His friends and family call him Stevin, he says. "I didn't think we'd be touched at the time," he says. But it seems more authentic when Smith talks about his mindset while he was working to alter the outcome of games. Smith and Burton also talk about how student athletes should be paid, so that they aren't temped by the money to fix or throw games. And they suggest that it is so easy it could happen again. Smith and Burton talk about how easy it was to do, as does Gagliano. He would do prison time, as would Gagliano and Silman. Smith's dreams of an NBA career ended - a reenactment shows him hosting a draft party, but no team takes him. Somers and other journalists had also caught wind of point-shaving and were trying to break the story.Įventually those involved in the point-shaving would be arrested. This led to fixing another couple of games, with Gagliano at this point betting millions of dollars all around town in Las Vegas (he had to keep bets under $10,000 each to avoid suspicion).īy the time the fix was in on a fourth game, the feds were snooping around. Smith and Burton, who he enlisted to help him, came through in a strange way: Smith scored 39 points, but ASU won by exactly six points. Smith didn't want the team to lose the game, he told them, but he didn't have to - ASU could win, but not by more than six points. Working with Gagliano, an entrepreneur, they fixed a game against Oregon State. Smith, Silman and Gagliano all went to prisonīut Smith wound up owing Benny Silman, a student and a bookie at ASU, more than $10,000 in gambling debts. That changed with a group of elite recruits, including Smith. "And most of us who lived there thought this giant is never going to wake up." "They were a sleeping giant," Kent Somers, a columnist for The Arizona Republic who covered the team at the time, says in the film. The quick version of what happened is this: ASU was a constant underachiever in basketball.
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"Every time you get a paper bag full of hundreds, it's addictive," the enigmatic Smith says. Stevin 'Hedake' Smith faces the media in a scene from 'Hoop Schemes' on Netflix. Various motives are bandied about, but this, too, can be whittled down to a single word: money. Although Sewell offers Smith, Burton and Joseph Gagliano, who set up the scheme, plenty of time to explain themselves, and they disagree on some of the particulars, no one denies the overall crimes - or Burton's assessment of them. "Oh man," he recalls thinking when he realized things aren't going to work out as he'd hoped. Isaac 'Ice' Burton boils the whole point-shaving scandal down MORE THINGS TO DO: For restaurant reviews, travel tips, concert picks and more, subscribe to. Get all the news you need in your inbox each morning.īut no one cuts through the details and gets to the heart of the thing like Isaac "Ice" Burton, another ASU player involved in the scandal, which occurred during the 1994-95 season. What makes it dicey is the unpredictability of sports and the fact that throwing games is, you know, illegal. "Hoop Schemes," directed by Luke Sewell, offers, in addition to interviews with Smith and others involved, a straightforward explanation of how betting lines and point spreads and throwing games works, should you ever be in need of such knowledge.
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Stevin 'Hedake' Smith, seen in his playing days at Arizona State University, is at the center of 'Hoop Schemes,' part of the 'Bad Sport' series streaming on Netflix. "Bad Sport," a series of six short documentaries about sports scandals that will stream on Netflix, revisits one of the darkest moments in Arizona State University history, sports-related or otherwise, one the school and its fans would like to forget: the point-shaving scandal involving former player Stevin "Hedake" Smith.