Sports media loves a gambling scandal — unless it can be ignored

On nights that don’t necessarily include Halloween, Tom Waits has written boozy, flop-house encrusted prose and sung lousy-luck laments about such personal matters as investing in “fast women and slow horses.”

Waits also hoarsely sings of a world stuck in reverse, such as a business that “makes feet for children’s shoes.” Don’t know if he’s much into sports, but he seems to know in which direction they’ve gone.

The lift-the-barriers-on-vice legislation to legalize, invite and profit from human self-destruction has, inevitably, brought fixed sports gambling to the fore. At least, in the NBA’s case, for a couple of days.

The scandal line forms to the rear until their sensational status fades like school shootings, political assassinations and our sports subservient to money pumped from Communist China and Islamic despotic royals from the United Emirates (see the new ads carried on the backs of NBA refs).