Can American pro sports dive any lower?
The only major sport that has been spared from all of the racket is hockey, arguably the worst-off entity on the professional scene.
But the other three – basketball, football, and baseball – are rotting to the core. Law enforcement has entered the equation in every situation – Michael Vick and dog fighting, Barry Bonds and steroids, Tim Donaghy and gambling.
All of the news is negative, all of the evidence damning. Have you, the loyal sports fan, ever witnessed such a fury of bad news?
The NFL should get off the easiest from its respective problem. Vick has done nothing to compromise the on-the-field product. If he is guilty, then he is guilty of shaming himself and his organization, but the game of football comes away clean as long as Roger Goodell judges with an iron hammer.
Baseball and basketball won’t get off so easily. Both sports are mired in scandal and ambiguity. The federal government is involved in the every day headlines. Bud Selig, baseball’s commissioner, was summoned to appear before Congress to answer questions about the outbreak of steroid usage within his league – why the testing wasn’t tough enough and the penalties against users weren’t great enough.
Selig presided over the infamous Steroid Era, baseball’s great renaissance that turned into a grandiose fake. Selig was either too naïve to figure it out or blissfully ignorant.
Either way, Selig is now paying the ultimate price: a steroid user as the home-run king. Bonds will break the home run record in the next few weeks, and fans and players alike have accepted the fate of the game’s holiest record.
It is baseball’s biggest black eye – and a permanent smudge in the record books.
But the NBA might be worse off. There have been scandals in the past with players and organizations and coaches. There has been nothing, however, like this.
A referee cheating is a completely different matter. The refs and umpires and officials are supposed to preserve the sanctity of the games they govern, and they have the most power when it comes to point-shaving or any of the other illegal game-altering techniques.
A corrupt ref strikes at the very core of spontaneity, which is the lifeblood of sports and their most attractive element for fans and players alike. The idea of games being fixed is disturbing for anyone who uses sports as a vehicle for entertainment. It’s not entertaining if somebody is purposely altering the outcome.
Of course, one corrupt referee ruins it for the rest of the bunch, which now has to answer to NBA fans and players who will have a field day with Donaghy’s corruption. But the biggest question remains: was Donaghy alone in his crimes?
If there are other NBA referees getting paid on the side then there will be hell to pay for the league, which will struggle to regain its credibility for the better part of a decade.
And there lies the difference between the NBA’s problem and the MLB’s problem. Steroid users can’t affect baseball as much as corrupt referees can affect basketball. Baseball players are only at the plate four times in a game, and even with four hits during those at-bats could not have the substantial impact that an NBA referee – who is in on every single play – could have on basketball.
So the NBA is in the worst shape of the three. Hard to believe considering a steroid user and a guy indicted for running a dog fighting ring play for the other two.
