The Knicks were expected to select Mr. White in the NBA draft, and he was told by his coach, Clair Bee, that they were going to offer a lucrative contract.
But in February 1951, only days after The Sporting News named him college player of the year, Mr. White and several LIU teammates were arrested on charges of accepting bribes from a professional gambler. The players, in exchange for the bribes, affected the outcome of games, essentially by keeping margins of victory below the established point spreads to create betting coups. Players from powerful teams such as City College, Bradley, and the University of Kentucky were also implicated in what became a national scandal.
Mr. White, a consensus All-American in his junior year, was accused of taking bribes involving several LIU games in his junior and senior seasons, including a loss to Syracuse in the 1950 National Invitation Tournament. He led detectives to $5,500 in bribe money he had hidden in an envelope taped to the back of a dresser drawer at his room in a Brooklyn YMCA.
Mr. White was sentenced to a year in jail in November 1951 on his guilty plea to a misdemeanor conspiracy charge; he served nearly nine months. Together with the other players in the scandal, he was barred from the NBA.
“It wasn’t the money; it was peer pressure,’’ Mr. White told Dave Anderson of The New York Times in 1984. “I was naive.’’
White said: “I used to think about what I missed not playing in the NBA, but not much now. It took some time for the bitterness to go away, but you realize there are other values in life besides basketball.’’
Sherman White was born in Philadelphia but grew up in Englewood, N.J., where he starred for an unbeaten Dwight Morrow High School team in 1947.
When Madison Square Garden marked the 50th anniversary of the college game there in 1984, White was named to its all-time team of collegians who had played at the old or new Garden, and he was introduced as “the virtuoso of New York basketball.’’
