He is nondescript now. He blends in. It has been more than 10 years. He is just some 52-year-old guy who manages rental properties on the west coast of Florida, where he lives.
He occasionally gets recognized in an airport or elsewhere, "unfortunately," he says, and sounds somewhat surprised in adding, "Never had somebody who's been rude, though."
Sometimes he'll be flipping through TV channels and come across an NBA game.
"That should be me out there, still running up and down the court with the greatest athletes in the world," he thinks to himself. "Definitely emotional. It still stings. But there's nobody to blame for this but me. I had choices, and I made the wrong ones."
Tim Donaghy, disgraced former referee, was at the of the center the betting and game-fixing scandal that battered the NBA's credibility in 2006-07.
A movie about that, "Inside Game," hits theaters across the country, including South Florida, this Friday.
It is not a big-budget film. Donaghy is portrayed by actor Eric Mabius, perhaps best known as the womanizing executive from TV's "Ugly Betty."
"Definitely should have been Brad Pitt or Bradley Cooper playing me," Donaghy jokes.
Donaghy calls the movie "somewhat accurate," adding, "There's stuff you shake your head at, but that's Hollywood."
The self-distributed film is Tommy Martino's version of events. That's Donaghy's childhood friend from Philadelphia, the one who introduced him to a bookie named Baba Battista, who had mob ties and ensnared Donaghy in his scheme.
A portion of proceeds from the film and from Martino's book of the same name will go to Pennsylvania's Elwyn School for persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities.
Donaghy, a consultant on the film, mentions this to soften the obvious impression that the men who scandalized the NBA with their wrongdoing are now aiming to make money from their story of game-fixing.
Donaghy began betting on games he worked, not attempting to affect who won or lost but influencing point spreads.
"75 or 80% of the time we hit on the play," he says.
Donaghy said this went on for four months in 2006 into '07. He would be paid $2,000 a game.
"I didn't get rich," he says. "Battista was the only one who got rich."
Then-commissioner David Stern called it "an isolated incident," portraying Donaghy as a lone wolf. Dongahy doubts that.
He says he has no idea if referee-related impropriety exists in the NBA today but says examples hardly were rare in the 2000s.
He said this of a Miami Heat game in the 2003-04 season:
"I was officiating one game with Dick Bavetta and he told me he had the Miami Heat a few weeks prior and had a bad game and owed Lamar Odom some favors. That was one game that I knew was going to be a win and the Heat would cover."
(Bavetta also worked the 2002 Western Conference finals that the FBI investigated over suspicions the results had been manipulated to assure a seventh game).
Donaghy, Martino and Battista got caught because an unrelated FBI investigation of organized crime happened upon the scheme. All three men did time. Donaghy cooperated and did 15 months on two counts of felony conspiracy. He got out 10 years ago this week.
Donaghy, 10 years later, is contrite, at least. Give him that.
"There's an enormous amount of embarrassment that I did what I did," he says now. "Absolutely, my name ruined. Hanging out with the wrong crowd that loved to gamble _ I got caught up in that. But, 100 percent, there's nobody to blame for this but me."
The center of the scandal is not banned from attending NBA games but when he went to a Mavericks-Knicks game in New York eight years ago, two years after getting out of prison, "I walked in and security guards immediately surrounded me."
Tim Donaghy has not attended a basketball game since.
