(This article is reprinted with permission from National Review Online.)
Mobile Billboards
Goosen turned out to be a shy, handsome South African with a satin smooth golf swing, shaky nerves, and no ability at all to give good sound-bite. He couldn't sell ice in a desert if you threw in a free camel. He was, in short, a disaster for the business side of sport. Tiger Woods, now, there is a name. That cat can sell stuff.
More and more, sports is about selling stuff. Product identification is the game. In golf, for instance, the players look increasingly like mobile billboards. You fully expect to see athletes, any day now, getting that ubiquitous Nike swoosh tattooed on some visible body part.
Golf tournaments and bowl games are named for their sponsors. Also the stadiums, to include the one in Baltimore which was named for one of those high-flying tech companies that flamed out with the Nasdaq. You wonder if the bankruptcy court will parcel the best seats out among the creditors.
Aside from visually cluttering up the world of sports, the whole intertwined complex of sponsorships, TV ratings, and product endorsements raises some troubling questions. The most famous fix in the history of sports was engineered by gamblers who paid some Chicago White Sox baseball players to throw the World Series. Since then, the assumption has been that gambling was the looming threat to the integrity of sports and there have been some scandals — point shaving by college-basketball players, for instance — where betting has polluted the well. But it would be hard, if not impossible, to win millions on a game that had been fixed by bribing players or officials. If you bet enough, the bookies — and the casinos that take legal wagers — would notice and shut down the action. The law would be alerted and investigations would be launched.
So if you did manage to engineer a fix, you would have to bet modestly enough not to move the line and alert the authorities. The risk might not be worth the reward. While there will inevitably be small gambling scandals in the future of sports, the real possibilities for corruption are with the sponsors and, especially, television. Consider, for example, the World Series and the NBA championship, both of which are best of seven affairs. Now you could, conceivably have an NBA championship series between Toronto and Vancouver. Imagine trying to sell advertising spots for that match-up. If you were a network executive, you might pray for one team or another to sweep the series in four games so you could get back to putting on Law and Order every night. Angie Harmon's cheekbones would surely get higher ratings than Toronto and Vancouver, two cities that are in Canada, for the love of Mike, a place most of the people who watch television couldn't find on a map.
Heartless TV Executives
On the other hand, the championship could come down to Los Angeles vs. New York. Lakers, Knicks. Now, that is a match-up people would watch and that would sell about a super tanker full of beer with every 60-second spot. You'd do just about anything to make sure that one went the full seven games. You'd surely make sure that the ref's kid didn't have to take out any student loans to get through college.
In baseball, you could have a world series between Seattle and Arizona (which, unlike an NBA championship between Toronto and Vancouver, is a real possibility) or you could have the Yankees playing the Dodgers. The difference for true sports fans would reside in the regions of myth and tradition. Yankees and Dodgers (even when they are in L.A.) resonates with any true fan. Seattle is where they make coffee and computers and Arizona is the cactus league. Those teams didn't exist when Don Larsen threw his perfect game. (The losing pitcher was Sal Maglie and Murray Kempton's column on him, the next day, was one of the all time gems.) For TV executives, it would not be a matter of the heart. TV executives don't have hearts. The difference would be millions of viewers and more millions of dollars.
Would some TV guy pay you if you could make sure it was Dodgers vs. Yankees in October, going the full seven?
The answer to that question is: “What is the number of your offshore account?”
All of which brings us to Dale Earnhardt Jr. and the race he won at Daytona. As the old line has it — when something seems too good to be true, it usually is. And that win, at the track where his father was killed a few months earlier, looked too good to be true. It happened, conveniently enough, during prime time instead of on Sunday afternoon when NASCAR usually races. Earnhardt Jr. had to make up a lot of ground in a few laps in a race where it is hard to pass because of equipment rules. At Daytona, the cars run with restrictor plates, which slow them down. This is done to make the race less dangerous. If you want to pass at Daytona, you need help from other cars in the form of a draft. You follow in the vacuum created by the car ahead of you and then you slingshot around him in the turn. Earnhardt passed several cars without much drafting help in the last few laps of the race.
Was it legitimate or had NASCAR put the word out among the drivers that it would be good for the sport if Dale Jr. won this race? NASCAR is a tightly run, family corporation and relentlessly commercial. Every square foot of sheet metal on the cars and every inch of the drivers' uniforms have been rented out to some sponsor. NASCAR writes the rules and changes them whenever the competition isn't close enough to keep things exciting. Ford will not be permitted to dominate since that would offend Chevrolet. And there are millions of Chevrolet fans out there whose feelings must be considered.
The Fix Is In
And there are plenty of people who wanted to see Dale Jr. win that race. NASCAR officials knew that and so did the other drivers. Nobody had to be told that it would make a great story — and be good for the sport and its ratings — if he won it.
You could, then, make a persuasive case that the drivers — some of them, anyway — who Earnhardt Jr. passed in his charge to the finish backed off and let him get by. That they might have done it without even really meaning to. Earnhardt Jr. had the fastest car on the track that night and had been out front most of the race. It was some bad luck with accidents and pit stops that had him out of the lead with less than 10 laps to run.
He had the car and, certainly, he had the motivation. He is a pure racer and he runs hardest when he is out front, just like his father did. He doesn't need favors. And NASCAR drivers, for all their intuitive sense of how the media works, aren't exactly sentimentalists. Letting off would be contrary to a NASCAR driver's nature. It would be like asking a dog not to eat a lamb chop or asking Bill Clinton not to mess with the help. Put these guys in a car and they want to pass somebody. And, more to the point, they don't want anybody trying to pass them. They'll bang into you if you try.
I, for one, don't believe the fix was in.
Not this time. But wait around. It's going to happen.
