SNYDER: If there’s a perfect sport to rig, it would have to be tennis – Washington Times

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

I was talking to my 16-year-old daughter about the match-fixing scandal that rocked tennis this week on the eve of the Australian Open.

“You mean some of games were rigged?” she asked. “Doesn’t that happen in all sports?”

Well … uh … I don’t know.

Movie fans enter theatres fully aware that the next two hours could demand a “suspension of disbelief.” Some movies — I’m thinking “Die Hard,” where Bruce Willis launches a car off a toll-gate abutment into a helicopter that’s hovering at the mouth of a tunnel — require a lot more than others.

But when it comes to sports, we want to believe what we see. Cynical adults (and teenage girls) might call us naïve, but our emotional investment is way too large to view sports as just another scripted drama.

We know pro wrestling is fake. Everything else needs to be on the up-and-up.

Point-shaving? Sure, that has gone on in college basketball at least since the CCNY scandal in 1950. In a 2006 study and another study in 2013, researchers estimated that point-shaving occurred in about 5 percent of regular-season games with double-digit spreads. There have been instances as recently as a few seasons ago, when Auburn guard Varez Ward was arrested on charges of bribery and conspiracy for allegedly trying to shave points.

However, no one except gamblers really care if Team A fails to cover the spread while beating Team B. Our only real concern is Team A intentionally losing a game it would’ve won. There’s a huge difference between “throwing” and “shaving.” Margins of victory are bettors’ primary reason for living, but most of us just want assurance that the victors are legit.

So it was shocking this week when Novak Djokovic, the world’s No. 1 men’s tennis player, said someone tried to offer him $200,000 to lose a first-round match at a 2007 tournament in Russia.

“I was approached through people that were working for me at the time,” he told reporters Monday at the Australian Open. “It made me feel terrible because I don’t want to be anyhow linked to this kind of — you know, somebody may call it an opportunity. I don’t support it. I think there is no room for it in any sport, especially in tennis.”

Actually, tennis is the perfect sport to rig.

It’s under-the-radar enough to avoid extensive scrutiny. There are no teammates to foil your plan by playing well. There’s no coach to put you on the bench for a spell. Besides the wiseguys, no one else is involved or required.

According to an investigation by BuzzFeed News and the BCC, there is evidence of widespread match fixing at major tennis tournaments since 2008. Richard Ings, a former anti-corruption executive with the Association of Tennis Professionals, put it this way in the report: “If you were to invent a sport that was tailor-made for match fixing, the sport that you would invent would be called tennis.”

BuzzFeed reported that authorities have been repeatedly warned about a core group of 16 players, all of whom have held top-50 rankings. None of the players faced and sanctions and the majority of those named are playing in this year’s Australian Open.

Story Continues →