Tales from the first tee

Inside A Point-Shaving Web And The ICE Hammer

• Rich Easton

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A few unfamiliar names, a 70-page indictment, and a flood of betting data set the stage for a candid look at how games get bent and why so many of us still want to believe the scoreboard tells the whole truth. I walk through the mechanics of a recent point-shaving scheme at mid-major and D2 programs, how sportsbooks and integrity services flagged coordinated prop bets, and why subpoenas, texts, and money trails make “nobody will know” a losing strategy. The result isn’t moral panic; it’s a sober case for uncertainty—and the reason I stopped wagering when hidden variables outnumbered knowns.

Then we swing to a different arena where trust is contested in public view: immigration enforcement. ICE operations have surged, detention capacity has climbed, and the country is arguing through headlines, viral videos, and incomplete stats. I lay out the competing claims—historic enforcement gains versus due process concerns—and ask listeners to sit with the uncomfortable math of trade-offs. Policies promise order, but every big lever has an unintended cost, and communities feel it first.

To ground it all, I return to the one place where the odds feel honest: the course. “Write about what you know” led me to golf, not because I’m a pro, but because four hours with a scorecard reveals who we are under pressure. From Hogan and Penick to Rotella and Parent, the mental game beats quick fixes, and the best shots arrive after quiet practice, not swing juice. I share a childhood dodgeball moment that rewired my idea of courage, plus four reasons we forget our own peaks—and how to lock them in for the next swing. If you can’t control the whistle or the policy, you can still control your reps, your recall, and your response.

If this resonated, follow the show, share it with a friend who bets too confidently, and leave a quick review with your biggest takeaway. Your notes shape what we explore next.

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SPEAKER_00:

Welcome to Tales from the First Hitty. I'm Rich Easton. Now telling tales from picturesque Harrisonburg, Virginia, outdoor adventure capital of the Shenandoah Valley and home to the James Madison Dukes. What comes to mind when I say Kennesaw State, Nickel State, Marves Fairley, or Shane Hannon? For most people, you'd get a blank deer in the headlights response. Those four names and more have been exposed in a recent point-shaving scandal that's rocking D1 basketball. Now I've talked about the biggest trend in sports recently, and no, it's not pickleball, don't get me started. No, it's sports gambling.$112 billion in revenues in 2025 and project it at$125 billion this year. It's doubled over the past five years, driven by legalization in new regions and states and an ongoing online presence. Look, I don't consider myself a conspiracy theorist. Unless the subject of UAPs comes up, then I'm all in. I'm all in to learn about what others in the legacy group already know. And I think they know that they're here. They've been here, their technology is superior, and we still don't have very good clear video. So I've got one foot in and one foot out. I don't bet on sports. You know, I've even stopped betting on my golf game because despite the juice that comes from the need to win a hole, my body continues to give me the middle finger when it's go time. I don't bet on sports because I've been disappointed too many times with results that lost me money. What a surprise, right? Unintended results at the end of a game that made my wager a loser. Now that I've learned from David Metcalfe, U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, that dozens of basketball players on 17 teams purposely underperformed after being paid tens of thousands of dollars to effect a greater loss than anticipated to cover the spread. Multiple players on multiple teams were in on the point shaving. Kennesaw State and Nicholas State were just two out of the 17 schools under investigation. We all want to believe in the integrity of college sports. Okay, let me rephrase that. Time and time again, we're made aware of athletes point shaming, referees fixing games whose calls affected the outcome of the game and the bet. And yet still, we like to believe that the governing body of the NCAA has watchdogs to prevent this sort of thing. Well, maybe they do. Because now there's a 70-page federal indictment unsealed that point fingers at Morris Fairley and Shane Hennan for recruiting players at mid-D1 and D2 schools, thinking they're probably flying below radar. I don't bet on sports because I'm just unsure of too many factors. What each coach, player, owner, or referee's motivation is for that game. Does the owner want the first pick in next year's draft so he influences who plays and who doesn't that game? How badly does every coach and player want to win, or is something or someone influencing their performance not to do so well? Or at least do well on some plays and don't do well on the others that make a difference in the outcome of the game. And not being a conspiracy theorist, I also don't know what's going on with their minds and bodies. What's happening and influencing them where they're distracted in the game, or what's happening with their bodies where they just can't compete at their highest level because something's gone south. You know, and it might be that they really want to do well and they're telling their coaches they're ready to go. But they and only they know whether they're feeling that three-point jumper that day, that they can get up and above the rim anytime they want, that they are quick enough to play the kind of defense that they do when they're at their best. I know that I don't know the whole story for every player, coach, ref, so it's best for me to watch the game without wagering on the outcome. How many people have been built out of millions of dollars of wagers because they were unaware of the gambling undercurrents affecting the real outcome of the game? There's not a stat on that, but I know it's big. Look, am I surprised in all of this? And the answer is no. Just amazed that innocent people are still betting against the three-card Monty in Times Square. My dad would always say, Richard, it's rigged. Do not bet on that. And he knew that three-card Monty, he knew that the find the ball under the cup game in New York, it was all rigged. He knew it. So he's like, don't play. We'd go to carnivals. He's like, don't play the games. Go on the rides, don't play the games thinking you're gonna win that Cupie doll or that big bear for that girl you like because it's rigged. It's all rigged. No, that's not why I don't gamble. I don't gamble because I know I'm not smart enough to anticipate the outcome of the game with everybody that's playing in the game. Look, I don't know anything about the accused fixers. Marves Fairley, Shane Hennan, Jalen Smith, Rod Winkler, and Alberto Loriano. Don't know anything about them. Don't know their innocence or their guilt. But it seems like a clever strategy to enlist basketball players that were not likely getting any of the NIL money because of the size of their programs and divisions they competed in. We're not talking Yukon, Kansas, Duke, or North Carolina, where their stars are earning tens of thousands monthly on NIL. We're talking schools like Kennesaw State, where collective players were paid a sum of upwards of$100,000 per game to throw the game. I mean, that just flies below the radar of all sports betting, particularly when a lot of betting is on teams that most people know. So, how did the feds find out about this, you might ask? I think the answer is it's all in the data. Sportsbooks and integrity monitoring services detected unusually large coordinated wagers on certain college and even CBA games, especially on player props and against heavy favorites to cover. The FBI and federal prosecutors then subpoenaed betting records, communication logs, and financial transactions, which revealed clusters of accounts tied to the same small group of gamblers and intermediaries. And here's the kicker. Investigators say they collected text messages, DMs, call records, travel and cash transfer details showing fixers coordinating with players about specific games. And the alleged fixers probably all had one thing in common. They probably thought they'll never know.

SPEAKER_01:

Nobody's gonna know. Nobody's gonna know. They're gonna know. How would they know?

SPEAKER_00:

You'd have to be living under a rock not to be hearing stories about ice. Ice, ice baby. Yes, VIP. Let's take it. Hey, didn't Queen and David Bowie start under pressure the exact same way as Ice Ice Baby. ICE stands for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. It operates as the primary investigative branch of the Department of Homeland Security, and their mission focuses on protecting national security and public safety. With our new administration, ICE enforcement has intensified dramatically, shifting to a nationwide deportation strategy targeting all undocumented immigrants rather than criminal or recent arrivals. And according to my sources, the administration's quadrupled ICE arrests, setting daily quotas at 3,000 and expanded detention capacity to a hundred and thirty thousand beds, with forty-five billion in funding from one big beautiful Bill Act, the OBBBA. So what's the net effect? Border crossings have dropped from over a hundred thousand to ten thousand monthly. And if you believe that a hundred thousand is a big number, and most of these people are not being productive and are taking jobs for Americans, then you'd say, hey, this is a good start. And if most of those people have been identified as criminals and are causing havoc here in the United States, you'd say, hey, this is a great start. But interior operations have sparked controversies, including viral videos of aggressive arrests and deaths in custody amid gutted oversight mechanisms. Critics highlight eroded due process, no due process in many cases, while supporters cite historic enforcement gains. So you try and look at both the pros and the cons, and there always have to be both. So a pro, it boosts deportation of criminals and undocumented immigrants. Cons. It erodes community trust. Pro, it targets serious offenders. Cons. It risks racial profiling. Pro, it improves public safety. Cons it erodes overreach on minor violations. Pro, it leverages local manpower. And con seventy-four percent of ICE detainees lack criminal convictions. That's fifty thousand people. In twenty twenty five, ICE conducted two hundred and seventeen thousand five hundred and eighteen arrests, mostly towards the year end, mostly in border states like Texas, Florida, and California. And how many were Venezuelans? Those stats are unavailable. We know upwards of eight million Venezuelans fled their country in the past ten years, creating the largest displacement crisis in the world. While upwards of eighty percent of them fled to South American neighboring countries, over 200,000 directly landed in the United States, and we don't know how many filtered indirectly from other South American countries on top of the 200,000. Look, when Emma Lazarus inscribed the new colossus at the base of the Statue of Liberty, it read, Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shores, blah blah blah blah blah, and ends with, I lift my lamp beside the golden door. When she wrote that, I don't think she had the foresight to imagine the State of the Union a quarterway into the 21st century. I wouldn't be surprised if the current administration, an effort to duplicate the messages on the presidential wall of fame in the White House, rewrite the sonnet at the base of the Statue of Liberty to be something like: give us your scientists and engineers, your techno geeks and generational wealth, teeming with loyalty and a pledge to make America the greatest empire the world has ever seen, led by His Majesty, the man of the people, 38-time club champ and defender of those that agree with him. Anyway, every plan has unintended consequences. This ICE overreach is certainly one of them. And it all comes down to one thing that everyone can wrap their heads around. Who can you really trust? Look, if you live in a border state and you listen to certain types of media, then you might have one point of view that this is something that's good. Things have gone too far. If you live in an interior state and you listen to other types of media, you might think this is a little bit of overreach. What other countries in the past have done things like this? And how did that work out for them?

SPEAKER_02:

So long, farewell, I'll be to say goodnight. I hate to go.

SPEAKER_00:

And as my sales team was talking about it, all of a sudden I blank into a memory of high school when I'm fun fumbling for a condom and trying to open it the week my parents left on vacation, left me at the house, and I would be having these rendezvous with my girlfriend between my last class in high school and my lacrosse practice, or even a lacrosse game. And let me tell you, I fumbled. But no, the best advice I've been given isn't wear a condom. Although I would tell you, kids, wear a condom. And it's not, hey, don't shit where you eat. I had to learn the hard way. When I started in the work world, right out of college, I fooled enough people to qualify for this executive training program with a large oil company. I went through the customary three months of cutthroat training and was assigned to a regional office in Tyson's Corner, Virginia. I was single. And so were the five administrative assistants at the regional office. So the first day in the office, my first line manager at the end of an off-site lunch bestowed upon me some wisdom that was also bestowed upon him. And that was don't shit where you eat. Hands off the office eye candy. It was remarkable how all five administrative assistants were smoke shows. I started to think that all companies in the 70s were hiring for viewable talent along with people that could get the job done. I remembered my dad's office back in Long Island, a mid-size metal door and frame manufacturing plant where the administrative help looked and sounded like Fran Dresher. When the show Mad Men started in 2007, it brought up memories of a similar time for me in the 70s and 80s working for this oil company. So the advice of don't shit where you eat made perfect sense, if not for the fact that the culture was all about winning and power. The perfect combination for office trists, road trip misbehaviors, and protecting your catch. The good advice that I got was more of a territorial threat. It was more like don't shit where we eat. Anyway, I took no one's advice and and within one year I was promoted, probably for three reasons. One, I earned it. Two, it reopened the flock of those five administrators, and number three. Three, there wasn't a number three. It was basically get him out of this office so we can continue to do what we do best. Yeah, so the best advice I've been given isn't wear a condom, isn't don't shit where you eat. Although I'll tell you kids, those are really good advice. It was write about what you know about. And for me, golf is what I know about. And look, it's not like I played in high school or college or played in any pro circuit. It's just that when it was important for me to play golf as I was trying to climb the corporate ladder, and most events off-site with our customers were around golf. I had to learn how to golf and golf good enough, number one, so I wasn't the problem, and then eventually where I could contribute to the team game and maybe win some trophies at some of these events. Now, the truth is I played on some foursomes where the other players were A players, and I might have been C or D, but I held my own long enough for us to win. And also, I'm observant, and I watch people, and I watch how people compete. More importantly, how they react to their shots, their partner shots, their competitors' shots. Everybody tends to define themselves on a golf course. I always say it's a microcosm of life, but everybody says about everything they do. You could see somebody's personality after playing a four or five hour round. I also like to analyze my own swing, my own behavior. I've read as many golf books as anybody I know. Ben Hogan's Five Lessons, Harvey Penick's Little Red Book, Golf is Not a Game of Perfect by Bob Rotella, Dave Pelz's short game, A Good Walk Spoiled, by John Feinstein, and my favorite of all time is Zen Golf by Dr. Joseph Parent. A book I've gifted to club throwers and self-destructive whiners. It gets into the mental aspect of golf and what you should be thinking about and not thinking about. And basically, just cut the self-deprecating bullshit on the course. It's a hard game. So that's why I talk about golf. I think about it, I read it, and I do it probably more than I should. But anybody who gets the bug can talk about golf. And most likely they do. Whether they're married to a golfer and weave the sport into their lives, play professionally, compete recreationally, they all experience and deserve a voice. Mine covers my Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde relationship with the challenge of golf, with the golf shots, the good, the bad, and the ugly. The experiences of playing as a teammate or a competitor to somebody who at one point, and it could have been the last hole, was your teammate, now that you're a competitor, or a good walk down the fairway with a good friend to bullshit with about any topic, or just a complete asshole that you get paired up with. I know my relationship with the sport. So while I feel compelled to share some short-sighted insights, there'll always be something to talk about in golf. Because I am the scorpion on the frog's back. It's just in my nature. So here it is. Then one of four things might be true. Number one, you're so in the moment that after you've hit a career shot, you just move on to the next shot. Two, you're so humble and self-deprecating that you thought it was just all luck. Three, your memory might be good, but your recall just sucks. Well, welcome to senior moments. Or number four, you just need to practice or play more because everybody has that great shot in them. My first memory of sports accomplishment didn't come on the golf course, lacrosse field, or ski slopes. It came in dodgeball at Camp Pontiac. Now let me set this scene scene. From birth until twelve years old, I was puny, uncoordinated, and not much of an athlete. And for you guys that know me, you might say, Well, nothing's changed. Because of that, I was picked on and was acutely fearful of being bullied. Now my dad always told me when that happens and somebody's bullying you or a group R, find the biggest guy in the fight and punch him in the nose. Now, somehow those words landed on deaf ears and until I knew how to take care of myself. The thought of picking on the biggest baddest seemed like awful advice because they were just gonna hit harder. I was sent to sleep away camp so my parents could have some alone time and use the fact that they had the means to afford camp for their both their boys as currency with their friends of, hey, look, we're doing okay. I definitely needed toughening up, but the story I kept telling myself was camp wasn't going to accelerate the process of toughening up. Dodgeball was popular at the time and a great proving ground for the coordinated and the fearless. The same guys would win or end up in the five as the final two players until one was left as the victor. My strategy would be to run back and forth behind the front line of catchers and throwers. This way, as guys on the other team were ripping the ball at us, it would hit one of my teammates before it would hit me. Eventually, I'd be exposed and beamed in the head, ass or back, while trying to avoid a knockout. I feel like this is the movie Dodgeball with Vince Vaughn. I can't tell you what I was feeling, what I ate, or why I decided to try one day, but we're in one of those color war competitions at the end of the camp session where half the camp competes against the other half with colored flags to signal their team. We were the red team, our competition was the blue team. And Dodgeball was one of the competitions and happened to be the last competition that if everything was tied from all the other sports that you competed in, it would determine who won Color Wars. And it just so happened to be that year that we were all tied up coming into Dodgeball. Now, the two Dodgeball terrors in camp, Roger Flint and Amos Wood, were on the blue team. The talk of the camp was that they had Dodgeball locked, which would win color wars. Go blue. So as the game started, Roger and Amos did what they did best, knocked out most of our players with head and groin shots, and then caught most of the shots on them, which also knocks out players on the other side. But Roger got cocky, wasn't even looking at our team when he bends down to pick up a ball. And I had a dodgeball in my hand, took three steps and winged it. It didn't go very fast, but he's not looking. Hits him in the head, knocks him out. Now, doesn't knock him out like concussion out, knocks him out of the game. That infuriated Amos. He was pissed. How the fuck could me, Rich Easton, knock him out of the game? So now he is stalking me. Amos looks like he is gonna take a ball and throw it through my head. And I'm running back and forth. I don't have a ball because I just threw one to knock his buddy out, and he is gonna knock me out. He's running, he sees me, he takes three or four steps, leans back, leans forward, and launches this ball. Now, typically I duck, but this ball is heading right towards my nads. That's right. My jewels, my family jewels. I have to protect them. I can't move to the right or to the left. All I could do is squat down and let the ball hit me, and maybe I catch it. The ball comes in as I bend down, hits me in the stomach, but as a reaction, both my arms go around the ball. I grab it, I fall backwards, I fall on my ass, I hold on to the ball. Game over. Red team wins, red team wins Color Wars. At this point in my life, that was the hardest I was ever hit, particularly with a rubber ball. There was a quick silence and then a cacophony of sound, mostly surprise, but adulation because the red team won Color Wars. So it was a combination of, yeah, we won, and man, what a surprise that Easton caught the ball. Look, it didn't do anything to elevate my stature at the camp since most thought my eyes were closed and I got lucky, which wasn't far from the truth, but it was a milestone for me. I caught that fucking rocket, and the feeling of success was far greater than the red mark it left on my stomach for weeks. Look, it happened 60 years ago, and it happened a minute ago in my mind. Look, I'm cursed and blessed with memories that just don't go away. Everything in my life happened a minute ago because I recall what I was thinking, feeling, and what led up to that incident. It's a blessing when the memory was an achievement that I worked hard for, like a great shot that actually performed well, went in the hole, or even defied what I was capable of up to that point. It's a curse when I fucked up because I was reacting instead of responding. Like most things I work hard at, my best shots in golf typically came after good practice sessions, not after speed drinking while playing. I'm amazed at golfers that improve with swing juice. Hey, it just fucks with my balance and thought discipline and is only a solution when I've already given up on the course and I don't want to make anybody else's life around me miserable, so I'll have a few beers and giggle, and hopefully the loss of the bet won't cost me or my partner too much money. So try and remember your best shots in practice and even on the course. That memory will likely guide your next great shot. And look, if you don't practice, there's a good chance you'll continue to endure the same challenges with the same results, unless you're just one of those guys, and I've played with them, that don't practice. They just go out and they play a lot and they learn from playing. So I say play more, practice more, or just settle for the fact that you're as good as you'll ever be. So stop whining on the golf course, stop complaining, or stop telling people this is the I don't understand it. I played so well last week, this is the worst I've ever played. It's not. It's gonna get worse if you don't play or practice more. Talk to you soon.