In 2007, Nikolay Davydenko – then the fourth-ranked men's tennis player in the world – faced anonymous Argentine Martin Vassallo Arguello in a minor tournament in Poland.
Davydenko took the first set easily – 6-2. Then something strange began to happen. Money coming from linked Russian accounts registered with mammoth British bookmaker Betfair began to pour in on the match.
What made it strange was that all the new money was betting on 87th-ranked Vassallo Arguello to win.
Suddenly, Davydenko developed an ankle injury. He was treated several times and dropped the second set. Wagers continued to swamp Betfair. Nearly $7.5-million would eventually be laid with just one bookie on a contest that could not be viewed on television through most of the world.
Davydenko retired in the third set. Betfair had already alerted the Association of Tennis Professionals that someone had in all likelihood fixed one of its matches.
A months-long internal investigation concluded that a Russian gambling syndicate knew that Davydenko would lose to Vassallo Arguello, but stopped short of assigning blame to any specific person.
The ATP released its report in 2008, weathered a very small blowback in the press and moved on. L'affaire Davydenko was too easily written off as an anomalous quirk – just one player in just one match that just about no one had seen.
For nearly eight years, the issue receded from view. It's back now, and tennis has already begun to eat itself as a result.
On Sunday, the BBC and BuzzFeed released a lurid report suggesting that match-fixing is rife in men's and women's tennis, involving several top pros. The key nugget from the story – that there is a cabal of 16 players, all ranked in the top 50 and including Grand Slam winners, who routinely throw sets or matches.
"More than half of them will begin playing in the Australian Open on Monday," the report states. As evidence, BBC and BuzzFeed pointed to unreleased reports from tennis's own integrity unit.
No one was named. The urge to speculate created the first small rush. It helps that the world's best players are suddenly all in one place – Melbourne – and available daily to the press.
The story might have begun to sputter again had Novak Djokovic not waded into the middle of it, pulling pins off grenades.
Asked about fixing, the world No. 1 retold a story he had first mentioned in 2007, a couple of weeks after Davydenko's curious collapse. At the time, it was largely ignored.
According to Djokovic, he was offered $200,000 to throw a 2006 match in St. Petersburg, Russia. In the end, he skipped the tournament.
He would not say who made the offer – only that it was conveyed to him through a member of his team.
"Unfortunately, there were some, in those times, those days, rumours, some talks, some people were going around. They were dealt with," Djokovic said on Monday. "In the last six, seven years, I haven't heard anything similar. I personally was never approached directly, so I have nothing more to say about that."
From that answer, one gets the sense that Djokovic realized a little too late that he had not only opened a can of worms, but begun shaking it around the room.
Of course, there's no reason Djokovic would have heard any more from fixers. When the approach was made a decade ago, the Serb had just cracked the top 20. His total prize money amounted to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Less than a year later, he had won a $500,000 tournament in Miami and begun winning regularly. His career earnings now stand just short of $100-million.
Whatever his moral makeup, a competitor that successful is not likely to be tempted by a bribe.
Neither is Roger Federer, but he is canny enough to understand that being above suspicion is not enough. Someone needed to speak, and quickly, on behalf of the sport's integrity.
Sensing an existential danger that Djokovic did not, Federer called the new report "nonsense."
"I mean, it's like, who, what? It's, like, thrown around. It's so easy to do that," he said. "I would love to hear the names. Then, at least, it's concrete stuff and you can actually debate about it."
Everyone else who was asked about the story did some version of a "Who? Me?" shoulder shrug. As the first day of the Australian Open lengthened and more competitors cycled in and out of the interview room, their answers on the subject became perfunctory.
Word was getting out: "Don't talk about this."
Federer is right and wrong. Names would put this story to the test. But without them, people will still talk about it. Obsessively. After all, the best player in the world just confirmed that fixing in tennis is real.
Every odd or lopsided result in a major tournament may now be held up for scrutiny and debate, if only because people love dirt.
Since the major syndicates controlling this crooked business are apparently based in Russia and Italy, a fog of suspicion will obscure players from those countries for the next little while. It could get ugly fast.
No one in the tennis power structure – and that includes the major media – is going to say much about it past this week. It's neither fair nor wise to speculate when people's livelihoods and good names hang in the balance.
But there are plenty of savvy tennis obsessives and outsider outlets that will happily go deep on this, whether their suspicions are based in fact or not.
The names will be out there. They may not be the right names or guilty names. But there will be names.
Considering that, the ATP/WTA should do themselves the favour they couldn't or wouldn't eight years ago – come completely clean. Thanks to Djokovic, the only way for tennis to protect its reputation is through a radical transparency.
The longer they hold back, the more likely it is that the entire 2016 tennis season becomes a potentially disastrous, single-issue story.