In any given year there are more than 500,000 American boys playing on almost 20,000 high school basketball teams, and fewer than 2% of them will make it to March Madness. Only 60 young men get drafted by an NBA team each summer, and in the most recent draft a third of those spots went to international players. The numbers suggest the funnel from the Amateur Athletic Union into the NBA is one of the narrowest in all of sports.
Hundreds of Turkish footballers and referees have been found to hold illegal betting accounts. The sport betting scandal that took hold of the Turkish Football Federation this week has put a spotlight on an endemic issue. Hundreds of players and referees have been accused of illegally placing bets. list of 3 itemsend of list Authorities are trying to understand the scale and impact of a situation they're calling a moral crisis.
Members of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, which oversees professional sports, called the allegations against Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz "markedly more serious" than other recent betting incidents in baseball. Federal prosecutors on Sunday indicted Clase and Ortiz and accused them of rigging individual pitches over multiple games so gambling associates could profit on wagers.
Players are trying their best to win; the games are on the level. If you lose that, if the games are fixed or the players are motivated by something other than the competition, the whole thing collapses. (This is why sports gambling was banned for nearly 100 years after the Black Sox scandal; it was understood by everyone involved, until very recently, that players and coaches gambling on their own games was sports' third rail.) There's no reason to watch a game you can't believe
The referee's report of a football or hurling game is final. His or her declaration of something within that report doesn't just carry most weight, it carries all of the weight. Unless there is incontrovertible evidence to the contrary.
"In the Matter of: Peter Edward Rose, Manager, Cincinnati Reds Baseball Club," attorney John N. Dowd summarized the gravity of the findings. "Betting exposes the game to the influence of forces who seek to control the game to their own ends. Betting on one's own team gives rise to the ultimate conflict of interest."
