Thursday, July 26, 2007

Gambling in Sports

To paraphrase my husband, can anyone look at the uproar that has followed the officiating scandal in the NBA, and not see how what Pete Rose did was so completely detrimental and damaging to baseball, the game he claimed to love?

Record holder or not, amazing player or not, gambling on a sport where you have some control of the outcome (and I don't believe Pete Rose had the self-control or the desire to stay away from gambling on his own team, or as Commissioner Stern said "when you gamble, you lose the benefit of the doubt), not to mention putting the sport into the hands of organized crime, should automatically leave you ineligible for the Hall of Fame. A Hall of Famer should be more than a record holder, he should be someone who lifted up the game and made it better.

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