Betting on sports is nothing new. Ever since the early days of gambling, betting on the outcome existed and unsavory people always looked for ways to make the outcome a sure thing. But in the 1930s with the invention of spread betting, a new strategy emerged in the seedy underworld of college sports gambling: shaving points. This was a strategy in which athletes would intentionally play just bad enough to virtually guarantee a specific score gap, winning the game but also winning for the men controlling the gambling. During the 1940s, college basketball was considered a pure sport. All that changed in 1951 when multiple trials sprung up from the CCNY point shaving scandal, bringing the illusion of purity crashing to the ground nationwide. It was in the wake of this scandal that the film The Basketball Fix was produced.
While the history surrounding this film is fascinating, the film is not. The story is straightforward to a fault, presenting us with a promising young basketball player, Johnny Long (Marshall Thompson), who is struggling with having little money as he enjoys a scholarship to college. He is raising his younger brother and is dating a young woman he wants to marry, but without money he fears he cannot do right for either. Into that picture comes Mike Taft (William Bishop), a gambler who offers him a lot of money to shave points during games; not enough to lose but just enough to guarantee Mike makes a lot of money from the gamblers placing bets with him. While Johnny initially accepts, he eventually decides to step away from the racket, though he soon finds out that isn’t as easy as he thought.
The biggest surprise in this film is how it ends. This is a dour movie that emphasizes heavily the consequences of cheating the system and that ending plays heavily into it. But everything leading up to that is slow and plodding, having little of interest to say to modern viewers. It would have been topical in the early 50s but that isn’t the case anymore and watching it nowadays it is more of a curiosity than anything else. Even Marshall Thompson, who is supposed to be the heart and soul of this film struggles under that weight and we never quite buy into his earnestness, nor his change of heart in the final act. 1951 - 65 minutes
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