Sports in the United States and around the world have been connected with betting scandals for decades.
Perhaps the most notorious instance came in 1919, when eight members of the Chicago White Sox conspired to fix games in that year’s World Series at the behest of gamblers. The players were motivated in part by the miserliness of their owner, Charles Comiskey, who underpaid them.
Eight players, including Joe Jackson — known by the nickname Shoeless Joe — were banned from baseball for life, though in May the M.L.B. commissioner, Rob Manfred, removed them from the permanently ineligible list.
The team became known as the Black Sox, and the scandal was the basis for the 1988 film “Eight Men Out.”
Pete Rose, one of baseball’s greatest players and the game’s career hits leader, was caught up in a gambling scandal when he was managing the Cincinnati Reds. He was accused of betting on baseball, which is strictly forbidden.
In 1989, he was banned for life and barred from consideration for the Hall of Fame, to which he would have been elected with ease. Mr. Manfred reinstated Mr. Rose in May, eight months after his death, making him eligible again for the Hall of Fame. Mr. Rose eventually confessed, but said he had never bet against his own team.
Basketball’s biggest betting scandals have mostly come in the college ranks, in part because until recently college players were not paid, and had more incentive than a well-paid professional to cheat to make money. Most scandals involved point shaving — winning a game, but making sure to do so by a smaller margin that the bookmakers predicted.
Among the colleges that were accused of point shaving over the years were the City College of New York, along with other schools (1951), Boston College (1979), Tulane (1985), Arizona State (1994), Northwestern (1995) and Toledo (2006).
The other most notable gambling scandal in the N.B.A. involved not a player or coach but a referee, Tim Donaghy. He admitted to betting on games he refereed from 2003 to 2007. His associates claimed that when Mr. Donaghy refereed one of these games, his influence assured that the team being bet on won almost 80 percent of the time.
The new N.B.A. scandal involves, in part, “spot fixing,” which takes advantage of the fact that gamblers can now bet on just about any aspect of a game. In spot fixing, players don’t fix a whole game, but they manipulate some smaller element, such as how many points a certain player scores.
One of the most prominent spot fixing scandals came in the oh-so-proper sport of cricket. Three members of the Pakistan national team arranged to record a “no ball,” in which the bowler steps over the line improperly, at predetermined moments, so that bettors could correctly predict them. The three were convicted and sent to jail and banned from cricket for five years.
Victor Mather, who has been a reporter and editor at The Times for 25 years, covers sports and breaking news.
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