Tennis is a country club sport that pays athletes caddyshack rates
The fix is in until the sport gets its house in order
By Asher Kohn
The revelation that pro tennis players are suspected of throwing matches to benefit organized crime has somehow shocked the British, even though gamblers wagered nearly $6 billion on sports in the UK in 2013.
The BBC and BuzzFeed News reported that a watchdog agency within professional tennis “flagged” 16 players ranked in the top 50 for suspicion of match-throwing. And as the Australian Open begins this week, tennis fans will wonder if they can trust the results.
Tennis is a medieval sport. Rackets were introduced in the 16th century and its four marquee events date back to the 1800s. Cheating had gone on in the sport for several centuries, but a suspicious upset in 2007 forced a police investigation that led to the formation of the Tennis Integrity Unit in 2008.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the sport was a moneymaker from the get-go. King Henry VII lost money — his kingdom’s money — betting on tennis matches. In early 1721, a German sheriff published a guide on how to catch tennis hustlers and refs on the take.
Tennis was able to keep its reputation as an upper-class sport because it didn’t go professional until 1968. Even then, the gambling money didn’t flow until the Internet made it easy. International gambling rackets rely on streaming and messaging to influence the outcome of matches around the world, from Argentina to Uzbekistan.
The tour ensures that in order to make it big, young tennis players have to take financial risks. Players ranked 100 or below often have to pay for their own flights to far-flung locales. That makes them susceptible to gamblers promising $200,000 with no strings attached.
The fact is, only a select few tennis pros earn enough to make a living. To be exact, 1.8% of male and 3.1% of females earned enough to make ends meet in 2013, according to the International Tennis Federation. That means only a few hundred athletes, in a sport with about 4,000 pros, are putting something away after paying an approximate $160,000 just to compete.
Tennis is big business and as late as 2012 there was talk of players boycotting tournaments whose prizes weren’t keeping up with the cost of living. With journalists shedding new light on the gambling issue, investigators may scrutinize the hundreds of athletes who hope a Dunlop sponsorship is just around the corner.
As it is framed, the match-fixing scandal leaves the tennis executives, those latter-day nobles, far removed from accusations of ill-gotten gains. No matter how many underpaid young stars turned to organized crime to sustain their dream.
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