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Athletes, coaches, managers, and officials that bet on their sport should receive a permanent ban for their actions. At the heart of sports integrity is key. If we as fans cannot believe there is a level playing field and that any team or individual can win on any given day there is no reason to shell out money to watch games. An athlete gambling on his own sport is a greater danger to the health of the game than even the much ballyhooed steroids in sports scandal.

The big problem with gambling, not just a persons own team (Or self in individual sports) is it often leads to fixing the outcome of an event. While some may say it's no big deal to bet on yourself to win it is a huge problem. It opens Pandora's box. It makes it an easy step into throwing maybe just one game for some quick money. Betting on other athletes is just as bad. It is too easy in many sports to influence the outcome covertly through any number of surreptitious means.

It is quite easy to point to the infamous Black Sox Scandal in which gamblers paid off eight White Sox players to throw the world series. Some of these players used their payoffs from the gamblers to place bets against themselves through proxies to further boost their ill-gotten booty. It took nothing short of perhaps the greatest baseball player of all time, Babe Ruth, revolutionizing the game to save the league and give it the opportunity to grow. Pete Rose is another well known example. Rose as manager and as player/manager of the Reds placed bets on baseball including his own team. For years he argued he never did any such thing but finally some fifteen years later confessed he in fact did. He was adamant that when he bet on his team it was always to win but that can never be proved and is irrelevant. Betting on games is baseballs greatest offense.

Baseball is not however the only sport blackened by gambling among it's athletes. In 1963 Paul Hornung and Alex Karras of the Detroit Lions were suspended from football indefinitely for betting on NFL games. Both were reinstated a year later but under strict conditions to avoid all forms of gambling legal or otherwise and in Karras's case to sell a bar he owned linked to sports betting as well. No other players in the NFL have been suspended on gambling charges since which points to the notion the NFL may have this problem under control or that those betting on games have gotten more discrete.

Robert Hoyzer was a soccer referee that fixed matches during the 2005 Bundesliga scandal.

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