World tennis certainly was not broke but they fixed it anyway
SO what’s left? Tennis has now joined the impressive list of sports that are rotten with corruption.
We long knew about old sink-holes like horse racing and minor level professional boxing.
But that seedy duo has been joined by soccer and league, trotting, basketball, soccer and cricket, just to skim the muck off the top.
That is aside from sports like cycling, and more recently, Russian athletics that have been deeply discredited with performance-enhancing substances use and cover-ups.
The Essendon saga continues to belch noxious gas like a secondary volcanic outlet, even though there is nothing approaching evidence that the witch’s brew of supplements made any substantive difference.
I can only think of golf, maybe rugby union, netball, motor-racing and lawn bowls that have not been associated with match-fixing at high levels.
And even as I say that in this era of allpervasive corruption I can see the huge potential to cheat for money in all those sports: a fluffed shot here, a clumsy pit change there.
The recent UFC 193 cage-fighting tournament in Melbourne featuring Ronda Rousey and friends was not sanctioned by Victoria’s gambling authorities as it was not considered to have adequate anti-match-fixing safeguards in place.
But it was the cricket exposes over the years that showed the worst of the influence of gambling on sport: building from suspicion (remember the pitch information and weather conditions helpfully provided by top level Australian players to bookmakers who apparently couldn’t afford a TV to find out for themselves?), to Cronje’s confirmation of some episodes, to the realisation via court convictions that it has pervaded the sport for many decades and consequently no dropped catch, bungled runout or rash shot should ever be viewed the same way.
Even the “big bash” games this season have featured spectators armed with IT devices to report every on-field occurrence of any use back to gambling associates.
But it is the ability for gamblers to bet on not the outcome, but the miscellaneous events in the sport that is far more insidious, because a player can bowl a no-ball, drop the first point against a lowly opponent, fake an injury, give away a penalty or whatever without losing the game altogether.
But the tennis being bent, and, we are told by authorities, by what seems to be a greater margin than all other sports put together in the past 12 months at least, while not really shocking, was nonetheless out of character.
Tennis is less diverse than the Oscars: the only non-white faces you ever see in the stands are the Williams’ sisters’ family.
So such low class behaviour there is like the Sydney to Hobart being won by a yacht that turns out to be stolen.
And so outraged was the tennis establishment when the story first broke (by the online Buzzfeed site, not mainstream media) that they took the welltrodden path of denying reality.
While a host of high profile players came forward to say it was not only widespread, that they personally received such offers, and that the feeling among players was that to come forward was to risk the wrath of the game and future career prospects, the tennis hierarchy cast doubt on it all.
If it moves like a snake, looks like a snake, and wears and T-shirt with no sleeves that reads “SSSSSSSSSSSSHIT happens” then it’s a snake, Adam.
Sadly it seems it has been the gambling corporations that have been the most effective deterrent, by tracking and exposing dubious betting plunges, obviously to protect their business interests and sustain the confidence of the regular sap punter upon whom they feast.
For their part the International Tennis Federation last year confirmed Betway as a sponsor for the Davis Cup and Fed Cup competitions and display ads for online UK gambling firm, William Hill feature on all three main show-courts at the 2016 Australian Open for the first time.
So you know they’re taking it seriously.
If it moves like a snake, looks like a snake, and wears and T-shirt with no sleeves that reads “SSSSSSSSSSSSHIT happens” then it’s a snake, Adam.