Corruption in Pro Tennis

Why does professional tennis seem so vulnerable to corruption?

The answer is simple if you look at the issue from the viewpoint of the sharks swimming around in the underworld of sports betting. In tennis, you can bet on a sure thing.

How so? Tennis matches are head-to-head competition between just two players. To fix a match, all you have to do is get one of those players to take a dive. That's a sure thing.

In this, tennis is like professional boxing and therefore a tantalizing target for the corruption that plagued boxing till not long ago.

Therefore, it's much easier to fix a tennis match than it is to fix a football game or basketball game, where the outcome depends on the performance of many players. Sure, you can try to get a Brett Farve to blow a game. But the defense can score, or he could get benched so that a replacement wins the game. No sure thing by any means.

What's more, a tennis player can throw a match in ways are that are indistinguishable from the normal errors that plague every tennis player. Everyone has a bad day now and then. Everyone. In other sports, the bad days aren't as different from the good days as they are in tennis. So, for example, if a football receiver starts dropping crucial passes, you get suspicious. But tennis is such a mental game that a player's whole game can innocently break down on any given day. Nobody gets suspicious.

This is why the players getting fined should just accept the consequences and move on. In the long run, this crackdown will be good for them too, because it will be good for tennis. Tennis must never forget that it is an ideal target for the corrupters and do whatever it can to make itself a harder target in every way possible.

Because one thing is for sure: there WILL be attempts to corrupt it.

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