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John Thomson  

Here and there

If you like reading books on sports this is for you. The book is called The Fix and it will forever change the way you think and feel about professional sport.

The Fix is the most explosive story of sports corruption in a generation. It presents compelling evidence that some of the highest soccer matches in the world may have been fixed: European Champions League, Olympic and World Cup tournaments.

It tells the story of an investigative journalist, Declan Hill, who set out to examine the world of football match fixing in professional soccer.

Hill came face-to-face with the multi-billion dollar illegal Asian gambling industry. Over four years, he interviewed more than two hundred people, including professional gamblers, Mafia hitmen, undercover cops, top-level international soccer players, referees, and officials. He met men who claim they have bribed their way into fixing the results of some of the biggest matches in the sport. Initially very skeptical, Hill travelled across four continents to corroborate their stories. He found soccer leagues where mobsters have fixed more than eighty per cent of the games. But most chilling, he met and then was adopted by a small group of match-fixers.

In The Fix, Hill explains the structure and mechanics of illegal gambling syndicates, what soccer players and referees do (or not do) to affect the outcome of their games, why relatively rich and high-status athletes would fix games, how and why club officials would bribe the opposition and how they get referees “on their side.” Perhaps most shocking is Hill’s discovery that gambling fixers have successfully infiltrated the game, all the way to the top international matches.

The book, however, is not just about match fixing in soccer, the world’s most popular sport. Throughout the text, Hill uses examples from other sports – tennis, hockey, even rowing – to show that the credibility of professional sport now lies on a fragile foundation, and it provides enough hints to suspect that all sports above amateur level should look nervously over their shoulder.

I couldn’t put it down.
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Talk about feeling old all of sudden! I just got a note that SILK-FM, the radio station now owned by Astral Media, will be have a birthday on June 21 - its twenty-fifth. As they cut the ribbon to put the station on the air, the guests invited by then owner Nick Frost, were Walter Gray, Jamie Browne (both owned radio stations locally) and CRTC Commissioner Rosalie Gower from Vernon. A school choir sang the national anthem live, Albert Baldeo said a prayer and the station went on the air with the song “Theme From a Summer Place,” by Canadian Percy Faith.

As Nick Frost said to me, “It seems like yesterday.”

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Didn’t I have my first footlong at the White Spot on Granville in Vancouver? I think those were the first footlongs in Canada or am I wrong about that?

If you sell sandwiches that happen to be, oh, 12 inches long, and you dare to refer to said sandwiches as being a "footlong," then Subway would like to have a word with you. NPR reports that, shops calling their sandwiches "footlongs" began receiving a cease and desist letter from Subway demanding a halt to this alleged misconduct and explaining that Subway "has applied for the trademark FOOTLONG (TM) in association with sandwiches."

Subway's trademark applications for "footlong" are now being considered. A cursory Google search reveals over 6,000 uses of the words 'footlong sandwich' apart from the term 'Subway.'

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Canada's newest wireless carrier is trying to set itself apart from the other startups now entering service by targeting the nation's large Asian community.

Mobilicity, the brand name of parent Data & Audio-visual Enterprises (DAVE) Wireless, began signing up customers in Toronto and its surrounding suburbs, promising to extend its HSPA+ network later this year to Vancouver, Calgary, Edmonton and Ottawa, the nation's capital.

For $20 a month on top of any of its no-contract plans, subscribers can take one of two unlimited voice calling packages: One to China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan, Singapore and Vietnam, and the other to India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.

DAVE Wireless, headed by Toronto businessman and satellite radio network owner John Bitove, paid CDN$243 million in Canada's 2008 AWS spectrum auction for licenses covering many of the country's biggest cities. It's also funded by New York's Quadrangle Capital Partners. Unlike Wind Mobile, which is backed by Egypt's Orascom Telecom Holdings S.A.E., Mobilicity isn't trying to build a national network. Instead it's focusing on urban dwellers that aren't looking for the coast-to-coast coverage offered by present carriers.

The Canadian government set aside spectrum for new entrants in the 2008 to encourage competition because three incumbents -- Bell Canada, Rogers Communications and Telus Corp. -- hold about 95 per cent of the wireless market.

An estimated 70 per cent of Canadians are wireless subscribers, leaving 30 per cent of the market -- roughly 7 million people -- up for grabs.

Cable operator also bought AWS spectrum in 2008, Calgary-based Shaw Communications Inc. They have already been talking about how their purchase of the Canwest Global TV properties this past month they will have much content to offer to their new phone network which is scheduled to start sometime next year.


More John Thomson articles

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About the Author

John Thomson is the Okanagan's pre-eminent business columnist writing his column, Rumours and Things, for over 24 years. Plugged in to the valley's who's who, John keeps his readers coming back for more with his straight talk and optimistic perspective on where we are headed next.

When John is not writing his column, he runs a sixteen year old think tank called the Executive Roundtable and holds his popular "Thomson Presents" quarterly business speaker seminars.

Have a comment, question, or tip for John? 

E-mail John at
[email protected]
or send him a fax at 250-764-8255.

 



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The views expressed are strictly those of the author and not necessarily those of Castanet. Castanet does not warrant the contents.

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