The lure of large sums of money has always been an overwhelming temptation to seek out sometimes illegal means to harvest one’s financial desire. In sports, especially professional sports today, with so much money at stake, many have looked for that big payday. After watching the NFL Championship, a game Green Bay was expected to win hands down, troubling questions arose.
NFL football is big business. From the rites of television, commercials, and even more money in gambling, they all make for a billion dollar industry. In a game before kickoff, the overwhelming odds favored Green Bay over Tampa. With so much money at stake, especially in today’s reality, it’s very conceivable that a play or two and even the arbitration could be called into question. In a previous wild card game, the Pittsburgh Steelers had questionable plays and mistakes that shouldn’t have happened. However, 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, errors and even arbitrations that shouldn’t have happened, did happen.
In the annals of sports, there have been instances where games have been released and the Fix was there from the start. One of the most famous cases was the Black Sox scandal of 1919. This is where Shoeless Joe Jackson and several members of the Chicago White Sox took money to throw out 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 betting on football and it cost him a year of disbarment. Pete Rose is another who opted for professional sports and cost him consecration in the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame.
When a game is played and there are questionable calls from referees, coaches or players and also errors that should not have occurred, these are signs of possible irregularities that could be interpreted as attempts to fix the outcome of that game. It has happened before and you can bet your bottom dollar that it is 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 fading, his ego couldn’t accept the fact that father time has a way of reaching us all. We moved to one more team just to play another 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 fruits of the financial gains generated by their athletic programs.
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 game calls, officiating and blatant mistakes made by players could justify “the fix was there.”
