… that halfway through this sporting summer, Pac Man Jones would look, comparatively, like Desmond Tutu?
… that the commissioner having the relatively stress- free summer would be the guy who runs the NHL?
Observations:
Every time you watch a game people bet on, there’s a chance the betting is impacting the integrity of the outcome. A very small chance in almost every case, but a chance. That was true a month ago. It’s no more or less true now.
If Tim Donaghy teaches us anything, it’s that the old ways of dismissing “conspiracy theories” about game-fixing - there’s too much at stake, think how many people would have to be involved, etc. - were naive and bogus.
But that’s all he teaches us. Wake me when there’s evidence or reason for a sensible person to believe Donaghy isn’t a single, isolated criminal.
Donaghy is nothing more or less than a dirtball who got in money trouble and saw a sleazy way out. He deserves to crawl back under whatever rock he once crawled out from and stay there.
His story, at least what we know of it as this is written, tells us nothing about the modern state of things in the NBA or anywhere else. It does not warrant the hysteria that is surely coming (Ruppie, for example, believes that Donaghygate somehow proves the 2006 Steelers-Seahawks Super Bowl was fixed). It does not warrant the assumption that all sports are now basically pro wrestling.
This just in: People get in trouble, and they do desperate things. Show me that Donaghygate is more than that, and I’ll start hyperventilating, too. Until then…
As a child I was a huge Baltimore Colts fan, and I’ve long had a sort of educated half-suspicion, half-fantasy that the 1969 Super Bowl was fixed to justify the NFL-AFL merger. If you’re interested in hearing the lengthy and tedious case that can be made for that, let me know.
The point is, unlike most of my colleagues, I have never routinely dismissed or scoffed at the possibility of game fixing, and I have never downplayed the role officiating can have in the outcome of games.
But I’m not now going to overstate them, either.
I spent Monday in Happy Valley, speaking to prospective sports writers/broadcasters at a Penn State sports-journalism “camp” for high school kids. The subject was column/feature writing, so we talked a lot about how writing about controversial topics involves going beyond the gut and thinking hard about what you think.
Naturally, we spent a lot of time on the current headlines.
These kids were from all over the country. They were very smart and dialed in to sports and media and even, surprisingly, sports history.
Still, it was interesting how conventional their opinions were. Most of them seemed to utterly buy into the reverence for baseball records, and were as repulsed by Barry Bonds as Michael Vick. More, in a couple of cases.
They were about evenly divided on whether the NFL should suspend Vick. The pro-suspension group mentioned the Pac-Man precedent. The anti-suspension group stood behind “innocent until proven guilty.”
It was heartening, in a time when the death of newspapers is almost considered a given, how many of them said they wanted to be sportswriters. Three kids, two of them female, said they wanted to be baseball beat writers.
Of course, another young lady said she wants to be the sideline reporter for “Monday Night Football.” Two males said they wanted to be pro athletes, but if they didn’t make it as players, saw journalism as “something to fall back on”.
