, Jack Egan, a senior, was their brightest star. That season he averaged 22 points and 12 rebounds per game, and was a third-round draft pick of the Philadelphia Warriors.
A Forgotten Classic and the Complicated Legacy of the 1961 St. Joe’s Hawks
One of the greatest college basketball games ever played was the 4-overtime third place contest in the 1961 NCAA tournament between Utah and scandal-ridden St. Joe’s. Vice.com
Portrait of a Fixer
When the scandal broke, play for the national championship was reaching its final stages, and of the four teams that were to fight it out in Kansas City, one was St. Joseph’s, which had not yet been mentioned in connection with the fixes. But Sports Illustrated was aware that three St. Joseph’s players had accepted bribes. Accordingly, Basketball Editor Ray Cave spent several days in Philadelphia with the team, and traveled with it to Kansas City, where he watched it win third place in the tournament. He particularly observed one of the three players, a forward named Frank Majewski, because it was Majewski who had brought the other two into the conspiracy. Cave’s report on Majewski, out of deference to the grand jury’s inquiries, has been held up until now. What follows, then, is a unique sports story: a portrait of a fixer drawn at a time when he was still unexposed, but operating under the dual stress of national championship play and of the knowledge that an investigation was in progress that might bring his private world crashing down around his ears. Last week Frank Majewski’s private world crashed. Sports Illustrated.