The Biggest Scandal in Sports

Well I am currently severely limited in my mobility so I figured what the heck, why not post a new sports blog. There's really only one topic on my mind today and that is The Biggest Scandal in Sports. And it may not be what you think.


Steroids. In any sport. Baseball, Football, Golf, or perhaps the dirtiest sport of them all, cycling. It's all no big deal. Dog Fighting. Michael Vick. Federal Indictment. Small potatoes. An NBA referee involved with mobsters in point shaving, and throwing games. Now that is a scandal. Tim Donaghy has suddenly put the result of every NBA game in question. In the past, but more importantly in the future as well. Every close game with a questionable call will now involve rants invoking the name of Tim Donaghy. Sure, its easy to blame Donaghy. He shouldn't have been involved with the mafia . . . Well duh. He should have had more integrity than to fix games or point shave just for some extra money. These things are true. Still I don't blame Donaghy, I blame the NBA.

The NBA needs to take the brunt of the responsibility for this whole situation. Throw Donaghy in jail, he deserves it. You roll with the mafia you are going to get pinched, end of story. However, point the finger at the league. The NBA doesn't pay its official enough, plain and simple. You pay your people right and they don't go around looking for shady ways to make extra money. Take the 1919 Black Sox scandal for instance. One of the major reasons these players threw the World Series was because they weren't getting paid squat by their ballclub. And this is pre-free agency, so its not like they could just perform for a few years and then bolt to the open market. The guys paying the players to fix the series allowed them to make a living, thats all their is to it. It's the same basic principle with Mr. Donaghy and whatever other officials he is about to give up in this investigation (you don't really think this is an isolated incident do you?). Pay your people right, and they are much less likely to wind up getting paid by the wrong people to do the wrong things.

Now you're saying, Ravi, its all fine and good that the NBA is at fault for this whole thing, but is this really worse than steroids and dogfighting? Yes. Steroids, you can test for, you can clean up your game, you have a legitimate testing program for a few years and people forget about the whole thing as a small dark period in baseball's long and glorious history. Dogfighting? Yes it's a felony and its disturbing as all get out, but its one stupid athlete involved in a stupid off the field hobby. The fact that an NBA official is involved in gambling on games that he calls, puts the integrity of the entire league, the integrity of all of professional basketball on the line. Unlike the other issues that the other sports are dealing with, this shakes pro basketball to its very core. Basketball refs can effect a game so much by the way they are calling it, that a guy blowing whistles with alterior motives can seriously effect the outcome of the game. Need the Cavs to lose? Whoops looks like Lebron has gotten called for a couple charges instead of the block call or the no call that he usually gets. All of a sudden King James is out for the rest of the first half with foul trouble and we all know how good the Cavs are without Lebron. Yeah, it really is that easy. Congratulations, I just taught you how to throw an NBA game if you are a ref. Its not really rocket science.

You see the problem with this isn't just that so many calls in a basketball game can go either way (although that's certainly part of it), its that you can actually kick a team's best player out of a game with relatively little fanfare. In the NFL, you can call pass interference on Champ Bailey all day if you'd like, but the difference is, after 6 times, you can't send him to the showers. In basketball, more than in any other sport, the integrity of the referees is absolutely vital to maintaining the integrity of the sport itself. That is why this is such a big deal. Who can ever say for sure now whether the outcome of any given NBA game was legitimate? Now that kind of cloud hanging over your sport definitely qualifies as the biggest scandal around. The running joke in sports circles is that NBA commissioner David Stern is the most powerful man in sports. If this is true, then the mobsters trying to keep Donaghy from talking may be the least of his worries.