Sports will go on

The last week in sports has been nothing short of a train wreck.

Be it doped out cyclists competing in the only race Americans care about (and "care about" is such a strong way to describe America's, um, tolerance of this race) or the ongoing Barry Bonds saga in baseball, or the Michael Vick dog fighting scandal.

Yikes, that's a bad week in itself. Then you add the worst of them all: the NBA's embarrassing story of a referee that slipped through the cracks and allegedly fixed basketball games over the last two years.

In a league that's already slipping down the slope faster than a beginning skier, Tim Donaghy's gambling problems might be the straw that breaks the camel's back. Already struggling with an identity issue, a league perceived to be led by money-hungry thugs, the NBA has seen ratings fall a long way the last few years thanks to highly-public wrongdoings by NBA players. From the Ron Artest fight in Auburn Hills, MI, to the Stephen Jackson off-court trouble to many more similar stories, the last thing the NBA needed was this gambling headline.

This is right up there with the 1919 "Black Sox", the Chicago White Sox team that got caught up in gambling and fixing games (including the World Series).

But this is when the NBA needs to do a drastic overhaul and change its entire image. Before this incident, people accused refs of favoring one team over another. Now it seems some of these allegations might be true. David Stern, the NBA Commissioner, is a smart enough man to see and seize this opportunity to change the NBA.

Starting with its background probes into the history of NBA officials, then changing its marketing scheme to make the league more family friendly, the NBA could rise once again to take over the focus of American sports fans.

Sports and the NBA will go on from this point, but it's up to Stern and Co. to step up to the plate and fix the league. Without a major fix, this could be the incident we talk about years from now that changed the way individual sports hire the people that decide the games.

That, and maybe only that, would save this wrecked train.