Tennis' gambling scandal is starting to look an awful lot like baseball's steroid scandal. In both cases, the sport's governing body seems to think the path to credibility with fans isn't to unearth the problems and clean them up, but instead to bury them.And the result, after the problems and the cover-up both come out anyway, is that everything is escalated, including the distrust. Then, when more problems come up, the governing bodies themselves have no credibility. Their word means nothing. Suspicions grow, whether the new scandals have merit or not.
So I can't say for sure whether the low-ranked Italian tennis players who have sued the ATP Tour, the men's tennis tour, are right in their claims that they were busted for tiny gambling offenses while plenty of bigger-name players were let go. The suit claims that the Italians were used to give the appearance of integrity in tennis, when really they were being used to hide a much bigger problem.
But at this point, it's on tennis to prove the allegations false, not the other way around.
Tennis has not attacked its gambling problem so much as hidden from it. We have seen that clearly in the past few weeks and months, as it decided not to investigate one of the most powerful people in tennis, IMG's CEO, Ted Forstmann, who had been betting on the game. Meanwhile, at least three of the six members of the ATP board are tied economically to IMG. One is a current IMG vice president.
So the Italians' claim, mixed with tennis' colossal conflict-of-interest and structural incestuousness, as well as its inclination to cover up, look so bad that you find you can't even trust the integrity of something called the Tennis Integrity Unit.
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Source: http://tennis.fanhouse.com/2010/12/23/gambling-scandal-disintegrating-tennis-into-soiled-sport/
Andy Murray Andy Roddick Anthony Kim Arjen Robben Ashley Cole
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