From WSJ Online:
“Sometimes the outcome of a game seems so improbable that it defies belief—or easy explanation. Take Super Bowl III (1969), in which the upstart New York Jets of the AFL beat the NFL’s seemingly unstoppable Baltimore Colts. To explain the Jets’ victory there was, among much else, the abysmal quarterbacking of the Colts’ Earl Morrall and some bad decisions by 27-year-old Colts coach Don Shula. Joe Namath played pretty darn well, too, for the Jets.
According to Brian Tuohy, though, something else was going on. He suggestively quotes Colts defensive lineman Bubba Smith: “The game just seemed odd to me. Everything was out of place. I tried to rationalize that our coach, Don Shula, got out-coached, but that wasn’t the case. I don’t know if any of my teammates were in on the fix.”
For more click here.
Chicagoan and skeptical sports fan Brian Tuohy has written, “The Fix Is In,” a thought-provoking new book detailing show-biz manipulations to American professional sports outcomes. The book’s official website can be found at http://www.thefixisin.net.
The East Portland Blog is of two minds about his assertions. On one hand, of course sports are fixed, former NBA ref Tim Donaghy has asserted thus and, while his assertions of league-wide corruption may be self-serving, as a ref and as a gambler, he was in a position to see it from all sides. Sports are a multi-billion dollar TV enterprise, it would be a poor investment to allow the games to play out into a scenario unpopular with the public. Of course the leagues are giving us pleasing story lines and seemingly heroic victories for the sake of ratings. Any television show will alter it’s subject and content to please the public and increase ratings. It would be foolish not to. No one benefits from television shows which displease the public and don’t get watched. And scripted television shows cost the networks peanuts compared to broadcast rights for professional sports.
And yet.
And yet. The sports storyline for which I and other Chicago Cubs fans have waited more than a century– ie the Cubs winning a World Series— would please the public and grab monster ratings in Chicago, the third largest media market in the country. But this has not happened since the pre-radio and pre-TV 1908 Series. If network fixers were truly deciding baseball outcomes in advance, the Cubs would have an electronic media age World Series championship by now.
