An exclusive interview with Tim Donaghy, the NBA referee who gambled with Mafia-connected bookmakers – Sports betting, NBA tanking, US Corruption

It is the $64 million dollar question.  

The audience, mostly sleepy tennis executives and sales people on an early Sunday morning in the near-empty conference center, leaned forward, when I asked it to Tim Donaghy.  

Tim Donaghy, the former National Basketball Association (NBA) referee who had worked with gamblers connected with organized crime, and I were on stage together this weekend.  It was the final day of the RacquetX Conference in Fort Lauderdale – a massive event attended by almost every tennis, squash, badminton, paddle ball, pickle ball and table tennis official in the sport world.   

Donaghy and I had been invited in to speak about the tsunami of match-fixing and gambling addiction that is flowing over professional sports.  

Donaghy spoke passionately about his fight with addiction that had caused him to gamble on every sports event he could – from golf tournaments to NCAA College Football to, of course, his own NBA games.  

When he was betting on other sports, he had a success rate like almost every other dopey punter. But when he bet on NBA games, the mob called him “Elvis”.  He had a success rate of roughly 80%.  In the betting world, that is unheard of – anything over 53% a year is considered phenomenal for professional gamblers.

So I asked him the question.   

It is the question that hangs around everything that he does. It is the question that catalyzed the Netflix documentary about the Donaghy scandal in 2019. It is the question that causes NBA fans of a certain age to argue long into the night. 

Did you, Tim Donaghy, fix games when you were a NBA Referee? 

The System in America

One of the things that I have learned since moving to the United States is that corruption is the system. It is not outside the system. It is not, anymore, bribes in brown envelopes or cash payments to cops on the street. Rather the whole American system moves by and for corruption. The examples are all around you in this great, but deeply misguided, country. 

I first witnessed the process in Iraq.  No insult to American soldiers, but they could get Dunkin Donuts, expensive, military high tech, and air cover for their patrols, but they couldn’t win the war.  That was not an exception, the US military has not won a conflict in thirty-five years – despite spending trillions of taxpayer dollars, and almost a million people killed.  

No insult to American nurses, doctors but the US medical system is the most expensive in the world yet no only do twenty-seven million people (the population of Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway combined) not have any coverage – the United States ranks below any of their industrial rivals for successful health outcomes.

And this season Sacramento Kings, Utah Jazz, and the Washington Wizards are tanking.  This is the uniquely American sports phenomenon where professional teams deliberately lose games so they can get better draft picks the next season.

For the average American sports journalist, when tanking is mentioned they do their usual slavering, licking of the corporate boot that is kicking them in their teeth, and write po-faced articles and media hits about how difficult it is to stop underperformance in the NBA.

However, for average sports fans, tanking – is sporting blasphemy.   The fans pay their hard-earned money and the teams lose on purpose.

It is everywhere in American professional sports.  The system literally runs on tanking.  There are academic papers studying the ‘threshold point’ of seasons when teams start to deliberately lose. 

In baseball, four years ago, the billionaire owners locked the players out in a labour action. It was mostly over salaries but one issue was tanking. The players wanted to play every game to the best of their abilities. The owners wanted to be able to tank without any back chat from their uppity athletes.  It is there in the legal contracts between the players and the owners.   

After their latest round of deliberate under-performance, Mark Cuban, the mouthy, minority owner of the Dallas Mavericks, said, “Few can remember the score from the last game they saw or went to… They can’t remember the dunks or shots….The NBA should worry more about fan experience than tanking.”  Which is effectively saying the fans do not care if their teams win or lose – news to most sports people.

Tanking is a pretty easy phenomenon to stop. The sports leagues just have to fine one team a huge amount of money. If that doesn’t stop the problem then the leagues should just force the franchise owners to sell the team. 

But that does not happen. 

It is America.  The corruption is the system. 

The Donaghy Defense

Donaghy’s essential defense (and this is a paraphrase of his comments on stage) is, “No, I did not deliberately fix games. I just knew that the NBA of that era was so corrupt. They would tell us, the refs, which teams they wanted to win. I knew which referees liked which teams and players.  I just knew the system and I bet on the existing corruption.” 

Well, he would say that wouldn’t he?   

After all, Donaghy served a year-and-a-half in jail, where he was attacked by an inmate who claimed to be linked with the Gambino Crime Family. Why would he admit to more crime? 

To be fair, Donaghy wrote an entire book– Personal Foul–  arguing his point.  The book is excellent and in it he gives examples of play-off series that were pushed to seven games to maximize everyone’s profits.  At the conference presentation he spoke about the NBA promoting “refereeing the names on the jerseys, not the game.” 

 

To back up these assertion he told the story of during one of officiating a game in Philadelphia between the 76ers and the, then-dominant, Chicago Bulls.  He called a foul on Michael Jordan.  Here is the excerpt from Personal Foul:

By 1996, I had been in the league a couple of years, still trying to do things the right way. I’ll never forget a pivotal moment in a game in Philadelphia I was refereeing with Ed T. Rush. The 76ers’ opponent was the Chicago Bulls. That year, the league office showed us film of a particular spin move players were utilizing on the baseline. By rule, if the ball wasn’t out of the player’s hand before he lifted his pivot foot, he should be called for a traveling violation. The trailing ref was supposed to watch for that play because the other referee would be under the basket with an obstructed view. I was the trailing ref that night when Michael Jordan made that exact spin move on the baseline, and I called a travel. I waved off his basket and 20,000 people—presumably Philadelphia fans—started screaming at me. I couldn’t believe it. 

A timeout was called and Jordan and Bulls coach Phil Jackson rushed over. Jordan was in shock. He wasn’t angry—just puzzled. His attitude seemed to be, it’s okay to call that violation, but don’t call it on me! 

By the time Phil Jackson reached me, he had his hands in the air. What are you doing? he asked, stunned by the call. 

Phil, I said, that’s the travel they told us to call. 

They don’t want that called on him, Jackson said, pointing at Jordan. And Jordan added, You’re gonna call that on me? 

I recall thinking, What is everyone complaining about? The Bulls knew what was expected of them. I was just as puzzled looking back at them as they were looking at me. Nobody had any answers for me, and it was something I definitely wanted to talk about with the other referees after the game. It was strange; the whole place was booing me. Why were the Philadelphia fans upset at me for calling a travel on the Bulls? The simple answer is that everyone—even the 76ers fans—paid to see Michael Jordan work his magic with the basketball. It was basically a show, and my call was getting in the way of the star performer. 

After the game, I went over to Ed T. Rush, one of the top referees on the staff, and said, Ed, that’s the spin move we saw on the tapes. Why did I catch so much heat? 

He shook his head and looked at me as if I had just fallen off the back of a cabbage truck. You have to think about who you’re calling it on, he said.

**

This is America. The system is the corruption.