Tennis scandal waits to be served

Tym Glaser

ALMOST HIDDEN in the growing pea-soup fog of sport sleaze is another scandal waiting to erupt.

While Marion Jones' teary-eyed drug cheat confession, Floyd Landis's constant bleating of Tour de Farce innocence and the revelation of a corrupt NBA official possibly manipulating the results or scores of basketball games have been dominating the headlines, tennis' own ugly little secret is lurking in the shadows.

Authorities from the sport's governing bodies, the ITF, ATP and WTA, hunkered down together yesterday to get to the bottom of allegations of match-fixing in their, until now, pristine sport.

Popular British betting house Betfair rang the alarm bell in August when it voided bets on a match between world No. 4 Nikolay Davydenko of Russia and his unheralded opponent, Martin Vassallo Arguello, in Sopot, Poland due to "irregular betting patterns."

Roughly translated, that means too much money - and we are talking about US$7 million here - was bet on the No. 86-ranked Argentine pulling off the upset. Davydenko was leading into the final set when he retired from the match with a leg injury.

Davydenko, who is now the subject of an ATP inquiry, proclaims his innocence but other players, including British star Andy Murray, claim "fixing" is going on in the sport.

"It's difficult to prove if someone has tanked a match or not tried because they can try their best until the last couple of games of each set and then make some mistakes, a couple of double-faults, and that's it," Murray said recently. "It's pretty disappointing for all the players, but everyone knows it goes on."

US$100,000 turned down

Meanwhile, Belgian journeyman Gilles Elseneer last month said he turned down an offer of more than US$100,000 to lose his first-round match against Potito Starace of Italy at Wimbledon in 2005.

In Austria yesterday, Georgian player Irakli Labadze was in court accused of conspiring with a professional gambler to make money by "throwing" a match.

Labadze aroused suspicion after unexpectedly losing his first-round match at last year's Raiffeisen Grand Prix in St. Poelten, Austria, to unseeded local player Julian Knowle. Martin Fuehrer, a gambler with whom Labadze is friendly, won 17,000 euros after betting 10,000 euros.

However, when he went to collect, bookmakers Cashpoint refused to pay out and the agency claims it has evidence that Fuehrer knew his friend would lose.

Sitting atop this powder keg are the sport's ruling bodies which are poring over a document which apparently lists "suspicious" matches all the way back to 2002.

Still, as "suspicious" as a match may look, it's going to be mighty hard to prove it was "fixed" unless a player or gambler can be forced into a corner, a la Jones and steroid czar Victor Conte, and made to spill the beans.

It just seems to be harder, day by day, to watch any sport and trust its integrity. I naively thought that tennis was as clean as the white costumes at Wimbledon but where there's smoke, there's generally fire.

I had a pretty good year picking the men's winners of the Slams you didn't have to be Nostradamus to come up with Federer-Nadal-Federer-Federer.

Now, when I look into my little crystal orb everything looks foggy, pea-soup foggy.

Later ...

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