For those unfamiliar with the details surrounding UFC’s latest fight-fixing scandal, here’s what happened:
Featherweight Isaac Dulgarian, who entered his previous bout as the largest favorite in UFC history, sat at around -250 against Yadier Del Valle as their November 1st bout approached. At the eleventh hour, however, a massive influx of bets on Del Valle shifted the line all the way to -150. An anonymous Redditor, citing a friend who worked at the Hard Rock Hotel & Casino, claimed said casino “got 5 very large bets from different people on del Valle round 1.” Some sportsbooks stopped taking bets altogether.
The fight itself bore out those concerns. Despite boasting a phenomenal wrestling game with rock-solid jiu-jitsu to back it up, Dulgarian shot a halfhearted takedown, gave up his back, and barely resisted as Del Valle locked up a fight-ending rear naked choke 3:41 into the first round. The fix was so obviously in that more than one sportsbook offered credit to those who’d bet on Dulgarian, who hadn’t done himself any favors by proposing that fighters get a cut of successful wagers placed on them earlier that same week.
This was not the organization’s first gambling scandal. In one of my favorite dumb sporting moments, they caught Tae Hyun Bang planning to throw his fight with Leo Kuntz, told him to knock it off, and watched as a Bang who clearly hadn’t even bothered to train somehow gutted out a split decision. Hell, it arguably wasn’t even the most egregious; James Krause, who enjoyed a middling career in the Octagon before switching his focus to training and gambling advice, got himself and a chunk of his associates blacklisted by sending in a compromised Darrick Minner to be inhumanely euthanized by Shayilan Nuerdanbieke.
This does, however, seem to be a tipping point. Suspicious fans are re-evaluating other odd outcomes, like the time Andre Fili, whose gym famously specializes in guillotine chokes, stuck his neck right into Melquizael Costa’s waiting arms after a massive line shift. The FBI, which had just announced a massive NBA gambling bust and which went on to announce an MLB scandal involving a pair of pitchers, has gotten involved.
Save for maybe the Dana White piece that did well on Reddit, my MMA gambling pieces got more eyes than anything else I’ve done, fiction or non-fiction. I was very, very good at it for a brief period of time. Speaking as a veteran of the field who spent a noteworthy chunk of their adult life enmeshed in it: god, I hope this is fatal. This crap sucks.
I am not inherently opposed to gambling. It ruins lives, of course, but so do any number of vices with which we’ve elected to trust people. It’s the lack of friction that’s the issue.
Though I know I’m going to get grief for this comparison, it’s the most salient one I can think of, so: I support waiting periods for gun purchases. Yes, there are people whom no amount of legal consequences can dissuade, but the the point isn’t to stop an assassin. It’s to stop a guy whose murderous tantrums wear off after an hour.
Before the federal legalization of sports betting, you either had to deal with an internationally hosted sportsbook or physically travel to somewhere like Vegas. There was effort involved in torpedoing your entire life. Now you can do it from your couch and half of every broadcast is goading you into doing it.
The same logic extends to fixing events. It’s long boggled my mind that you could bet on things directly within athletes’ control, like taking the under on rebounds, and prop bets like that are only getting more specific. It’s easier than ever to execute skullduggery and harder than ever to prove it.
And then there’s the toxicity issue. Part of the fun of sports is investing passion, both positive and negative, into something that ultimately doesn’t matter. No, I don’t actually think that Yankees fans should have the team’s logo branded on their foreheads like a vengeful Bostonian’s retelling of The Scarlet Letter, but it’s fun to get worked up over nothing when you and everyone else involved know the stakes are zero. Kinda hard to maintain that atmosphere when your favorite quarterback’s pick-six costs you a month’s salary instead of bragging rights in your office’s fantasy football league.
The current setup just sucks for everyone. It sucks for athletes who have to worry about their screw-ups inspiring murderous rage from the rando they just accidentally bankrupted. It sucks for viewers who have to stomach a torrent of gambling ads and question every underwhelming performance they see.
I’m not naive enough to think that you can totally eliminate this issue; hell, some ne’er-do-wells rigged a whole World Series decades before computers existed. But the current setup just can’t last. While we haven’t had that sort of recent catastrophe in boxing (despite some folks’ best efforts), I’d prefer regulators not wait for one.