"Personal Foul": A Telling Account of a Corrupt Enterprise

In 2008, during his 11-month sentence in the Pensacola federal prison, disgraced NBA referee Tim Donaghy began writing his memoir. Part admission of personal wrongdoing and part exposé of his former employer, Personal Foul: A First-Person Account of the Scandal that Rocked The NBA is a candid account of Donaghy's fall from grace after he was convicted of betting on hundreds of NBA games throughout his 13-year career as an NBA referee. Through revelations of his own misdeeds, Donaghy discusses the "culture of fraud" that exists in the NBA with respect to the way games are officiated. He reveals how he was able to correctly pick 70 to 80 percent of games he bet on just by knowing which officials were slated to ref which games. Personal biases, relationships, and vendettas -- all of those come into play for a startlingly high number of referees when they work a game in the NBA. The refs often have an agenda -- and so does the league as a whole. In fact, Donaghy explains how in certain cases during his career (especially during the playoffs, when the stakes are highest), a referee crew would take directives from higher-ups in the NBA headquarters who wanted the game called a certain way so that the desired team would win.

Call it like you see it? When it comes to NBA refs, that couldn't be further from the truth.

In the last chapter of his book, titled "Fixing the NBA", Donaghy diagnoses the biggest problems facing the NBA today and the hurdles to overcoming them. First is the contention, repeated ad nauseum by David Stern in the wake of the scandal, that Donaghy was a lone "rogue referee" who acted out of line. This is simply untrue; the league is rampant with corruption. Moreover, there exists a marked lack of true accountability to uphold the integrity of the game. Donaghy explains how in July of 2008, the NBA hired Ronald L. Johnson, a retired U.S. Army General, to fill the newly created position of Senior Vice President of Referee Operations. Johnson would be responsible for "all aspects of the NBA's officiating program, including recruiting, training and development, scheduling, data management and analysis, and work rules enforcement." Johnson was to report to Joel Litvin, the NBA's President for League and Basketball Operations, who described Donaghy's allegations of a culture of fraud among NBA referees as "the desperate act of a convicted felon who was hoping to avoid prison time."

Clearly, Litvin is just the sort of person who would be complicit in this culture of fraud, someone willing to sweep the league's issues under the rug...definitely not the person you'd want in charge of referee operations if your true interest is reforming the game. It gets better (worse), though. Later that month, the NBA announced that one of the three individuals charged with reporting to Johnson in a restructuring of the Referee Operations Department would be Joe Borgia -- the same ref who once purposely changed a foul from Chris Webber to one of his teammates uninvolved in the play so that Webber wouldn't foul out (the reason being that fans hadn't come to see Webber sit on the bench).

"If I were an NBA fan," Donaghy wrote about all this, "I wouldn't know whether to laugh or cry." Me neither.

But the real heart of the issue that Donaghy addresses in this chapter concerns the league's shameless marketing of, and favoritism toward, individual athletes. Clearly, every time Kobe and LeBron put on their uniforms, the leauge is hoping that they perform well because they are the league's moneymakers; their success is the NBA's success. It logically follows, then, that the league does not want them to rack up fouls, sit on the bench for long periods of time, and get thrown out of games. But this presents problems -- namely, the fact that the refs frequently allow them and other high-caliber superstars to play according to a different set of rules than everyone else on the court. As Donaghy writes, the league has to "make up its mind about whether it's putting on real games featuring real competition, where the referees have the power to enforce the rules in the rule book, or whether it's putting on a show." If it's a show, Donaghy continues, then let's just come out and admit it: "simply change the NBA rule book to reflect that certain players get special treatment, marquee players get 10 fouls instead of six, and global icons are permitted to move their pivot foot. At least we'd be telling the truth."

While reading this, I found myself identifying with Donaghy's views to a tee. NBA basketball as it currently stands is unlike any other type of basketball that exists in the world. It's hardly real athletic competition; instead, it's a show, a performance, much like a circus. You'd think that over time, the tendency would be toward reform as more and more people have caught onto the egregious way in which the league operates (type in "The NBA is" on Google and the first three terms that the search engine provides to complete the sentence are "fixed", "rigged", and "a joke"). But here's the problem for me and other people who actually want to see genuine, fair basketball: we're outnumbered. I'd say that there are many more basketball fans in this country who simply want to see the "show" version of the sport, or as Donaghy puts it, "the opportunity to see some of the world's most amazing athletes perform physical miracles that you and I can only dream of." And if rules get broken along the way -- if Kobe is allowed to shove a defender to the ground while hitting one of his ridiculous turnaround fadeways, or if LeBron is able to take 5 steps on the way to one of his breathtaking dunks -- well, so be it. It was cool to watch.

To sum up, Donaghy may be a convicted felon, but in this book he tells it like it is. He admits his own mistakes, and he uses them in part to shed light on the culture of fraud and corruption that permeates the NBA. He closes, sadly enough, by resigning himself to the fact that everything he said throughout the course of the book will undoubtedly fall on the deaf ears of the league; after all, he's a disgraced ex-referee who gambled on NBA games, and he's going up against a powerful enterprise steadfast in its determination to paint him as that one bad apple, the "rogue referee". We should know better. As Donaghy concludes, "Just because I may not be the perfect messenger doesn't discredit the ideas I'm putting forth."

No, it certainly doesn't. Just like doctors used to smoke cigarettes while giving their patients sound medical advice, Donaghy can bear the burden of his faults while accurately diagnosing the NBA's problems. The question remains, will enough people ever care to correct them?

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In completely unrelated news, what a past few days for U.S. sports! First U.S. soccer advances to the Round of 16 with a memorable goal in stoppage time over Algeria, then John Isner closes out the longest match in Wimbledon history with a 70-68 (70-68!) 5th-set win over France's Nicolas Mahut. Wow!