The Wizard of Odds: How Jack Molinas Almost Destroyed the Game of Basketball

by Charley Rosen

In The Wizard of Odds, renowned and best-selling basketball writer Charley Rosen brings us for the first time the full life story of Jack Molinas, one of the greatest basketball players of his era, a man whose gambling addiction and hubris caused his ultimate demise. Drawing on numerous, previously unavailable first-person accounts, including Jack Molinas’s own journal and trial transcripts, Rosen presents the true saga of a man who perhaps better than anyone around him understood the weaknesses of the system in which he lived—so much so that he convinced himself that he could manipulate that system to his advantage with total impunity, in a life’s journey that took him from NBA play to the Mafia and the pornographic film industry, and to an ultimate tragic destiny.

Genres: Sports, Basketball

432 pages, Paperback

First published November 9, 2001

About the author

Charles Elliot Rosen is an American author and former basketball player and basketball coach. Rosen has been selected for induction into the NYC Basketball Hall of Fame with the Class of 2024.

Reviews

[Michael Backus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rosen isn't an elegant writer and at times, this book is overburdened with detail, yet the story is just fantastic. Jack Molinas, Super Jewish athlete, one of the great early 50s NYC basketball players, starts fixing games while playing for Columbia, goes onto the NBA where he continues to fix games, gets banned for life (and Rosen makes a good case here that Molinas, while undoubtedly guilty, became a fall guy for a large number of NBA vets who were also fixing games -- since he was a rookie, it was easier to get rid of him and not implicate the league as a whole) and it gets more interesting from there. Molinas goes out and gets a law degree and sets up a group called Fixers Inc that casts about all over the country paying players at colleges to dump games for various mafioso types. Molinas is simply an amazing character, one of those guys who a fiction writer really couldn't make up. Smart, cocky, sweet in his way, he went about methodically enlisting dozens of players in fixing games, getting himself deeper and deeper into business with some very powerful and scary guys. What happens is inevitable, Molinas is a train wreck waiting to happen, but it's also touching because he never lost his desire to play in the NBA again and kept bugging the commissioner in the early 60s to let him back. It was clear the man could still play at that level and Rosen (who has a column on the NBA on Fox Sports online, he's the most relentlessly honest expert writing) even has a small connection to Molinas. Back in the early 60s, Rosen was a star on Hunter's basketball team and he sought out Molinas for some one on one -- Molinas proceeded to destroy him and in the process, confirm Rosen's (relentlessly honest) take on his own game, that he would remain forever a 'small time big man.' Why someone hasn't snatched up the Molinas story for a movie, I'm not sure, he's a classic NY character from start to finish.

[Bo Belanger · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good stuff in here, fascinating character, it’s just 100 pages too long.

[Benja · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5. Book is a little plodding but very well researched and incorporates a lot of first hand sources... Molinas' story is WILD

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great read and fascinating story...definitely worth reading!

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is very interesting. Great if you like crime, sports, scandal or 1950's NYC and 1960's Pro basketball history.