By Kim Tong-hyung
With the top divisions of baseball, football and volleyball plunged into the murky depths of a widening match-fixing scandal, the government is vowing to purge professional sports of the influence of gamblers and fixers.
However, it could be said that a slew of betting scams involving professional players is a symptom but not the disease. Athletes here from a young age are exposed to a culture of cheating that is ingrained at every level of competition from amateur to pro.
The recent game- and sport-fixing controversies are linked to the massive demand generated from illegally online betting sites operated from China, Vietnam and other foreign locations, as was confirmed from the investigation of arrested players and fixers.
But it could be said that Korea’s complacency toward cheating and corruption in sports authored its fate as a hotbed for illegal sports betting and manipulation.
The core of the trouble may lie in the country’s scholastic sports, which double as feeder leagues for professional games.
The schools will say they are much more than talent farms for professional teams and represent amateur competition at its best. But the endless stories about fixed matches and bribed officials suggest that Korean scholastic sports are just as corrupt and exploitative as their professional counterparts.
The essence of the problem, critics say, is that scholastic sports are basically a microcosm of Korea as a society, where reputation will trump performance and social mobility is just a theory.
Students who score well in the state university entrance exam will enter the country’s top schools, which traditionally provide them with a lifetime of advantages in landing the best jobs, getting promoted and lock them on course to join the upper-tier of society.
The story is often similar for the majority of athletes who aren’t talented enough to be picked up by professional franchises right out of high school. They will get only a limited number of shots at joining the top college teams, which provide the bulk of players later drafted by professional teams.
For an athlete to join a top college program, it’s often required that his high-school team finishes in the top-four in national tournaments. This fuels a ``win-at-all-costs’’ nature that ironically breeds corruption, critics say.
The country’s amateur baseball association punished a number of high school coaches in 2005 for attempting to bribe officiating crews at national tournaments. But this didn’t prevent a slew of high school coaches and baseball umpires becoming entangled in a bribery scandal five years later.
There is often collusion among coaches too as tournament performances will dictate how many of their players end up with college teams. For example, a coach from a team that did well in the spring tournament might deliberately send out a team consisting of freshmen and sophomores when reaching the quarterfinals in the summer bracket in a ``wink-wink’’ arrangement with his opponent.
Things aren’t much cleaner in amateur football, which suffered an embarrassing moment last year when police uncovered a match-fixing scheme arranged between elementary school teams.
Basically, Korean school athletes have been told repeatedly that if you aren’t cheating, you aren’t trying. No wonder so many of them display a lack of respect for competitive integrity as pros, jumping at the first fixer offering them a chance to make some money on the side.
``The all-for-nothing nature of scholastic sports is obviously a big problem in this country. The top-four tournament rule, which dictates the players that make it to college and those who don’t, clearly has to go,’’ said a former executive of Hanwha who was involved in front office work for the Hanwha Eagles, a Daejeon-based professional baseball team.
``Look how we educate our athletes. We keep them in school most of the time, but train them as sports drones, and never expect them to show up in classes or do well in exams. We never cared about what kind of a people they grow up to be, never cared if they learned about integrity or decency. They have been brought up as machines who are expected to produce a result and this is not a good thing.’’
The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism unveiled a package of measures to prevent further corruption in sports Tuesday, after the professional leagues in baseball, football and volleyball were hit with match-fixing scandals.
The government will apply a ``no mercy’’ rule to any individual involved in match fixing. Professional clubs will also be held accountable for protecting players from exposure to match rigging or other manipulation.
Under a recently revised law on sports promotion, players or coaches who take part in fixing schemes are to be sentenced to up to five years in prison or pay up to 50 million won (about $44,480) in fines. Their teams will also face expulsion from the league.
``The recent events have created an alarming situation that may rattle the foundation of sports,’’ Culture Minister Chae Kwang-shik said in a news conference.