Tim Donaghy On PASPA And Sports Betting
With his life once in shambles, disgraced former NBA referee Tim Donaghy – who worked NBA courts for 792 games over 13 seasons, betting (and rigging) games all the while – now has a lot to say. Even more interestingly, the NBA is using Donaghy’s case to highlight the benefits surrounding the legalization of sports betting.
Naturally, moving the practice out of the black market and into the light – as well as bringing a tremendous amount of lost revenue sent to legal offshore sportsbooks back to the domestic US market – is an obvious step in the right direction. But not just financially.
One of the all-time bits of irony is that the law currently in question before the Supreme Court – the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 (PASPA) – has proven not just economically catastrophic but also counter to its very name. PASPA in no way “protects” the integrity of any game, as such laws force the workings of the wagering industry into “criminal” hands – hands that aren’t at all worried about tugging at that integrity and twisting it to their own needs.
Moreover, rigging games – and having the quiet infrastructure in place to do so – is infinitely easier when an activity is outlawed, as the radar is effectively turned off. Should PASPA be overturned, though, every league will have a vested interest in making very sure that their employees, athletes, and sponsors are “clean.” Fixing games will become far more difficult and far less commonplace, and there would be very little impetus for organized crime families and other illegal bookmakers to compete with multibillion-dollar conglomerations for the same pool of money.
Of course, making PASPA a thing of the past won’t necessarily stop people like Donaghy, as debt-ridden gambling addicts in positions of industrial prominence would still be able to skew results to their (or their partners’) favor. However, had PASPA never been conceived and sports gambling been legal all these years, Donaghy would have never been an NBA referee, and all the games he purposely altered would have never been historically asterisked as they are today.
Unfortunately, the NBA (and other leagues) are using Donaghy’s past indiscretions to try to stamp their mark on any impending PASPA overturn. The leagues have each drafted proposals to “combat” actions like Donaghy’s, all of which require substantial profit-sharing from casinos and sportsbooks that would offer odds on games once the practice is legalized. The leagues want things like access to betting information, full control over published wagering data, and a so-called “integrity fee” (which sounds like something only thieves charge). The leagues also want to be able to sue any bookmaker that they believe runs fraudulent books or participates in match-fixing schemes.
LegalGamblingUSA knows all of this, of course, is to maximize the leagues’ cuts of the massive influx of sports betting wealth that will flood US books once the Supreme Court overturns PASPA, and it reeks of hypocrisy. However, anything that gets sports betting out of the shadows (and out of its Las Vegas cage) is ultimately a good thing. Let’s just hope that the NBA et al. understand that the bookmaking profit margin is about 8-11% before they each go demanding a percent or two of that haul for themselves.
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