Tag Archives: Collusion

The Ultimate Sports Corruption Scandal

29 Tuesday Mar 2022

Posted by in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Jimme, Marriage, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Patriotism, Politics, Pop Culture, race, Sports, Youth

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Rolls of $100 bills (makes me think of Cyndi Lauper’s “Money Changes Everything”), April 9, 2018. (https://www.gtgoodtimes.com/)

I have long believed professional sports and elite college sports as severely compromised enterprises. It’s not just the obvious examples of league officials turning a blind eye away from the lack of fair play, like with baseball players doping and hitting home runs between 1998 and 2004. Or with the New England Patriots and them filming their opponents’ practices to gain an advantage during games. Or with the Houston Astros stealing baserunning signs from the Los Angeles Dodgers during the 2017 World Series. Or even with NCAA Division I football and men’s basketball, where there are enough recruiting and (until last year) pay-for-play violations to render the student part of student-athlete a really bad joke.

No, I believe owners, universities, and league offices collude to put their thumbs on the scale, and have done so for years. They do it for two reasons: 1., to generate revenue and renewed interest in their sport (whether basketball, hockey, baseball, or football, or — more obviously — WWE) and/or 2., to steer a sport-wide championship in the direction of a particular team (also a way to keep those multi-billion-dollar TV contracts aflowing). 

This doesn’t just explain the New England Patriots and the mysterious “tuck rule” ruling during the 2001 NFL Playoffs, a ruling that cost the Oakland Raiders the game and catapulted the Patriots toward the first post-9/11 Super Bowl (patriotism and sports — it’s kismet!). It explains when referees, umpires, and other officials make consistently favorable rulings helping certain teams win playoffs series and championships. Game 4 of the Western Conference Finals between the LA Lakers and the Sacramento Kings in the 2002 NBA Playoffs comes to mind. An official even admitted they may have rigged this particular series in favor of the Lakers. And Duke and Coach K. All anyone has to do is look at the difference between the team UNLV stomped in by 30 points in 1990 and the team UNLV “lost” to in 1991. Really? What difference — no difference! 

Even this isn’t the worst of it. With the newly opened frontier of legal betting on professional and college sports across the board, the temptations for individuals, for officials, for athletes themselves to alter outcomes to win bets will be enormous. The sports would is only a few years away from healthy athletes dying in their athletic prime of suicide or “suspicious circumstances,” stemming from their own gambling addiction, or because of a fan’s gambling addiction and narcissism.

I kid you not. We are a decade or two away at most from discovering how some of these great moments we have seen in a sport should have never been. All because money changed hands, or because of deliberately calibrated officiating, or because of tampering with equipment or with schedules, or because of general collusion among college conferences and universities or between sports leagues and team owners (or, with the student-athlete system, between all of the above). 

And when these turds hit an industrial-sized fan meant for a large indoor arena, what do any of us say then? That we knew all along? That we just went along because we wanted the distraction of sports free from corruption and politics? All of this is bullshit.

The truth is, sports has always been a source of entertainment, a place where we have pretended for years the outcome was never fully assured. But, we all have known the outcome has been helped along, sometimes by a lot. To build a fantasy around sports as set of institutions that brings people together and creates a sense of community is incredibly superficial. Those moments are fleeting and do nothing to change communities, cities, or our societies. Those moments, even as they temporarily unite folks around as flimsy a thing as a win or winning a title, are not untainted ones. 

Listen, I love sports, and have appreciated athleticism going all the way back to the Ali v. Frazier and Ali v. Foreman days. Heck, when my Uncle Sam clotheslined my father as payback for psychologically torturing my mother after she filed for divorce in 1977, I had appreciation for it then. That moment of college athletic-level tackling and the physics around it have been in super-slo-mo in my mind for 45 years. I have loved watching sports since I was 12, and playing sports since puberty grew me to five-foot-eight before I turned 13, and six-feet-even before my 14th birthday. The business of professional sports (including college sports programs and Olympic sports), though, is ugly. That is why I no longer care if athletes dope, stopped caring ages ago how much money they and the sports team owners make, or care much about wins and losses for my Knicks or other teams I kinda root for. 

Because I believe as much as I believe in anything a day of reckoning is coming for these institutions. And when it does, don’t say I didn’t write about it. When it does occur, we can then finally agree there is no difference in pop culture between commercialized music, PG-13 movies, fashion, and the world of sports.

Out of Touch, In A Bubble

18 Friday Nov 2011

Posted by in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Politics, Pop Culture

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Bubbles in water, November 17, 2011. (http://crusaders.biz).

I have said in many a blog post over the past four years how narcissistic our people are in this age. But with the recent uncovering of the extinction-level-event involving a serial child rapist and the decades-long covering for Jerry Sandusky at Penn State University has come something somewhat more subtle. A number of journalists and commentators have discussed the “bubble” that has existed at Penn State for years, the one that allowed for a group of high level of administrators to cover up at least one crime.

But the bubble is much more than covering up or denying the existence of a pedophile on a university campus. It’s how Penn State’s leadership has dealt with the world inside and outside of central Pennsylvania. Their commitments of support for two administrators who perjured themselves about what they knew regarding Sandusky’s child rape activities on Penn State’s campus in ’02. Their surly answers and vague statements to the media about the status of coaches or the football team. The three days it took Penn State’s Board of Trustees to respond to the national media crush that came with Sandusky’s arrest and release of the attorney general’s grand jury report with a statement and the firing of the university president and Joe Paterno.

A Real Time with Bill Maher writer playing role of conservative voter in a bubble, September 17, 2011. (Fanny Brown Rice/Flickr.com). In public domain.

And — even above Joe Paterno dictating his retirement terms to the Board of Trustees — Sandusky and his creepy lawyer Joe Amendola’s crash-and-burn defense of the pedophile’s “horse-play” actions via Bob Costas and Rock Center on NBC on Monday. It’s as if Sandusky, Paterno, Amendola and the interim head coach Tom Bradley expect their one-off communiques and non-committal pressers to keep the national and international media away. Kind of like they way they’ve been operating their little fiefdom for the past half-century, by stonewalling and intimidating local media and local authorities.

This bubble, though, isn’t limited to an institution as insular as Penn State. Because our nation has been a superpower for so long, our narcissism has allowed the rich, famous and powerful to create lots of bubbles. Even when folks have wanted to be in touch with the rest of the world, with the common folk of our society, their bubbles have made their interactions awkward and elitist, and have created their own set of problems.

We can start with President Barack Obama. Despite all of his oratory powers, his keen powers of intellect and insight, and his well-connected handlers, POTUS 44 is in the ultimate bubble, as out of touch with the American public as any of his post-World War II predecessors. A president that rode in on a populist wave in ’08, Obama has been all but disconnected from the Occupy Wall Street movement that was sparked — at least in part — by his brief moments of energy on behalf of the jobless in August and September. The bubble allows even someone as bright as Obama to become deluded in his mission, to fall into the grasp of political and corporate interests, even as he works for the American people.

POTUS 43, the man in the ultimate bubble, at window on Air Force One during fly-over of Katrina devastation, August 31, 2005. (http://Politico.com). In public domain.

The mainstream media, colored as it is these days by the green of corporate and affluent interests, is also in its own bubble. They are so far removed from the pulse of the American public that even the “man on the street” interviews done by local news reporters seem staged. They talk mostly to themselves, and are so enamored with their own intellect that even most scholars in academia think journalists are arrogant.

There’s a reason why the media slants everything to look like two equal and opposite sides, no matter the moral imperative to tell the truth. Which, by the way, is the raison d’etre of the Fourth Estate, no? They go through Hell itself to find an opposing side to counter the overwhelming evidence of climate change, or bring in Sandusky’s lawyer — a man with a sordid sexual history, knocking up and marrying a sixteen-year-old client of his — to counter charges against a serial child rapist (alleged). All in the name of objectivity, as subjective as an art critic at an Andy Warhol show.

The mayors of New York, Portland, Oakland and other places are in their bubble of shunning protests that last longer than a Grateful Dead concert, more interested in protecting the interests of their corporate and rich individual buddies than the public at large. And the police? Their bubble is one that allows them to see everyone as the enemy. Their slogan might as well be “To protect and serve — as long as you’re rich or a corporation.”

Protests, sit-ins, revolutions. They all burst bubbles, and put even the most insulated in touch with the pain that ordinary folks feel. That’s what the powerful and rich fear most. And that’s why more of us need to walk around with our proverbial toothpicks, ready to pop as many bubbles as we encounter.