Mean Hollerings from a Jet-Lagged and Hungover Wordsmith: American Dispatch Number 1
The time was right. Necessary really. The heat was on but I was in a rut. Caught up in the week-to-week trappings of the rugby league season, I had lost all sense of perspective. Nothing else seemed important or relevant or graspable, everything paled or darkened into grey flounder. The edge was gone and if your loyal author didn’t get it back, he knew he would be on the breadline. And ye Gods, the thought of having to get a job where pants are a requirement and a punch card is part of the deal is more terrifying than death itself.
Jolted into deed, the best course of action seemed like a trek to the Land of Hope and Glory. Get to the core of American sports and bring back what is most important. Delve into the scene and comment in the manner of a true professional. Time to get to the nuts. Madison Square Garden. Baseball at Wrigley. Big time boxing in the bright lights of Vegas. The House That Ruth Built. Closing day at Belmont Park. Niners football and Lord knows how many ESPN channels. It was a tour of duty, a Hunter S. Thompson inspired journey to the heart of the American sports dream, a spiritual march through the skyscrapers and cornfields of sports in the United States.
At any rate, that was the explanation used to fund The American Dispatches. Those holding court at the Punting Ace compound don’t give blank cheques to journalists known for having a taste of the good life without at least a reasonable explanation…
But as sunshine can turn to rain and the chase for gold can find a fool, the pursuit of the American sports dream has realised only a nightmare. Not for me…in a whirl of tequila and New York City charm, times have been nothing but princely for your traveling penman. But for American sports as a whole, the realities of their scene are not pretty.
Those with a tendency for short-term thinking call it a bad trip but there is more to it than a week of ghastly media and surly bar talk. This is an attack on the foundations, a direct assault on the core values and necessary integrity of professional sport.
In this instance, the faces are baseball slugger Barry Bonds and former NBA official Tim Donaghy. They are the tangibles of drugs and point shaving, two men who have done or are in the process of doing irreparable damage to their respective sports and the notion of competition as a whole. Their actions have undermined records and tainted history. They have driven away purists and have soured off potential new fans. They have lied, scammed and deceived the public. And most importantly, they have caused their sport and sports on the whole to have their legitimacy queried and integrity questioned.
Barry Bonds, the San Francisco Giants slugger, is in pursuit of the most revered record in a sport where statistics and numbers are as integral to the game as bat and ball. He has done so with the help of steroids. Or so all evidence suggests. One can ascertain merely from his changed body shape that he was and is more juiced than The Good Doctor on a Saturday night in Vegas. But more tangible evidence exists, including the testimony of those on the inside at Balco, the organisation that programmed Bonds into the hit king.
He chases an icon. Hank Aaron. He blasted 755 long balls, surpassing the great identity of baseball, Babe Ruth. Aaron did more for the African American cause in baseball than any other player since Jackie Robinson. As he received horrifying threats to his life and his family’s safety from those refusing to accept the notion of equal rights, Aaron gracefully hit like a champion and played like a king.
Hammerin’ Hank was someone to be proud of and his all-time home run record was looked on with admiration and fondness.
Not Bonds, who will claim the record any day. Only the grace of God can stop the mean-mouthed cheat whose only interest is himself and the money he can make for same. On the whole, America loathes him and the skullduggery he represents and with just a few swings of the bat he will take the home run record away from the purists and baseball lovers and place it in the hands of the lab technicians who don’t covet tradition or competition but victory and victory at any cost. It is nearly impossible to grasp the magnitude of what three more Bonds homers will do to baseball. The corrosion has already begun but when the day of doom arrives, the Four Horsemen may ride in and they may be calling for baseball.
And it is all a result of The Blind Eye, turned when it needed to be focused. Had professional baseball attempted to stamp out steroid use when they first became aware of its ever-increasing popularity, we wouldn’t be on the cusp of witnessing a jazzed-up robot claiming a sacred piece of baseball turf. Rather than take the pain of some short-term embarrassment to the sport, baseball went for the rug and the cover-up. And now, it is too late to do anything. The wheels are in motion and the revolutions are high…
While things in baseball look bleak, they look positively black in the NBA. Former referee Tim Donaghy has been caught in a gambling scandal that threatens the legitimacy of the most important basketball competition in the world. Commissioner David Stern called it the worst thing he has seen in over forty years in the sport and that, Dear Reader, is no exaggeration. If officials are on the take and the fix is in, the NBA holds no more legitimacy as a competitive athletic event than professional wrestling. Both showcase athletic superstars, both have their outcomes predetermined. There aren’t too many season tickets being sold for the Harlem Globetrotters.
Donaghy not only gambled, he gambled on the NBA and he bet on games he officiated. At least seven games have been identified as suspicious and to any gambler with a decent eye, it was patently obvious that he was betting the overs in the total points market. Basketball bettors are only too aware that lots of foul calls mean lots of points. It is simple logic…the scoreboard is ticking over but the clock is stopped. Fixing the overs-unders, simply, is much more clandestine than favouring a particular side in an attempt to fix a match. Those who aren’t gamblers just don’t recognise that something is amiss.
And this is a legacy of not only the NBA ignoring sports betting but professional sports organisations as a whole ignoring gambling institutions. The attitude of bodies running top level sports has been to deride gambling as evil, running on the impractical puritan platform of high moralism. “Gamblers are no good, betting is bad and the game doesn’t need it”. Which, of course, is complete bollocks and leads to situations like we have now. If the NBA had any form of open relationship with Vegas, recognizing the size of basketball betting and the benefits it brings to the sport, this all may have been avoided. But they don’t and it hasn’t and now the credibility of one of the largest sporting organisations in the world is on the line.
The NBA, of course, will not die. But it could well be relegated to NHL like status, where the sport is nothing more than a niche for the die-hards and a joke to the rest.
And if those think that Australian sports are immune, think again.
In Australia, the mantra is ignorance is bliss but we can all be sure and certain that unless administrators wise-up, the damage could be just as costly. The major sports in Australia are not run nearly as professionally as many international sporting competitions and if a major drug or gambling scandal hits rugby league or Australian rules, the death knell may be sounded.
Down under, testing for steroids and growth hormones borders on amateurish, administrator’s obviously failing to grasp the potential ramifications that widespread performance enhancing drug use could have. Like sport in the United States, gambling is considered an unnecessary by-product and something that is looked upon with disdain by organizational bodies. When a player bulks up suddenly, it is chalked up as the modern game being more for athletes than footballers. When a referee makes some dubious decisions, he is derided for his incompetence but rarely is his integrity questioned. Suspicions, of officials and players alike, rarely reach the point of the sinister. Rather, they stop at the plane of ineptitude.
No code offers any transparency, be it in the field of drug use or gambling. Players are protected. Experts are ignored. Very little dialogue exists and there is certainly next to no policing. Rules and procedures and conventions are in place that cast shadows- there is no official injury status reporting in rugby league, to name but one. Sporting bodies have a fundamental misunderstanding of betting, believing an entire game needs to be fixed for something untoward to be occurring. This fails to account for everything from point shaving to prop betting. Worse, sporting institutions group all gamblers into the classification of devious.
Australian sports best beware. This is the age of professionalism and the Wall Street attitude of a buck is a buck is prevalent in all sports. If someone can make a dollar- through gambling or through performance enhancement – many will. It is time to wise-up, get professional and stop the moralistic drivel and put in place measures to ensure the credibility of all sports is maintained.