bwin Betting

Gambling has a big impact on sports, and nobody knows that better than Former NBA referee turned inmate Tim Donaghy, who was sentenced in 2008 to 15 months for betting on NBA games, though he said he never bet on games he actually refereed. Antoine Walker’s over 800,000-dollar casino bust in Las Vegas is nothing new, and gambling is a problem that’s touched all the major sports over the years. Walker’s story of course brought back memories of Charles Barkley, a former NBA star who got caught up in his own gambling woes, though he only ran up $400,000 when he went overboard in Vegas.

Las Vegas was ready for Antoine Walker, though. Unpaid casino markers are treated as bad checks in Vegas. Walker took out 10 such markers according to the charges against him, each for $100,000. He reportedly ran up the debts from last July to January of this year and only paid back an estimated $178,000. That leaves him on the hook for over $820,000 in casino marker debt, and to make the criminal case go away he will still have to shell out nearly 100,000 dollars more for the prosecutor’s fees.

Though it seems the NBA is a particularly healthy breeding ground for gambling issues, it’s not the only sport that has been tainted by the wanton wagering of its most recognized figures.

The undisputed king of degenerate gamblers in all of sports history has to be Pete Rose, a shoe-in for the Hall of Fame before he wound up embroiled in one of the biggest baseball betting scandals of all time. He was banned from baseball for a lifetime when an investigation proved he had bet on his own team, the Cincinnati Reds, to win.

The sport of Hockey got its own gambling black eye in 2007 when Rick Tocchet pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to promote gambling and promoting gambling. Tocchet played 22 seasons in the NHL, and he was an assistant coach for the Phoenix Coyotes when he was caught up in the criminal probe that led to the charges. “Operation Slapshot,” as the gambling enterprise was called, allegedly handled $1.7 million in wagers during a 40-day stretch that began at the end of 2005 and included college football bowl games and the Super Bowl. Hockey great Wayne Gretzky and his wife were even said to be loosely connected to the operation. Tocchet weathered the storm by serving two years of probation, and he is now the head coach of the Tampa Bay Lightning.

Even Tennis has its issues with gambling. Early in July this year Mathieu Montcourt, a 24-year-old Tennis pro, was found dead in his apartment building. Montcourt was banned from competition for five weeks and fined $12,000 not long before his death. His untimely demise therefore seems directly related to his gambling struggles.

So, the moral of the story is gambling is not for the faint of heart and certainly not a sport professional athletes can easily cross over to.