Still Feeling Smug, Mr. Stern?

The news that veteran NBA referee Tim Donaghy is under investigation for betting on and altering the course of games because of his involvement in gambling is the most devastating story in recent sports history. It is clearly bigger than drug scandals in sports such as cycling and track and field. It is bigger than Michael Vick's loathsome dogfighting allegations. It is bigger than all of the rampant crimiality in the NFL, in fact. The Donaghy story is more significant than the ubiquitous steroids in baseball story (which is inexplicably and unjustifiably bigger than steroids in football stories -- clearly we hold baseball to a higher standard) by a factor of multitudes. This is even a more significant situation than the Pete Rose betting scandal, as Rose was never seriously believed to have bet against his own team and to have intentionally swayed the outcome of games.

Sportsguy, whose abiding passion is NBA basketball, has the best column I've read on the Donaghy fiasco. It is the first must-read piece he has had in a while. When forced to focus on an important issue and get to the heart of the argument he removes the superfluous pop culture references (although the conceit of the piece is framed within a pop cultural possibility that he makes work), he does not name drop friends, and he makes few references to not-funny jokes. Instead he is smart and perceptive and gets to the heart of the matter:

Guilty or innocent, we will never watch an NBA game the same way. He's going to hang over everything -- every referee, every shaky outcome, every bad call -- in ways the average fan doesn't fully realize yet. Maybe they'll throw Donaghy in jail, maybe they won't, but he'll linger over every court like a black cloud. You'll hear his name more than you think. You and your buddies will make "that guy looks like he's pulling a Donaghy!" jokes every time a referee is making calls against your favorite team. Hecklers will gleefully play the Donaghy card after every bad call against the home team. For honest referees still working games, it doesn't matter what happens from this point on -- their collective integrity will always be questioned, their collective track record won't matter, and that will be that.

So that's one problem. The second problem is more complex. When news of the scandal broke on Friday, as J.A. Adande pointed out in his column that day, every diehard NBA fan had the same reaction. They weren't thinking, "I can't believe it!" or "Oh my God, how could this happen?" They were thinking, "Which one was it?" This was like finding out that your grandfather who smoked three packs a day for 50 years just came down with lung cancer. It was sad but inevitable. It was only a matter of time. These guys never made enough money (as we learned from the airplane ticket scandal) and struggled at their jobs consistently enough that there was no way to tell the difference between blowing a call and intentionally blowing a call.

And what if this is not an isolated incident? I have no information indicating that it is not, of course, but if Donaghy is not alone, this is the sort of revelation that destroys sports leagues. (By the way -- I've always believed that a ref throwing a game in any sport could be far more pernicious and subtle than Simmons implies. Why would a ref need to blow a call when all he would really have to do would be to enforce sporadically rules that are on the books but go overlooked? Let's use the NFL as an example. You know how announcers always say that you could call holding on every play? That would be the best way to turn the tables in an NFL game -- simple call those holding penalties. Similarly in the NBA, a few well-placed hand checking or traveling calls might be all it would take. It remains to be seen, and right now seems dubious, that Donaghy could be that discreet.)

But what keeps running through my head is David Stern. David Stern and his insufferable smugness. David Stern and his condescension in recent years toward anyone who dared question referees, or anything else about what increasingly came across as Stern's empire. David Stern who dismisses all who come before him because he has been told a million times that he is the smartest guy in the room (yes, I'm talking about you, Simmons. And let's keep in mind that Stern's business is basketball and that being the smartest guy in that room, while not insignificant, is also not the pinnacle of intellectual life.)

The memory I will take from the 2007 playoffs will be Dan Patrick's testy interview with Stern in which the still seemingly-Machiavellian commish referred to all of those questioning the travesty in the Phoenix-San Antonio series as engaging in "palaver." Stern could not possible have been more imperious, more patronizing, more hand-wavingly dismissive about serious criticisms. Guess who was one of the officials in that game? Tim Donaghy. Maybe, Mr. Stern, some charges were worth taking seriously. Apparently it wasn't all just "palaver."