Tom E. Curran • E-mail

Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter today vowed to get to the bottom of claims by disgraced former NBA ref Tim Donaghy that referees conspired in 2002 to extend a playoff series to a seventh game and that referees gave preferential treatment to star players by not assessing them technicals or fouling them out.

Actually, no he didn’t. Senator Integrity of the Game apparently hasn’t seen fit to dirty his hands with a stomach-turning scandal that makes steroids and Spygate look like kid’s stuff.

Why bother with allegations that the men charged with being judge and jury on the court are being manipulated by the suits upstairs while the paying public suffers?

Where’s the outcry from Congress? Where’s the indignation from the biggest sports media entity on the planet, ESPN?

Maybe there’s not enough juice to it. Maybe this is too sticky a situation because the second-largest source of Specter's campaign funds since 1989 comes from employees of Comcast, which actually owns the NBA’s 76ers. You know the old, “don’t bite the hand that lines your war chest” adage. Better to go after a sworn enemy of Comcast like the NFL and run a dog-and-pony show over a low-level employee taping fat guys in sweatsuits making hand signals than seeing if the NBA’s referees have been manipulating outcomes of playoff games. Better for ESPN, which of course is partnered with the network televising these NBA Finals, ABC, to swallow the “rogue referee” line of NBA Commissioner David Stern and mitigate the damage that Donaghy’s allegations could cause to advertisers and ratings with perfunctory coverage of the scandal that isn’t.

Spygate was a bad chapter for the NFL. But at least NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell treated it with the seriousness it warranted.

Contrast Goodell’s commitment to get to the bottom of that issue with the ongoing blasé attitude shown by NBA Commissioner David Stern.

After Donaghy’s lawyer released a letter last week detailing Donaghy’s allegations of game manipulation by referees, Stern said in a press conference, “The only concern I have is that when a letter gets filed on behalf of a convicted felon, my concern is that news media run with it as a major blockbuster series of allegations, when, in fact, this guy is dancing as fast as he can to throw as much against the wall so his sentence won't be as hard, put more at risk. But then everyone runs around and says, 'What about the newest allegations?' But pretty much he's a singing, cooperating witness who's trying to get as light a sentence as he can. He turned on basically all of his colleagues in an attempt to demonstrate that he was not the only one who engaged in criminal activity.”

Admittedly, I’m not as well-versed in legal acrobatics as Stern is, but I’ll ask anyway: How do Donaghy’s allegations really help him?

“Because a convicted felon said something about his colleagues in order to lower his time away, am I worried about that? I'm worried that someone is out there saying it, but (the media are the ones) who will either deal with it or not. We've been as open and transparent as we can be,” said Stern.

Oh. I must have missed news of Stern’s meeting with referee Dick Bavetta in which Bavetta refuted Donaghy’s claims that the sixth game of the 2002 Western Conference Finals was rigged. And I must have missed the press conference in which Stern explained how Bavetta’s explanation checked out.

Or maybe there hasn’t been one. Just like there hasn’t been a full-scale and public investigation performed by the NBA that would assure their product isn’t tainted.

My guess? That investigation will come when the outcry and indignation over possible NBA game-fixing really takes off. Which is to say, never.

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