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What can cheating scandals teach us about the world? Defector Staff writer Patrick Redford has spent his career writing about rule breakers, and now he's taking to a podcast called Only if youf Get Caught. Only if youf Get Caught is gonna cover things like why did the NBA hand out its largest ever fine to an owner for letting his players buy private? Or what does the Varsity Blues admissions scandal say about the future of higher education? Only if you Get Caught believes that the best way to learn about any competitive framework is by looking closely at who breaks the rules and why. And if you love Patrick's periodic breakdowns of the chess cheating scandal on Normal Gossip, you're gonna love this show. Only if you get caught from Defector Media and RadioTopia is out October 21st. Wherever you get your podcast hello and welcome to Normal Gossip. I'm your host, Rachel Hamp. Each episode of this podcast we're gonna bring you an anonymous morsel of gossip from the real world, y'.
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All.
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We are so close to the premiere of season nine. In case you're not following us on Instagram or subscribe to the newsletter, the next season of Normal Gossip starts on November 12. The gossip and guests we have for y'. All. All I can say is I am so fucking excited. This season is gonna be a little different from previous seasons. We're gonna have 10 episodes as we do every season, but since we're publishing, we have got some little breaks planned so there won't be an episode during the two weeks that include Christmas and New Year's. We'll make sure to mention that as we get closer to those off weeks. And we are already planning some fun stuff to keep y' all tidied over. But what that means is that y' all are gonna get Normal Gossip from mid November all the way through January. Hopefully that'll make those dark winter days just a little bit easier. But now let's get into the real reason we're here. If you listen to our July bonus episode, then you'll know that this is the season of new podcasts here at Defect, the company that I co own along with dowager Queens of Gossip Alex Sujon Laughlin and Kelsey McKinney. Alex's podcast Try Hard launched back in July, and this week Defector is launching Only if youf Get Caught, a narrative podcast produced by Alex and hosted by frequent Normal Gossip guests and fellow defector comrade Patrick Redford. If you love Normal Gossip, and I'm assuming you do, then I think you will really enjoy Only if youf Get Caught I really love the way Patrick describes the show. He has this really compelling theory that the best way to learn about any competitive framework, whether that's sports, the publishing industry or the economy, is by looking closely at who breaks the rules and why. In every single episode of Only if youf Get Caught, Patty takes a deep dive into a particular cheating scandal, whether that's the Varsity Blues admissions scandal or the controversial 2002 Western Conference NBA Finals between the Sacramento Kings and the Los Angeles Lakers. It is the latter scandal that is covered in the very first episode of Only if youf Get Caught, which we are bringing to you here in the normal gossip feed. I hope y' all enjoyed as much as I did and we'll see you in in a little less than a month for the premiere of season nine.
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Being a fan of any team involves a certain amount of self delusion. You know you have no control. When your team wins, it feels almost liberatory. It doesn't matter how little you had to do with it. When they lose, as they inevitably will, it feels deflating. The only consolation is the low stakes. It literally is just a game. But that begs the question, why are you doing this? This is Only if youf Get Caught A show about breaking the rules. I'm Patrick Redford, a stack writer for Defector, where I typically write about basketball, media and culture. Something to know about me is that I'm fascinated by cheating. Everyone loves the story of a scoundrel doing bad stuff, but I find myself frustrated and confused by the way we talk about breaking the rules. Too often we impose the framework of good and bad onto situations that are much more complicated. The reasons why someone would cheat are assumed to be self explanatory and worst of all, simple. I don't think that's true. People bend the rules to get advantages all the time, both in and out of sports. To truly understand something, whether that's Olympic level competition, financial market making, or the publishing industry, you have to understand how people cheat and why. In this show, we're going to explore cheating, frauds and all kinds of chicanery. We'll start by looking at what happens when you believe the NBA, if not the entire world, has it out for your favorite team. Okay, so in every episode of this series, we're going to break down a different cheating scandal. There are five parts to every cheating scandal. A cheater, a cheated, a rule that is broken, the stakes, and an arbiter of truth. So before we get into the nitty gritty of the story, we're going to Run through all these details with a quick game cheat sheet, if you will. I've got our producer Alex here.
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Alex, hello.
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Okay, so what we're going to do.
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Is I am going to set a clock for one minute and I want you to run through this cheat sheet for the audience. Does one minute feel doable to you?
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Oh, I can rock it in one minute. Let's go.
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Okay, I'm going to pull up my stopwatch on my phone because we don't have real stopwatches. And go.
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Okay. It's the 2002 Western Conference finals. Who are the cheaters? The ill omened Los Angeles Lakers as well as the NBA are alleged to have carried this out either in concert or. The Lakers benefited from malfeasance by the NBA. Who lost? This is easy. The noble Sacramento Kings, basketball fans, lovers of beauty and aesthetics and sports. Who is the arbiter? Unfortunately, that's also the party alleged to have cheated here. The NBA through their officials and possibly the league office. What is the rule? This is where it actually gets a little weird. The official NBA rule book entry for foul contains 5,488 words. It's this very arcane, difficult to parse thing that is justice is meted out in real time. And the rule, essentially, the rule, essentially that was contravened was that the legal fiction of what is a foul was disadvantaged against the King several times in crucial moments by the arbiters here. What is at stake? Why does this matter? The Kings were never the same after this. They had this beautiful run. Their spirits were broken. This conspiracy has gained a psychic hold whose powers only have grown as the team has spiraled into failure. Is that a minute?
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That was a good minute and 20 seconds.
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Nice. Okay, cool. In under the wire. You did it. Back in the early aughts, the Sacramento Kings were briefly the best team in the NBA. They were on the verge of winning the city's first championship when they lost under controversial circumstances, some say the NBA conspired against them. This is one of the most infamous NBA conspiracy theories that the NBA and the three officials working Game 6 of the 2002 Western Conference Finals rigged the game to make sure the Kings lost and the Los Angeles Lakers won. But why would the NBA do this to one of its own teams? And why would the league care enough to influence the outcome of such a critical game? Consider who would benefit. The Lakers were the team of the moment. They had the two most famous players in the world and they were chasing their third straight championship. The NBA would stand to gain a lot. Both in the long term by helping the Lakers win and in the short term by extending the series. As it turns out, Game 7 would be the most watched non finals game of the century. Everyone wanted to see the underdog win for once. I was born in Sacramento, which means I inherited the accursed birthright of Kings fandom. If you know one thing about the Sacramento Kings, it's that they are one of the sorriest franchises in sports history. I love Sacramento, though most people think of it as a boring place. It's drab compared to California's other wonders, and Sacramento has precious little representation on the national cultural stage. There are few ways to express collective civic pride or refute the inferiority complex, unless you're a Greta Gerwig Stan or whatever. So the Kings are the primary outlet for this psychic angst. Given how load bearing Kings fandom is, then it's very funny that they are such a tragic franchise. Until very recently, they failed to make the postseason for 16 straight years in a league where over half the teams make the playoffs. Being that bad for that long takes an impressive string of bad decisions and bad luck. They have hired lousy coaches, made inexplicable draft decisions and remained stubbornly incompetent across two ownership groups. In Kings fan lore, this stinkiness all began in 2002 when they believe the NBA cheated them. Something broke when the Kings lost that series and they never came close to winning a title again.
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Back in 2002, you little Lakers fans.
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Cheated my Sacramento Kings.
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It was unbelievable. It was the worst officiated game in.
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My sports writing career. I believed that night when I covered.
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That game here in Los Angeles that.
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It was an abomination. The refs made lots of calls that night in May of 2002, lots of.
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Calls against the Kings.
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I should note that it's not just fans and sacramentans who believe this. A disgraced former NBA referee said years later that the league fixed the game. Ralph Nader wrote a letter to NBA Commissioner David Stern demanding an investigation that was clear. A flagrant foul. As you can imagine, he wasn't even called for it and on the floor bleeding. No investigation was ever conducted, but the conspiracy has persisted for decades. I even believed in the conspiracy for a long time. It was comforting. If part of being a fan is creating this shared identity, what does it say about everyone involved? If that identity is one of uninterrupted losing, it makes sense to displace the blame for that failure. How could we have come so close and lost so bad who did this to us? What cabal hatched this plan? Surely this was a profound injustice. It's easier to believe in conspiracies than it is to accept losing. That is especially true when the conspiracy makes as much sense as this one.
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Let's go back to 2002, when the hair was short and the shorts were long. Those Sacramento Kings were one of the coolest basketball teams of all time. They had a real like Ocean's eleven vibe. They were cocky and international and they played with the real level of artistry. They were always running, cutting and passing to each other with impeccable coordination. It seemed like every player knew where his teammates would be before they got there. They all loved to pass the ball, even their best player, Chris Webber, in their center, Vlade Divac. The team was defined by their selflessness. Their rivals were the flamboyant, star studded Los Angeles Lakers. They couldn't have been more different. Where the Kings were all about equality and harmony, the Lakers were led by the bickering superstar duo of Kobe Bryant and Shaquille o'.
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Neal.
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When's the last time you talked to Shaq?
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And did you ever apologize for those statements?
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You know, I haven't had the opportunity to talk to him directly, but if I do get it, they were so good, it didn't even matter. They hated each other. No team could match the Lakers. By winning the previous two championships, they re established themselves as the NBA's premier team. Even the two coaches were polar opposites. The Kings were led by the soft spoken, owlish Rick Adelman. Lakers coach Phil Jackson, meanwhile, was extremely famous for coaching Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls to six championships where Adelman advocated collective, harmonious basketball. Jackson was a master of manipulation who took a real pride in cultivating that image. He poked and prodded, using the media to motivate his players and goad opponents. One of his more successful goadings is now permanently etched into Sacramento Kings lore. You can hear it every time you go to a game. Two years before their fateful and allegedly fixed matchup, the up and coming Kings lost to the Lakers in a surprisingly feisty first round series. Before game three, the Kings set a huge Lakers jersey on fire in center court, and the team won both games in Sacramento behind their howling fans. Jackson infamously responded by comparing Adelman to Adolf Hitler during a team film session. He also called Kings fans semi civilized rednecks and said Sacramento was a cow town. But Kings fans turned Jackson's barb against him and embraced their raggedness. They started bringing cowbells to games and clanging them at opponents, a tradition that continues to this day.
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We had a guy who was sitting.
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Right behind our bench who had a.
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Cowbell, and he brought one cowbell to.
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The game and decided that he was.
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Going to ring the cowbell for 48 minutes non stop during the game.
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Any after effects after that?
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What's that?
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Any after effects?
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I'm sorry, did you say something?
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My ear's still ringing a little BIT. Back in 2002, the Kings played an Arco arena, a big old barn of a building located in an otherwise empty field out by the airport. It was an ugly and unremarkable arena, a concrete rectangle surrounded by failed and failing developments. But Arco was not without its advantages. Because the arena was so small, it was known as the loudest in the league. Opposing players always talked about how tough it was to play there, and Kings Fans relished our hostile reputations. Where's the toughest place to play? Where the fans just get on you. That'd be Archo Arena. Why is that? They're just nuts, man. I was 10 years old when the 2002 series began, and I remember the city being swept up in the spectacle. It was all anyone was talking about. And I grew up obsessed with basketball, and I knew my favorite team had a real chance to win a championship that meant a lot. They won 61 games that year. All the stats said they were the best team going into the playoffs. It was also very clear that whoever won the Western Conference was going to win the championship. Speaking of the playoffs, here's a quick refresher. The top eight teams from each conference, west and east, are seeded into brackets. They play best of seven series until a champion emerges from each conference. The higher seeded team gets to host the majority of games in a series. The Kings were the 1 seed in the west and the Lakers were 3. And each team won their first two rounds comfortably. All you really need to know about the east is that A, it was easily the inferior conference, and B, the New Jersey Nets made it to the finals, but nobody took them seriously. I was lucky enough to attend one of the games that year, but I was also 10 and a literal child. So we decided to bring in somebody who was more of a sentient adult when these games were going on. Meet Tommy Craggs, my former editor at Deadspin.
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Summer of 2002, I was interning in Atlanta at the Wall Street Journal, and I was about to move out to San Francisco. They were the best team in the league that year.
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Yeah.
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They won 61 games.
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Yeah. And it was a really cool thing to experience. Informative for me as a sports fan.
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I learned a lot from Tommy over the years. But one of the most important things was this phrase he loves to repeat.
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You have to root for pretty. And it was cool to see, like, basically the whole country come, like, rally around this one Kings team, mostly because they played pretty. Players are given all sorts of freedom to act on instinct and sort of use a larger suite of skills that they have. But I think the important part is it's all within a set of, like, prescribed actions. And, you know, it was really beautiful to watch in basketball. That is really beautiful to watch. And you see players kind of reading each other in the moment on the fly.
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Believe in that.
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This is about skilled basketball, not about size and strength. And they're playing every facet of the game, all the cliches about pretty basketball really were true with those Kings teams.
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Pretty was almost enough to carry the Kings through what would turn out to be an epic series. After his team won Game one, Kobe got food poisoning from some Sacramento hotel room service last week, and he does tire. While some Lakers players claimed it was intentional sabotage by the Sacramento hotel staff, some Kings players intimated that he was maybe playing it up. The Kings won the next two games, though the Lakers were publicly aggrieved about how Kings center Vladi Divock was defending Shaq. Divock was a master of flopping, just essentially pretending to get hit to trick the referees into calling a foul on the wrong guy. Basketball is very hard to officiate, in part because it moves so fast and in part because it's so physical. The 10 players on the court are all going at full speed, trying to get away with as much contact as they can. Refs have to determine who's cheating and who's not in real time. Knowing that every decision will make someone mad. That is especially hard if you're being screamed at by 17,000 semi civilized, redneck style fans. Maybe you'll miss a few calls. Maybe you'll err on the side of even subconsciously pleasing the crowd. Or maybe you'll go the opposite way, subconsciously resisting the urge to give the crowd what it wants by calling a harsh game for the home team. The Kings nearly landed a knockout blow in Game 4, only to lose in the most heartbreaking possible way. They were ahead the entire game, but in the final possession, the Lakers got a miracle. When I close my eyes, I can still see it. Kobe Bryant drives right. Doug Christie sticks to him. He misses. Shaq misses a tip in. Vlade Divock rises, bats the ball out to the perimeter directly to Robert Hori, who sinks a three Lakers win at the buzzer. Back in Sacramento after that Game four heartbreak, the Kings played a gritty game and won by a single point, putting them within one game of the finals. But this win was not without its controversial moments. Sacramento probably got away with two fouls in the last minute, fouls that probably helped them win the game. It's funny to think about now, given Game 6's infamous legacy, but a big national narrative after Game 5 was how bad the referees had been. The Los Angeles Times J. A Adande wrote a smirking column with the headline Series has become officially interesting, but nobody could have guessed what would come next. If you're enjoying this episode of Only if youf Get Caught and you're wondering how you can support us. The best way to help the show is a five star rating and review. Wherever you're listening right now.
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In a series this close, each possession means more, and so does every call a referee makes or chooses not to make. So the NBA puts its most experienced refs on the biggest games. Let's meet the crew who worked game six. You have Dick Bavetta, a legendary old referee. He's a tiny, decrepit little man who looked like a cigarette actively being smoked. He didn't retire until he was 75. He's the crew chief, which is what it sounds like.
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Dick Bavetta was known to be and knew himself to be the guy the league would bring in to ref game sixes in series that they wanted to go to seven. You know, because, you know, the longer the series, the more ratings, the more money for the league.
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One of his partners is Ted Bernhardt, who famously gave this weird quote to Grantland about basketball. I can't even see where it's even an issue. I'm from Indiana. There are real problems in the world. You know, it's a basketball game, it's the entertainment business. And the third ref is Bob Delaney, who is a former New Jersey State trooper who infiltrated the mob and wrote a book about it and then became an NBA referee. Imagine the person manning the conspiracy board, drawing and then furiously emphasizing the line between basketball and organized crime. Over and over again, these three presided over a real chaotic mess of a basketball game. In Game 6, no team ever built a double digit lead and the two teams spent the game going nervously back and forth. The Lakers had their backs against the wall and they played with this thrilling sense of desperation while the Kings tried to keep their composure as everything slowly unraveled in the fourth quarter. Those 12 disastrous minutes formed the base of the conspiracy. Officials called The Kings for 16 fouls in the fourth quarter, twice as many as the Lakers. The disparity alone is remarkable, as are a number of specific bad calls. With three minutes left, Chris Webber gets called for an offensive foul at the rim, costing the Kings three points. On the very next play, there's a scramble where it looks like Webber pretty clearly commits another foul. But at the last second, his teammate Vladay Divach innocently reaches in and touches the ball and they call it on him. It's his sixth foul, so he's out of what is at this point a very close game that forced Sacramento to guard Shaq with Lawrence Funderberg, a guy who basically hadn't played all series. He got cooked it is beyond question that the Lakers benefited from officiating. According to a detailed analysis of every call by longtime NBA front office guy Roland beach, the Lakers got six points worth of bad calls. That's a rough estimate, but they won the game by four, so clearly it mattered. There are strict definitions for the various types of fouls. The NBA rulebook entry for fouls is 5,488 words long, but every call is made by officials who have to Keep track of 10 sprinting basketball players, each of whom is trying to get away with stuff. Refs miss calls all the time, even big consequential ones, and the uncertainty there is red meat for sports fans who are definitionally irrational. The way the game is officiated and the way officiating is talked about have changed significantly since 2002. Probably because of 2002. The NBA now has replay review and the league releases daily public reports on the performances of its officials. They tell teams and players before every season how they will enforce slightly different interpretations of the rulebook in the name of art. You might think surely more transparency would make everyone happy, though if anything it's made fans more prone to conspiracizing. Since referees still make mistakes. What could be stronger evidence of a league wide vendetta against your team than a boxed replay review? Everyone became more paranoid about officiating after 2002. Game 6 ended fittingly on a missed call. It is the most infamous one of the bunch. With 13 seconds left in a one point lead, Kobe Bryant was on his way to catch an inbounds pass when he slammed Mike Bibby in the nose. Bibby was leaking blood all over the court and the game was thrown into chaos. If that call goes the other way, everything could have been different. The Kings have a perfect chance to dial up a game winning shot and go to the Finals and win. And deliver Sacramento to the promised land and redeem the inferiority complex and keep the franchise from being cursed. In this branching timeline, they sweep the nets, then host a parade running down J Street, revelers surrounding City hall chucking stuff into the Sacramento River, Images of the arboreal State Capitol grounds broadcast around a world also reveling in the King's success. Shaq leaves the Lakers and no team in the Western Conference can stand before the Kings, Sacramento is thought of as a basketball mecca. When Greta Gerwig makes Lady Bird 15 years later, she mentions the championship because, like, how could you not? That's Sacramento, the city of champions. But we don't live in that world. With Mike Bibby dripping blood on the hardwood, Baveta swallows his whistle. No call. Lakers win by four. If you wanted, you could make the case the Kings were cheated out of a championship. And that becomes a line pretty quickly. Kings beat reporter Eileen Voison said the Kings themselves spent the hours before game seven complaining about game six. They played nervous and scared in game seven and lost at home. After the pair of losses, everyone in Sacramento was pretty up in arms about the Game 6 situation.
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Sports conspiracies in general are instances of fans sort of intuiting the structures of the league, like, who is favored and who isn't, who has power in the context of the league and who doesn't. And all sports conspiracies basically operate like this. Like they're shaped by the broader political economy of the sports in which they take root, but they're all basically doing the same thing. Like soccer conspiracies tend to be about, like, shadowy international outfits influencing outcomes across the map, which, like, stated a little differently, that is an unremarkable description of how soccer actually works.
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Right.
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In professional football, for a long time, everything was about how teams could defy the gravitational pull of going.500 on the season. And often you would get these conspiracies about the most powerful figures within these teams. The coaches trying to find wins, trying to find advantages on the margins of the rules. In the NBA in 2002, you have this, like, underlying sense of everything, that, that the big, big market teams are the favorite children in the league. And so all the conspiracy theories, or a lot of them, tend to sort of center around big market teams. Given these structural factors, it's only natural that refs become a focal point, too. I mean, they. They always have been. But, like, in this specific context, they become like Stern's. Stern's cops. Like, they are deputized to enact David Stern's will on the chaos of a basketball game. And so the Tim Donaghy scandal just grows out of that.
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Tim Donaghy was a referee who worked in the NBA from 1994 to 2007. When he was caught betting on his own games, he was swept up in an FBI investigation into one of the five families of the New York mob. In that investigation, the FBI discovered that gamblers had been making immense Profits betting on NBA games, games that Donaghy turned out to have been working as part of coming clean to the FBI. Donaghy claimed that this 2002 game was fixed, and he wrote about it in a book that he tried to publish.
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We get a hold of the book at Desmond, we publish some excerpts, then the whole book kind of gets out and causes a stir. Yeah, I mean, I think the basic allegation of the book is the rest could shape the outcome of. Of the game, whether according to the prerogatives of the league or because of their own petty bullshit like Steve Javi hating Allen Iverson or whatever. And that these things, these forces were sort of obvious enough that if you were in the know, if you had some sort of inside knowledge, you could make a decent amount of money betting on them. And so there are, like, some parts of that that I think are, again, like, sort of unremarkably true. There are some parts of it that feel like Donaghy wasn't telling the full story. But I think the basic idea that a ref can shape a game and that the way they shape it is all mixed up with, like, their own bullshit. I don't think it's like direct, sinister pressure from the league, but like a general understanding that this is an optimal outcome, not necessarily just for the business interest of the league, but like, what fan without specific commitments didn't want to see that Kings Lakers series go on forever?
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Like, that was just.
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That was as good as basketball got. And of course, people wanted more basketball.
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The Kings never recovered from losing the series. They had a bad year.
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The Mavericks at the feet of the kings in seventh.
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B
And then another bad year. And then 16 years went by without them making it to the playoffs. Many Kings fans point to game six as the moment everything changed, or more precisely, when everything was taken from them. The painful thing about that alternate timeline I laid out earlier, where the resplendent springtime magnolia blossoms of Sacramento are seen reflecting off of the golden championship trophy, isn't just that the Kings fell short. It even goes beyond the notion that they were cheated. What is most painful is the reason why the Kings were worth cheating out of a title. It's that they were punished for being from too small time of an NBA city. Like Tommy said, the spiritual truth masking the factual falsehood is a key to this contradiction. Conspiracies sticking around for so long. That's why so many people still believe the series was fixed. It's why I used to believe the series was fixed. I got over it. Shortly after the Donaghy revelations, probably early in college, as I was becoming more of a fully formed adult. The unique bustedness of the Kings was obviously formative for me, but as I started writing about sports, I quickly realized that I had to develop a rational perspective. Being a good writer means being able to contextualize things as thoroughly as possible. In this case, that meant shedding comforting illusions. I'm not the first person to make this analogy, but there's a cultishness to sports fandom. Both affiliations involve tricking yourself into believing in an irrational salvation. Cheated Kings fans get a powerful story to bind themselves together, no matter how flimsy it is. If you can achieve some level of healthy distance from the more irrational tenets of fandom, you'll quickly realize that you're not special. Any theory about your team being robbed of victory through a vast conspiracy starts to sound absurd. Suffering is the glue that binds every fan base together. In this specific case, there's the simple fact that the NBA has a lot more to lose by getting caught fixing games than they would gain from the fix itself. The COVID up would also be impossible. A basketball game has too many variables to fix without everyone finding out. Accepting human fallibility is not easy. It definitely feels worse to lose because of a human error by a supposedly neutral party than it does because the ball bounced a certain way. But not every bad thing is also an injustice. What conspiracists are really mad at is their own lack of control. Ultimately, my point is that believing in the conspiracy theory is a form of cope. It stems from an inability to come to terms with the fact that your team will lose. No one wants that, but that's sports. The point is to figure out how to have fun even if your team isn't winning. I think if you adopt this aggrieved policy of conspiracy victimhood, you're cheapening your own enjoyment. And ultimately, to believe in magic, you have to accept the possibility of heartbreak Only if youf Get Caught is written and hosted by me, Patrick Redford. It's produced by Alex Sujong Law with production support from J. Tol Vieira Editorial support from Tom Ley and Audrey Martavich. Justin Ellis is Defector's Projects Editor. Mixing by Samantha Gatzic show art by Jim Cook, Jasper Wang and Sean Kuhn are Defector's business guys. Thank you to the Defector staff. Defector Media is a collectively owned subscriber based media company. Only if you get caught as a proud member of Radiotopia. Radiotopia.
- [38:49]
A
From PRX.