The lure of large amounts of money has always been an overwhelming temptation to seek sometimes illegal means to reap one’s financial desire. In sports, especially professional sports today with so much money involved, many have sought out that big payday. After watching the NFL Championship, questions arose about a game Green Bay was expected to win.
NFL football is big business. From television rites, commercials, and even more gambling money, they all generate a billion dollar industry. In a game leading up to the start, the odds overwhelmingly favored Green Bay over Tampa. With so much money at stake, especially in today’s reality, it is quite conceivable that one or two plays and even the refereeing could be called into question. In a previous wild card game, the Pittsburg Steelers had questionable plays and mistakes that shouldn’t have happened. Yet they did. The Steelers were overwhelming favorites like Green Bay. In the same context both games where the obvious is very obvious that certain plays, errors and even arbitrations that should not have happened.
In the annals of sports there have been cases where games were released and the Fix was going from the beginning. 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 launch 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 soccer and it cost him a year of ineligibility. Pete Rose is another of those who bet on professional sports and cost him the consecration to the Hall of Fame of Major League Baseball.
When a game is played and there are questionable calls from the referees, coaches or players and also errors that should not have occurred 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. Playing for the love of the game is no longer a reality. Unfortunately, those days are long gone.
Remembering a simpler time. A time when playing sports was filled with euphoric emotions from playing the game. Where athletes stayed with one team for their entire 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, we all moved on to one more team just to play one more year, all for the love that They had. the game.
The temptations to fix it, as they say, are overwhelming in today’s fast-track professional sports of colossal salaries and huge television contracts. The same temptations now exist at the collegiate level. This is where college football and basketball derive huge financial benefits from television contracts. The universities involved continue to benefit from the financial gains generated by their athletic programs.
It is not naive to say 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, umpiring, and blatant mistakes made by players could justify that the “Fix was in.”
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