“Last Time This Went Down, People Died”: Richard Jefferson Recalls FBI Warning His College Team

The NBA was rocked by scandal last week, as Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups, Heat guard Terry Rozier, and former player and coach Damon Jones were arrested by the FBI in connection with illegal gambling activity. Both Billups and Rozier have since been placed on leave by the league.

Many have blamed the ubiquity of sports betting and the partnerships between the sports betting sites and leagues, networks, and players for this scandal, but the reality is that this is far from the first gambling scandal to rock the sports world, or even basketball, for that matter.

Richard Jefferson appeared on Rachel DeMita’s Courtside Club podcast yesterday, and the two spoke about how even when they were young athletes, they were warned against giving in to temptation.

“It kind of reminds me of when I was getting recruited for college,” the former Old Dominion guard DeMita said, “and I don’t know if it was the same for you, but they would put us in these rooms and make us watch those videos, and it was like, ‘If you drink, if you gamble, if you take any sort of gift, (This was before the NIL, all those things), this is what will happen.’ It scared the crap out of me.”

As a promising athlete growing up in Phoenix, Jefferson was scared straight by seeing the Arizona State point shaving scandal unfold in the mid-’90s.

“Because this happened in the state of Arizona,” he remembered, “I was in high school, it happened at Arizona State, I go to the University of Arizona to play basketball, the FBI would come to our team every year and specifically tell us, ‘Hey, we don’t know if we got all the guys. Some of these guys are still floating out there that were a part of this criminal organization. If anybody tries to contact you, just know that the last time this went down, people died.'”

If that doesn’t keep a young athlete on the straight and narrow, nothing will. “It was super, super intense,” Jefferson said.

The best way to avoid similar things happening in the future is to educate athletes and continually remind them of what they stand to lose by getting involved with the wrong people. Jefferson can vouch for the effectiveness of that strategy, but he said that because gambling is so omnipresent in modern-day sports, today’s athletes need even more deterrence than he got.

“They have to start educating,” he said. “You can’t educate at the same level if gambling and sports betting has risen to this level, and you’ve been educating at the same level. You have to up the education.”

To its credit, the NBA is taking the matter extremely seriously and will be reviewing its policies and education of all league and team personnel, per a memo sent out to all 30 teams that was obtained by ESPN.

It’s foolish to believe that gambling scandals can be completely eradicated from sports, but if the leagues do everything in their power to combat them, sports will be in a better place. If there’s a silver lining to this most recent scandal, it’s that nobody can make any excuses going forward.