Ignoring this problem is a bad bet

NEW YORK -- We won’t bury the lead. Men’s tennis has a gambling problem.

It’s more complicated than that ATP match in Poland between a Russian and an Argentine the first week in August. That’s just the flash point.

The heat is mostly on Nikolay Davydenko, No. 4 in the world and loser of that second-round match in Sopot, Poland, to Martin Vassallo Arguello, who is No. 73. Davydenko won the first set, lost the second and retired with an injury in the third.

After the first set, money poured in on Arguello to win, and when the British-based online betting operation, Betfair, saw the influx of more than $7 million on a guy already down one set in a best-of-three match against the No. 4 player in the world, they smelled a rat.

A 10-year-old could have figured that out.

Betfair then voided all bets on the match, an unprecedented move.

Davydenko is here at the U.S. Open.

He played and won routinely Thursday, as he did Monday, after which he babbled through a news conference with answers to questions about gambling that shed no new light on anything. To be fair, it is impossible to tell whether it is his poor English or his clear intention to further muddy the waters.

But muddy waters they are.

Tennis is a sport played in dozens of countries, by players who speak dozens of languages and tend to be 20 years old and are here and gone before anybody knows they came and went. Some weeks there could be as many as 10 men’s tournaments playing on four continents.

The stars make so much money that it makes little sense to be looking for more on the side -- a reason Davydenko seems a strange target. But the rest of the tour consists of hundreds who never make it, whose time frame is a year or so and who end up mostly as first-round fodder for the stars.

There are so many moving parts in so many places. To police this sport, to get your arms around it, is monumental.

The Davydenko case has been the can opener. Now, every day, the lid peels back a little more.

The French sports publication L’Equipe, went with a story Thursday that anonymously quoted two so-called elite players, Mister A and Mister B, as saying they have actually witnessed “thrown” matches, including one on the level of the Tennis Masters Series. Each said he was offered a bribe to throw a match and one said the sport must act “before things get out of hand.” One also said that players’ lounges are full of people on laptops, and that “60-80% of the coaches are on Internet betting sites.”

A walk through the players’ lounge here easily confirmed lots of people on laptops, and it brought a little chuckle over the current ATP rule banning players, coaches and their connections from using laptops inside stadiums. Most player lounges, as here, are just steps away from center court.

In recent days, players Paul Goldstein of the United States and Michael Llodra of France have said they have been approached in the past to “influence the outcome” of a match.

Thursday, Czech Republic star Tomas Berdych, seeded No. 9, mentioned as a problem all the people hanging around the players’ lounges at events and pulled no punches in his assessment of the Davydenko case

“The situation, it’s really bad,” he said.

“It’s also bad for all of us guys that he’s part of the ATP and he’s part of us. Even worse, that he’s one of the top guys.”

Berdych said he’d never had any sort of approach from a gambler, but minced no words about his desire to get this fixed.

“I heard it from other guys,” he said, “and just what I heard, it was from the tournaments in Russia. It was Moscow and St. Petersburg.”

He also said, “If they had any small chance to find it and prove it, it would be very good if they could.”

His solution was to “suspend him forever,” the “him” presumably any guilty party.

In agreement was U.S. player Vince Spadea, who has been ranked as high as No. 18 in his 14 years on the tour.

“Tennis needs to follow the baseball model, the way it handled Pete Rose,” Spadea said. “Here you had a guy with the most hits ever and they come down on him hard. That’s what some of the guys on this tour need right now. Some fear.”

Another tour player who didn’t want his named used talked about how angry he was when the ATP held its players’ meeting in March at the NASDAQ tournament in Miami.

“They had this expert, the former mob guy [Michael Franzese], come in and talk to us, and he had lots to say about how we could get hooked into gambling,” the player said. “There were a bunch of guys kind of making fun of this guy, acting rude and laughing all this off. I looked around and it was mostly the Russians.

“Which I found interesting, because these are the same guys you worry about.”

For its part, the ATP tour, while not denying there may be a problem, is comfortable with its stance and action plan.

According to Kris Dent, tour communications director, the ATP saw the potential problems coming with the advent of online sports gambling in 2003, much of it European based. The tour created new guidelines that year, tougher penalties, all the way up to lifetime suspensions, and went into a sort of protective partnership with online bookmakers such as Betfair, who alerted the tour to the unusual betting patterns at that Davydenko match in Poland.

Now, there are two investigators, one reportedly from Scotland Yard, working the case. Interestingly, neither Davydenko nor Arguello have been interviewed and Davydenko said he wasn’t scheduled for one until after the China Open, which ends Sept. 16.

Asked about that, Dent said, “We have one consideration about who is interviewed when, and that is what is best for the investigation.”

One way to interpret that would be to say that they have to track down the bettors before they can make a link to the fixers. And if they don’t do the first, they can’t do the second.

The ATP knows how explosive this is. It likes to remind reporters that there have been no gambling sanctions on the tour since the new rules were put in place. But its chief executive, Etienne de Villiers, felt strongly enough about the Davydenko case to issue a statement that pointed to the need for integrity and to hint that it’s tougher in tennis because it is a “one-on-one gladiator contest.” In other words, one guy can fix everything.

Tennis is a niche sport, one that fights daily for a piece of the public and media pie that is getting more and more crowded. The crowds at this U.S. Open have been large and enthusiastic. A fine time is being had by all.

Throw in one fix and they go away. At the moment, something smells, and it isn’t just sweaty wristbands.

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Times staff writer Lisa Dillman contributed to this report.

Dwyre can be reached at Bill.Dwyre@latimes.com. For previous columns, go to latimes.com/dwyre.