The NBA: Where The Fix Is In
Faux Twitter Tweet of the Day
Take this money and don’t print Tim Donaghy’s book or else you’ll wake up with Violet Palmer’s a horse’s head in your bed.
David Stern October 29th
Um Houston, I think we have a problem. Excerpts of former referee Tim Donaghy’s new book Blowing The Whistle: The Culture Of Fraud In The NBA were posted yesterday and some of the revelations are quite damning…to say the least:
To have a little fun at the expense of the worst troublemakers, the referees working the game would sometimes make a modest friendly wager amongst themselves: first ref to give one of the bad boys a technical foul wouldn’t have to tip the ball boy that night. In the NBA, ball boys set up the referees’ locker room and keep it stocked with food and beer for the postgame meal. We usually ran the kid ragged with a variety of personal requests and then slipped him a $20 bill. Technically, the winner of the bet won twice-he didn’t have to pay the kid and he got to call a T on Mr. Foul-Mouthed Big-Shot Du Jour.
After the opening tip, it was hilarious as the three of us immediately focused our full attention on the intended victim, waiting for something, anything, to justify a technical foul. If the guy so much as looked at one of us and mumbled, we rang him up. Later in the referees’ locker room, we would down a couple of brews, eat some chicken wings, and laugh like hell.
We had another variation of this gag simply referred to as the “first foul of the game” bet. While still in the locker room before tip-off, we would make a wager on which of us would call the game’s first foul. That referee would either have to pay the ball boy or pick up the dinner tab for the other two referees. Sometimes, the ante would be $50 a guy. Like the technical foul bet, it was hilarious-only this time we were testing each other’s nerves to see who had the guts to hold out the longest before calling a personal foul. There were occasions when we would hold back for two or three minutes-an eternity in an NBA game-before blowing the whistle. It didn’t matter if bodies were flying all over the place; no fouls were called because no one wanted to lose the bet.
We played this little game during the regular season and summer league. After a game, all three refs would gather around the VCR and watch a replay of the game. Early in the contest, the announcers would say, “Holy cow! They’re really letting them play tonight!” If they only knew…
Yeesh. I can’t wait to hear what Rasheed Wallace has to say after he sees this excerpt and all of the other ones. Will he have an opportunity to read the entire book though?
At this point, it appears not. The book’s publisher, Random House, was scheduled to publish Blow The Whistle next month but evidently has now backed out because of the possibility of an NBA lawsuit.
David Stern and his Nazi regime certainly may have threatened Random House and it’s subsidiary, Triumph Books, with a lawsuit. However, let’s read between the lines, shall we? I’m not Monk, but I have to think a cash payment was made by one of Stern’s minions to ensure Donaghy’s book never sees the light of day.
Power, money and greed corrupt people. It’s really a simple fact of life that will never change. Napoleon Stern may have saved the league back in the early 80’s, but these referee revelations may ultimately prove to be his Waterloo.
[...] book Blowing the Whistle have hit the internets. Among Donaghy’s revelations? Refs used to place bets on who would call the first foul of the game, then, not wanting to lose, would go several minutes [...]
October 29th, 2009 at 11:54 am