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Opinion editor’s note: Strib Voices publishes a mix of commentary online and in print each day. To contribute, click here. Harvest moons occur in October. So, occasionally, do “sports equinoxes,” the name given to a day when four major professional sports leagues take to the diamond, field, court and rink. Monday was such a rarity, and while the sports cornucopia likely fragmented audiences, it’s also likely that cumulative viewing reflected sports’ ever-increasing societal impact. The most recent weekly Nielsen TV ratings, for example, saw nine of the top 10 shows sports-related (including seven NFL games or pre- or post-games and one college football game), with just one a scripted series. Those stats track with similar data as well as dollars spent on record-breaking sports-rights TV contracts. The interest and the investment is because sports is one of the only entities occasionally uniting our deeply divided society. But binding those fragments is fragile, and faces tests, including the NBA gambling scandal alleged by the FBI last week. Actually, allegedly two scandals (so far), with one directly involving integrity of play (so far). The first involves illegal, mafia-organized poker games that used high-profile NBA stars (including Chauncey Billups, a hall-of-fame player turned Portland Trail Blazers head coach, one of more than 34 arrested) to lure high-stakes poker players into games rigged by high-tech devices. The other involves insider information used to bet on aspects of games (commonly called “prop,” or proposition, bets). One current player, the Miami Heat’s Terry Rozier, was among those implicated, as was Damon Jones, a former player and assistant coach who was charged in both cases. The bust, bursting onto front pages the week the league began its new $76 billion, 11-year television-rights deals, may have shocked. But it shouldn’t be a surprise, said Lisa Kihl, the director of the University of Minnesota’s Global Institute for Responsible Sport Organizations. “Any other country in the world that has legalized betting, there has been these kinds of scandals,” said Kihl. “So am I surprised? Absolutely not.”
