Floyd Layne, who passed away on July 29 at the age of 95, was seemingly ubiquitous on the New York City basketball landscape. Whether it was a summer league tournament in Harlem, an event to honor basketball legends in the Bronx, or a visit to Madison Square Garden to catch a Knicks game, you might encounter Layne.
His name is immortalized in New York hoops history, having been a key player on the 1950 City College of New York (CCNY) Beavers team, the only squad in history to win both the NCAA and NIT championships in the same season. It will never be done again as the nation’s best teams no longer play in the NIT, now viewed as a lower-tier postseason tournament.
CCNY, a team wholly composed of Jewish and African American players, knocked off Ohio State, North Carolina State and finally Bradley in their NCAA run. In the NIT, they took out San Francisco, Kentucky, Duquesne and lastly Bradley. Appropriately, both championships were won at the old Madison Square Garden on 8th Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets. Layne and his teammates, men such as Dewitt Clinton High School’s Ed Warner, the NIT MVP, and Taft High School’s Irwin Dambrot, the NCAA MVP, were princes of the city, having birthed pride and glory for CCNY, at that time an ethnic and cultural melting pot of students from poor and working class families.
Until…
For a far too long period of his life, when the 6’2”, Brooklyn-born Layne was still in his formative years, he was infamous for being part of a gambling scandal that rocked the nation. The lionized CCNY team dramatically became pariahs when in 1951 seven players were implicated for taking bribes to fix games.
Thirty-two players from seven colleges admitted to accepting bribes between 1947 and 1950 to manipulate the outcomes of 86 games, including the CCNY’s Warner, Dambrot and Layne. They were subsequently banned for life from playing in the NBA.
Instead of possibly wearing the uniforms of the NBA’s Knicks, Syracuse Nationals or Baltimore Bullets, Layne was a standout for teams such as the Scranton Miners of the American Basketball League and the Hazleton Hawks of the Eastern Professional Basketball League.
But he wasn’t defined by the pitfalls. Instead, Layne’s triumphant portrayal is as a beacon of the expansive New York basketball and education circles. Layne earned a masters degree in education and became a public school teacher. He was a mentor to and model for countless youth. The always engaging sage came full circle to coach the CCNY men’s basketball team from 1974 to 1988. He was also the head coach at Prospect Heights High School in Brooklyn in the 1990s and the head coach of the women’s team at the Fashion Institute of Technology from 2002 to 2004.
He was inducted into the NYC Basketball Hall of Fame in 2003, co-founded by his good friend Howie Evans, this writer’s uncle, mentor and the AmNews’ sports editor emeritus. Layne’s story is one of redemption, honor and empathy.
May he rest in power!
Jaime.harris@amsterdamnews.com