I would think suspending the number 1 player in the game for gambling would be quite a message to the rest of the league, right?
If there needed to be a message, sure. But if it wasn’t a prolific issue with other players, and they didn’t want to drag their star player’s name through the mud, especially after his dad was murdered…
But this is all speculation and it’s probably bullshit.
As I’ve heard it said, Jordan’s father was murdered because of Jordan’s gambling debts.
So, there was heat from serious underworld figures.
Consider also that the underworld may have also been fixing games (Tim Donaghy would acknowledge betting on games as a ref a decade later, and yet another conspiracy theory says that the league mandated the Kobe/Shaq Lakers, and not the Sacramento Kings, in the Finals, and used the refs to make it happen).
So it’s possible that the league itself (and David Stern in particular) didn’t want a big expose on gambling at the highest level of the NBA.
Jordan had to lay low while he cleared his debts (and so he “retired” while still working for Jerry Reinsdorf, the owner of both the Bulls and Sox), and Stern might have been sending a message to the underworld gambling community to back down.
Or something.
As I read it, this does not show that the Tuskegee Experiment was a secret. It shows that nobody who both cared and had the power to do anything about it knew what was going on. When someone who did care and did have the power to do something about it (a reporter) looked into it, then suddenly there were consequences.
Exercise Tiger might be another example. There were obvious means and motives to keep it a secret during wartime, but afterward, is there any particular reason to think that survivors weren’t telling their families/friends/etc.? Or is it just that nobody was bothering to write it into histories of World War 2? ETA: according to a link from Wikipedia, that’s exactly it. It stopped being a secret before the war even ended, but it didn’t reach public awareness.
It’s a bit like Bill Cosby or R. Kelly or Jeffrey Epstein. It wasn’t remotely secret that they were serial sex offenders. All three of them had gone through public legal proceedings, and comedians were joking about Cosby and Macklemore was referencing R. Kelly’s problems in a #1 hit song. But nobody did much of anything about it and most people didn’t know about it, until suddenly they did. Or like the Tulsa Race Massacre, or other episodes that get lost to history and then suddenly explode into public consciousness when they match the zeitgeist, or some journalist writes a story or book about them, or some public post goes viral.
These examples don’t tell us much about JFK/9/11/moon landing conspiracy theories. For something like that, pretty much anyone who knew about the conspiracy could make the information public with one phone call to the New York Times, so you need everyone who knows about it to be onboard with the conspiracy. That’s a whole other ballgame.
Pardon (and cure) my ignorance, please: what does “the league mandated” mean?
My initial reading is that shadowy figures controlling the NBA decided among themselves that the championship title ought to go to the Lakers, and took steps to achieve that outcome, but that seems kinda out there.
But is that the reading you intended?
ETA: And if so, shouldn’t the phrase be the ASSOCIATION mandated, on account of they call themselves an association, rather than a league?