King Kaufman's Sports Daily
A match-fixing scandal centering on referees has stunned German soccer. That sort of thing has never happened in the U.S. Why not? And could it?
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March 29, 2005 | An officiating scandal has rocked German soccer. A referee named Robert Hoyzer has been banned for life and arrested after admitting he took bribes from Croatian gamblers to fix lower-division matches. The gamblers have also been arrested.
Trying to avoid prison, Hoyzer is naming names, and the scandal, which broke in January, has been deepening weekly, spreading across Europe. The latest bombshell is that the gamblers had advance notice of who would be refereeing Champions League matches, which is privileged information.
Could such a thing happen here? Maybe, but consider this: With nine seconds to go in Villanova's NCAA Tournament game against favored North Carolina last week, guard Allan Ray hit a shot to bring the Wildcats within one. A whistle blew. Foul on defender Rashad McCants and a chance for Ray to tie the game with a free throw.
No, wait. Referee Tom O'Neill had called Ray, who had taken the legal two steps, for traveling. That wiped out the basket and effectively ended Villanova's upset bid. In the days since, there has been as close to unanimous agreement as the sports world ever gets that O'Neill blew the call. It was the most obvious, widely agreed-upon officiating mistake in a big American game in half a dozen years.
Yet not one serious person has even hinted that O'Neill was on the take, that he'd been paid off to fix the game in Carolina's favor.
A match-fixing scandal in world cricket in the late '90s included allegations against umpires. The corrupt adventures of boxing, figure skating and gymnastics judges have overshadowed athletic performances in several recent Olympic Games. But in the major American team sports, cheating or fixing by on-field officials is all but unknown. Incompetence, sure. Corruption, no.
"I have to tell you, I've been involved with officiating for 30 years," says Alan Goldberger, a New Jersey attorney who specializes in sports law and represents officiating organizations, "and I'm sure I've heard of incidents of bribery in 30 years, I just can't remember one."
Bill Topp, a vice president of the National Association of Sports Officials, agrees. "We are not aware of any gambling scandal involving officials in the United States in any sport at any level," he writes in an e-mail.
"Certainly there are officials who have been approached, and they do report that because that's what we ask them to do," says Bill Saum, the NCAA's director of agent and gambling activities. "The ones that we know of and the ones that communicate with us or their conferences, they've handled it like the pros that they are. We've never been concerned."
Saum is the only person interviewed for this column who said it isn't unusual for gamblers to at least approach officials, though others mentioned rare, isolated cases they'd heard of. The NBA declined an interview, and the NFL and Major League Baseball did not return phone calls.
How can this be? American sports are a multibillion-dollar enterprise. The parade of CEOs and big-name accounting firms through American courtooms over the last few years has shown us, if we didn't already know, that where vast sums of money congregate, the temptation to illegally grab some extra bills is too much for some people, even if they're otherwise solid citizens.