The first time the FBI rocked the modern age of pro basketball, its agents waited until six days after the San Antonio Spurs swept LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers in the Finals to call the NBA commissioner with some very bad news.
When David Stern appeared at a news conference a month later to discuss allegations that one of his referees, Tim Donaghy, had bet on NBA games, Stern, the man who had built the league into a global juggernaut and ruled it unforgivingly, was a ghostly shade of pale.
The titan looked like a broken man.
“I can’t believe it’s happening to us,” Stern said that day.
Sitting there in a packed Manhattan ballroom on July 24, 2007, I’ll never forget the look on the commissioner’s face when he called the gambling scandal “the most serious situation and the worst situation that I have ever experienced either as a fan of the NBA, a lawyer for the NBA or a commissioner of the NBA.”
Man, it really felt like the sports world was crumbling around us. When you lose the integrity of competition, you lose everything. If nothing else, I hoped the Donaghy case would become the scared-straight moment that permanently stopped officials, players and coaches from risking it all for the high-risk thrill of compromising the games.
Eighteen years later, that thought feels no less absurd than the notion that the arrests of Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups, Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier and former NBA player and assistant Damon Jones will have a lasting impact on illegal betting.
This time, the FBI wasn’t working around the NBA schedule, announcing the arrests in the middle of the league’s opening week, before anyone could fully appreciate what the sport’s newest sensation, Spurs’ Victor Wembanyama, did to the Dallas Mavericks on Wednesday night.
In comparison, this news conference made the Donaghy affair seem like a mildly difficult afternoon at the office. FBI Director Kash Patel stepped to the Department of Justice podium to detail what he called “an historic arrest across a wide-sweeping criminal enterprise that envelopes both the NBA and La Cosa Nostra.”
La Cosa What?
The Mafia?
You heard the man right. Patel wasn’t there to talk about Wemby, Dončić, Jokić and Curry. He was there to introduce Bonanno, Gambino, Genovese and Lucchese to the NBA fan who doesn’t follow crime families the way they follow the jockeying for playoff positions in the Western Conference standings.
Try to picture Adam Silver’s face when the FBI rattled off that lineup of prime-time players. The commissioner was reliving his predecessor’s worst nightmare … times a hundred.
Then try to picture Silver’s face again when he is asked to review the op-ed piece he wrote for The New York Times in 2014, which began this way:
“Betting on professional sports is currently illegal in most of the United States outside of Nevada. I believe we need a different approach.”
Silver was out in front on this cause, but let’s face it: The moment he wrote those words was the moment he was doomed to this hell-on-Earth experience.
Tim Donaghy, left, admitted to betting on games he worked as an NBA official during four seasons. (Ronald Martinez / Getty Images)
Of course, Billups, Rozier and Jones are presumed innocent until proven otherwise. Maybe the feds will fail to make their case. Maybe all three men will someday walk out of a courtroom vindicated of the charges made against them.
But in the wake of Jontay Porter’s lifetime ban from the league for manipulating his performance for prop-bet payoffs, these charges are about as ugly as ugly gets.
A head coach involved in poker games rigged by mobsters?
A 10-year NBA veteran benching himself for the sake of lucrative prop bets?
An 11-year NBA veteran and former coach with ties to the league’s most glamorous franchise (the Los Angeles Lakers) and to one of its all-time great players (James) selling inside information to professional gamblers?
“The fraud is mind-boggling,” Patel said.
But it is not shocking. Not even close. Years ago, I interviewed members of the 1949-50 City College of New York basketball team that won the NCAA and NIT championships in the same season before their historic feat was forever marred by a point-shaving scandal. Players from schools around the city were shaving and dumping. Floyd Layne, the CCNY star, took a few thousand dollars from gamblers and hid most of it in a flower pot.
Norm Mager, the CCNY sixth man who had first introduced teammates to a fixer, told me it was a fairly easy call at the time. “We didn’t have to lose games,” he said, “just win by fewer points. It sounded good to me.”
All these decades later, these Faustian deals are still being made.
Gambling is an all-American drug.
Technology is the needle that instantly injects it into the vein.
You can blame the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision to topple the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act and effectively open the floodgates to the money monster that is legalized sports betting. You can blame my home state, New Jersey, for being an early driver of this bus, and the 37 states (plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico) that followed.
But all the major sports leagues eagerly hopped on that bus, cashing in one day and then cursing the evils of illegal betting the next. In 2021, the NBA announced that DraftKings and FanDuel had become its “co-official sports betting partners.” That same year, after announcing partnerships with Caesar’s Entertainment, DraftKings and FanDuel, the NFL made deals with FOX Bet, BetMGM, PointsBet and WynnBET. Individual teams across all sports have agreements with online companies and casinos.
In 2023, ESPN signed a 10-year deal with Penn Entertainment to create ESPN Bet. My employer, The Athletic, has a partnership with BetMGM.
The genie is so far out of the bottle that it’s going … going … gone, with no chance of bringing it back.
Gambling is so ingrained in American culture that the NCAA’s approval Wednesday of a rule allowing athletes and staff members to bet on pro sports came and went without much of a fuss — even though college athletes in the modern revenue-sharing and name, image and likeness age have stronger connections to professional athletes, and all information about them, than ever before.
This news hit a little more than a month after the NCAA disclosed it was pursuing improper gambling allegations against 13 former men’s basketball players at six schools, which included players betting against their own teams. In the least surprising development, the NCAA said additional cases were being investigated.
Additional cases are here to stay. As long as the owners of prominent sports entities profit from gambling, their mandates about who can bet on what will be viewed by some as mere suggestions rather than rules.
The good news is that most fans will continue to wager legally and responsibly. The bad news is that some people lie, some people cheat and many do both in pursuit of a big payday. That’s the human behavior that created Thursday’s dramatic FBI event, which included mention of every mobster not linked to the Soprano crime family, the startling claim that sports books are among the victims in the case, and the kind of gambling indiscretions that might’ve made Pete Rose blush.
Eighteen years after Stern called a wayward ref “a rogue, isolated criminal,” nothing is isolated about gambling in sports. It is everywhere, and it is anywhere, and it will only get worse.
Mind-boggling, sure.
Just don’t ever call it shocking again.
