I want to focus on two topics today: Tim Donaghy redux and Big Brown’s Belmont. So let me get one other thing out of the way here in one simple declarative sentence:
Last night’s Game 3 of the NBA playoffs between the Celtics and the Lakers was the most brutally awful playoff basketball game that I can remember.
Tim Donaghy is back in the news with his allegation to the court/Federal officials that NBA playoff games have been fixed in the past in order to achieve some NBA League priorities that would not be served had the “wrong team” won that particular game. Here is a good summary of that entire situation.
When the Donaghy story broke, I wrote that the single worst thing that could happen to the NBA was for the slime to be spread around to other referees. Donaghy took all that to another level alleging that the league honchos were in cahoots with the referees in at least one instance. And the conspiracy theorists have lined up from here to eternity to shout, “I knew it all along.”
David Stern was interviewed just prior to last night’s game and he was in his “Sultan of Smug” mode. He dismissed all of this with a sweeping denigration of Donaghy as a convicted felon and as someone whose motive was to say anything that might minimize his sentence at his impending hearing. As soon as he said that, I wished that one of the toadies doing that interview would have asked him this:
Mr. Stern, you say we should not believe Mr. Donaghy because he has a motive to “stretch the truth”, but don’t you – as the overseer of a multi-billion dollar business enterprise – also have a powerful motive to “make all of this go away without any more public scrutiny”?
Of course, none of the journalists present – motivated to retain their NBA-issued press credentials to be sure – asked anything even close to that question. Nevertheless, as you read about this matter as it unfolds, keep your minds open and remember that if Tim Donaghy can be shown to be lying to the authorities here, he will add perjury charges to the ones he has already pled guilty to. On the other hand, if David Stern and his minions “spin the facts” in press releases and get caught, they can weasel out of that with whatever version of “it depends on the meaning of is” that they come up with.
When this matter broke, I said that David Stern needed to clean house in the NBA Security Office because all of this happened under the noses of the folks there and so they could not possibly be uber-competent. Not only did that not happen, David Stern now wants me to believe that in addition to sharing info with the authorities on this matter, his crack security staff has thoroughly investigated everything that is going on here and has found nothing. Well, if that isn’t the fox watching the hen house, then tell me what is.
Were previous NBA playoff games fixed? I don’t know but I would not rule it out.
Were games fixed by gamblers that the NBA has no clue about? I don’t know but I think that is at least a 50/50 proposition.
Were games fixed by referees at the direction of the NBA League Office? I don’t know but if they were you can start to shovel the dirt on top of the coffin of the NBA as a major sports entity in the US.
Can the NBA Security apparatus investigate itself, find nothing and convince me that all is well? Not in this millennium…
By the way, you will have a chance to gauge ESPN’s journalistic standards in the next few days. A journalistic enterprise would dig out the tapes of the games in question, go over them call by call with players and retired referees as analysts, and present that to the public. That should be an Outside The Lines special ready for airing by this weekend. A journalistic enterprise would take their investigative reporters – such as the ones they hired in the wake of the BALCO/Barry Bonds situation – and turn them loose on such allegations. Alternatively, ESPN can show itself as an “NBA partner” and simply have some studio goofs cluck about the horror of all of this. I’m betting on “NBA partner”…
Now on to Big Brown’s Belmont… Let me say at the outset, as simply and clearly as I can that I do not think this race was fixed in any way, shape or form. Several readers have written to me asking for my explanation of what happened. So, here is my slant on the situation.
First of all, I remain hugely unconvinced that Big Brown is some kind of super-horse. In all of his wins leading up to the Belmont Stakes, he beat his contemporaries and I have not seen any three-year-old run any race yet that is eye-popping. Unless there are late bloomers in this crop of foals, this is a bad crop; and Big Brown may be the least bad of the bunch. So, if my sense is correct, then a mediocre horse did what mediocre horses do all the time; he ran inconsistent to form and stunk out the joint.
Could Big Brown have been “coming down off his steroids” since he went a month without a Winstrol injection? Maybe.
Could the hoof crack have been more severe than it seemed? Maybe.
Could the missed workouts from the hoof crack have played a role here? Maybe.
Could it be that he just didn’t like running on Belmont’s sandy track surface? Maybe.
There are loads of unusual things that happen in horse races every day; not every one of them has a sinister explanation. In addition, that statement leads me to another matter here. Trainer Dick Dutrow has now begun to place the blame for all of this on jockey Kent Desormeaux. I watched the race and have seen replays at least ten times; Kent Desormeaux did not cause Big Brown to finish last in the race. As a matter of fact, as I watched the race live with two other folks, I said out loud as the field reached the top of the turn heading for the stretch and Big Brown began to lose a little ground to a tiring set of front-runners, “He’s not only going to lose; he’s probably going to finish last today.”
For the record, Kent Desormeaux is a Hall of Fame jockey. He led the nation in wins for three consecutive years; he still holds the record for most races won in a single year (598). He is not an incompetent boob.
For the record, Dick Dutrow has been suspended somewhere in the US for having horses in his charge fail drug tests in every year since 2000. He is not a man with a record that screams “honesty”.
If Big Brown is not injured as Dutrow claims and is a super-horse as Dutrow claims, then look for Big Brown to follow the schedule that Dutrow set out for him. Later this summer look for him in the Haskell Invitational (Monmouth) or the Jim Dandy or Travers Stakes (Saratoga) as a stepping-stone to the Breeders’ Cup Classic in the fall. Dutrow may decide to take Big Brown to California for the Del Mar meet and run him there – maybe in the Pacific Classic – because the Breeders’ Cup races will be in California this year. If Big Brown skips those races, you can reasonably suspect that the horse is injured despite what the trainer says. If Big Brown throws another clunker out there, you can conclude he is not a super-horse.
My guess is that Big Brown will not race against older horses prior to the Breeders’ Cup Classic because his value at stud would plummet if he lost badly to a tough field – such as might show up for the Pacific Classic. At the moment, the owners of Big Brown are looking at an asset worth something north of $50M at stud. However, if he starts losing, his value will drop like a rock since his own pedigree is nothing special. His sire was Boundary and all I can find about Boundary is that he was at stud for 10 years and his stud fee was $10K. [Aside: In the racing business, a $10K stud fee is peanuts.] Boundary only sired 16 stakes winners in his 10 years at stud and that may be why his career in the breeding shed was so short.
Finally, here are two comments from Scott Ostler of the SF Chronicle related to the officiating in NBA playoff games:
[This came after the NBA announced that the refs missed a crucial call in Game 4 of this year’s Western Conference finals.] “The NBA also announced that refs missed 8,753 charging fouls on Shaq O’Neal over the years and, just this season, failed to notice 5.1 miles of assorted traveling violations.”
“I understand that NBA playoff basketball is a lot rougher than reg-season ball, with the refs letting a lot of physical stuff slide. What I don’t understand is why. ‘Because fans don’t want to see important playoff games decided by refs,’ you say. Good point. When I go to a regular-season game, I’m thinking, ‘Man, I hope the refs get busy tonight! Love those free throws!’ “
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports…