As hard as it might be to believe, every Super Bowl since 1996 has been fixed. No, not fixed by gamblers or players trying to throw the game. But instead fixed by the NFL. Sure it sounds a bit far-fetched, but that’s the allegation made by Brian Tuohy in his book, The Fix Is In: The Showbiz Manipulations of the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL and NASCAR.
The thesis of Tuohy’s book is clearly stated in the title. Professional sports, as we know it, are as fake as professional wrestling.
The NFL fixed the 1999 season so that the Tennessee Titans and St. Louis Rams would play in the 2000 Super Bowl. This was their reward for letting the NFL move their franchises from Houston and Los Angeles to two cities that had lost out when the NFL expanded to Carolina and Jacksonville. The Ravens got to win the Super Bowl as a reward to Ravens owner Art Modell after he let the league move his team from Cleveland to Baltimore to make up for Baltimore losing out on expansion.
There’s much, much more in Tuohy’s book touching on every sport. For
instance, the 1919 World Series wasn’t the only World Series that was
fixed. Only many of the others weren’t fixed by gambling, but were
instead fixed by MLB and the networks so as to assure more games and
bigger television audiences. And no sport is more crooked than the NBA,
which has done everything from order the refs to not foul out certain
players in the playoffs to fixing the draft lottery so that various
college stars would end up in certain cities — yes, he rehashes and
gives credence to the urban legend of David Stern knowing what envelope
to pull out so as to ensure Patrick Ewing went to the New York Knicks.
There’s
a thread of truth to just about everything Tuohy writes — everything
about which he writes comes from previously published sources, factual
game stories, or quotes from bitter athletes on the losing end of a
contest. But all of his conspiracy threads, just like those of Glenn
Beck that Jon Stewart so easily pulls apart most nights on The Daily Show, fall apart with a simple reading of his writings.
First,
Tuohy offers up no original reporting nor actual evidence. His
reasoning that the 2002 Super Bowl was fixed by the NFL so that the New
England Patriots would win is that it was post-9/11 and the NFL was
pushing patriotism (Not addressed however is why MLB didn’t fix the 2001
World Series so that the New York Yankees, playing in a city affected
by 9/11, and riding one of those moments when a majority of baseball
fans might actually cheer on the Yankees, would actually win). There’s
no evidence produced to back these Super Bowl contentions. Nada.
For
instance, the Carolina Panthers lost the infamous Janet Jackson Super
Bowl because the NFL knew that multiple Panther players had tested
positive for steroid use and the NFL used the potential exposure of this
information to leverage the Panthers into losing. Why the NFL wanted
the Patriots to win this game isn’t addressed, and the fact that names
of the players were actually released offsets the theory that the game
was thrown to keep this information quiet.
And Tuohy flat out
gets a simple fact wrong early in the book, and that blown, simple,
easily verified fact puts into question just how factual this so-called
factual sports expose really is. Tuohy declares that the NBA ordered
that the Hornets be moved from Charlotte to New Orleans in the aftermath
of Hurricane Katrina. The problem being, of course, that the Hornets
had moved to New Orleans before Katrina and, because of Katrina, played
most of their 2005-2006 season in Oklahoma City.
I like a good
conspiracy, and I like a good conspiracy book. But this isn’t such a
book. There’s no original reporting. There’s not even any real linkage
drawn between the various incidents, and as with most conspiracies, like
the fake moon landings or anything from the mind of Oliver Stone, the
whole thing falls apart when you consider the large number of people who
had to not only have been involved for all of these sporting events to
be rigged, but also had to have remained silent over the years.
As
I said at the start, there’s a hint of truth to the premise. We know
from Tim Donaghy that all is not as it seems in the NBA. And we know
that Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots did cheat, and we know
that gamblers fixed the 1919 World Series. But that doesn’t mean that,
as Tuohy alleges, every important game in the history of professional
sports has been fixed.
The theory of Occam’s Razor is popularly
defined as the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. And in
the case of sports, the simplest explanation is that teams, even good
teams, do actually lose on occasion.
This article appears in Aug 26 – Sep 1, 2010.
