Zolani Tete was almost home. On Friday evening, August 21, the former world boxing champion sat in his car in Mdantsane township, South Africa, waiting for the gate to his residence to open. Two men wearing balaclavas emerged from another vehicle and opened fire. Tete tried to drive into his yard but took several hits and died at the scene. A 27-year-old woman traveling with him was also shot several times and remains hospitalized.

It sounded like an execution. New evidence suggests that it may indeed have been a carefully orchestrated hit. But if so, why?

Murder mystery

Those questions can’t be answered conclusively. Several suspects are now in custody. Two men accused of masterminding the killing face charges including murder, premeditated murder and attempted murder, while police say they have also arrested two alleged hitmen. The investigation continues and the motive is unclear. The South African Police Service has explicitly warned against speculation that could compromise the investigation. But that stops no one.

There is, at present, no publicly established link between Tete’s death and boxing, drugs, gambling or organized crime. But the grim circumstances inevitably invite questions about the world in which professional sport operates.

Tete was one of South Africa’s outstanding boxers. He won the IBF junior-bantamweight world title in 2014 and the WBO bantamweight title in 2017. His most spectacular achievement came that November, when he knocked out Siboniso Gonya with his first punch, ending a world-title fight after 11 seconds — the fastest knockout recorded in a world-title fight. His career ended with 29 victories, 22 by knockout, four defeats and one no contest.

His last fight took place in July 2022, when he beat Britain’s Jason Cunningham at London’s Wembley Arena. A subsequent positive test for the anabolic steroid stanozolol netted him a four-year ban, which expired on July 29 this year. Tete consistently denied knowingly taking the substance. He’d been training again and hoping to make an unlikely comeback at 38.

Why was he killed?

The answer will probably involve money. Professional sport is, among other things, raw material for gambling. Wherever millions can be wagered on unknown outcomes, there’s an incentive not just to predict what will happen, but to influence it. And wherever sufficiently large sums of money change hands, organized crime is inevitably drawn in.

Boxing provides an enlightening history. In postwar America, organized crime figures acquired extraordinary influence over the sport. Frankie Carbo was described as the mob’s “commissioner” of boxing; Frank “Blinky” Palermo was another prominent figure. Promoters, managers and fighters became entangled in a kind of subculture in which boxing was not simply competition but business… criminal business. Congressional investigations eventually exposed the extent of the underworld’s influence.

History makes us wonder whether professional sport is ever quite as sealed off from the criminal economy — as purists like to believe. The more money that pours into a sport, the more attractive it becomes to people interested in manipulating where it flows out. This is the case in any professional sport, not just boxing.

Organized crime in sports

Consider tennis. Its fragmented nature and the extraordinary number of things on which bets can be placed mean that a gambler need not necessarily forecast who will win a match. A single game, serve or double fault can become a betting commodity in today’s gambling environment. Tennis has experienced extensive matchfixing scandals involving players and organized betting networks.

Once the English gentlemen’s game of choice, cricket now offers boundless opportunities for corruption, particularly in South Asia, where betting has long been deeply embedded in the culture surrounding the game. When the 2010 Pakistan spot-fixing scandal became known, it was like taking the back off a wristwatch: The complicated mechanics of manipulation became exposed. For example, gamblers could bet on a no-ball being bowled within time parameters and players could be bribed deliberately to bowl such balls.

The Hansie Cronje scandal demonstrated that corruption could reach the highest levels of international cricket. Once captain of the South African national team, Cronje admitted accepting money from bookmakers and was banned for life. Cronje died 26 months after his fall from grace, when the plane he was riding crashed. This immediately gave rise to theories about a possible underworld assassination; an unexplained death in professional sport is always likely to spring theories of this kind.

Sonny Liston, the former world heavyweight champion, died in Las Vegas in 1970 under circumstances that have never satisfied those who suspected foul play. Coroners discovered heroin in his system and officially attributed his death to natural causes, but Liston’s long and well-documented connections with organized crime ensured that murder conspiracy theories persist to the present day.

Football has produced perhaps the most chilling reminder of what can happen when sporting outcomes, gambling and criminal interests collide. After Colombia’s elimination from the 1994 World Cup, defender Andrés Escobar was shot dead outside a Medellin bar. The killing became associated with anger over his own goal and with alleged betting and drug-cartel interests. But many have debated the precise motive and circumstances ever since. One wonders how many games of football, the most watched sport in history, are played in an honest spirit of fair play.

Gamblers, bookies and criminals

It may turn out that gambling had nothing to do with Tete’s death. It may even have been unrelated to boxing. The motive could be personal or something investigators haven’t yet disclosed. 

But perhaps that’s the reason the question is worth asking now. Professional sport attracts money, celebrity, gambling and powerful syndicates that specialize in skulduggery. Sport is predicated on uncertainty: Outcomes can’t be determined in advance — at least, not in honest competition. The trouble is, indeterminacy is a magnet for those who think they can cheat fate. Gamblers always think they know the results in advance. They’re never in short supply, and bookies know it. Organized criminals know something the other two groups don’t: how to replace uncertainties with guarantees.

At the moment, we don’t know if Tete was mixed up with organized crime, gambling syndicates or any other kind of twilight operations. All we know is that an athlete who spent the best part of his life mastering violence inside the ring was killed outside it. But the history of sport gives us good reason to ask whether Tete was simply the victim of a personal vendetta, or whether he had somehow become entangled in the criminal economies that surround professional sport.

[Ellis Cashmore is a co-author of Sport and Crime.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.