The lure of big money has always been an overwhelming temptation to seek means, sometimes illegal, to reap financial desires. In sports, especially professional sports today, with so much money at stake, many have been looking for that big payday. After watching the NFL Championship game, a game Green Bay was expected to win hands down, troubling questions arose.
NFL football is big business. From TV rites, commercials, and even more money in gambling, all create a billion dollar industry. In a game leading up to kickoff, the overwhelming odds favored Green Bay over Tampa. With so much money at stake, especially in today’s reality, it’s highly conceivable that a play or two and even arbitrage could be called into question. In a previous wild card game, the Pittsburgh Steelers had questionable plays and mistakes that shouldn’t have happened. Yet they did. The Steelers were heavy favorites like Green Bay. In the same context, both games where the obvious is very obvious that certain plays, mistakes and even arbitrations that shouldn’t have happened, did.
In the annals of sports, there have been instances where games have been released and the Fix was around from the start. One of the most famous cases was the 1919 Black Sox scandal. This is where Shoeless Joe Jackson and various members of the Chicago White Sox took money to throw away the world series. Shoeless Joe Jackson and the other seven members of the White Sox were banned from playing professional baseball for life. In Green Bay history, Paul Horning was caught gambling on football and it cost him a year of disqualification. Pete Rose is another who bet on professional sports and it cost him the consecration in the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame.
When a game is being played and there are questionable calls from referees, coaches or players and also errors that should not have occurred, these are signs of possible wrongdoing that could be interpreted as attempts to fix the outcome of that game. It’s happened before and you can bet your bottom dollar that it’s happening now. And most likely it will happen again in the future. It is no longer a reality to play for the love of the game. Those days are sadly gone.
Remembering a simpler time. A time when playing sports was filled with euphoric emotions from just playing the game. Where athletes stayed with a team for the duration of their career. And, in many cases, when his career was waning, his ego couldn’t accept the fact that father time has a way of catching up with us. All of us moved to one more team just to play one more year, all because of the love they had for the game.
The temptations to put the solution as they say are overwhelming in today’s professional sports, with colossal salaries and huge television contracts. The same temptations now exist at the university level. This is where college football and basketball reap huge financial benefits from television contracts. The universities involved continue to reap the rewards of the financial gains their sports programs generate.
It is not naive to express that the solution could not exist in today’s sports facilities. The reality is that there is a real possibility that one or more could influence a totally different outcome of a game for the sake of monetary gain. The recent NFL Championship Game, as well as the Wild Card Game, are constant reminders that the plays, the referees, and the blatant errors made by the players could justify that “the fix was afoot.”
