The 30 Greatest Sports Conspiracy Theories of All-Time - Elliott Kalb [2]
Two months later, in April of 2007, was another interesting story, when two-time NASCAR Nextel Cup champion Tony Stewart accused NASCAR of “playing God.” Stewart, after finishing second in a race in Phoenix, used his radio show as a platform to call out NASCAR for four yellow flags caused by debris on the track. He claimed they did that to create a closer race. “It’s about the integrity of the sport,” he said. “When I feel our own sanctioning body isn’t taking care of that, it’s hard to support them and feel proud about being a driver in the Nextel Cup Series. I guess NASCAR thinks, ‘Hey, wrestling worked, and it was for the most part staged, so I guess it’s going to work in racing, too.’” When one of the leading competitors in a sport says, as Stewart did, that “I don’t know if they’ve run a fair race all year,” people don’t know what to believe.
Conspiracy theories are nothing new. They first began to grace the front pages of newspapers in 1963, after President Kennedy was assassinated. By the late 1960s, the government and politicians had to answer to a growing number of investigative journalists who refused to suppress information. It was no longer enough to know that tragedies had happened; people were clamoring to know why they happened and who was behind them.
Some organizations still think that the best way to deal with a crisis is to cover it up, deny access, and stonewall. The thing about conspiracies is that they aren’t always toppling politicians or governments. Sometimes people lie in entertainment, private business, and, yes, sports.
I have been around professional sports for over twenty- five years, and I’ve seen a lot of things that don’t make sense. Sometimes, as the saying goes, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, it’s just a duck. But sometimes you have to scratch your head and wonder.
Fans always look for motives and reasons beyond what is presented to them. Sometimes it is said that a certain team got screwed by the league. Sometimes, certain teams aren’t “wanted” in later rounds of the playoffs, or championship rounds of certain events. In other words, fans of less-popular (or small-market) teams always look for reasons that their team was eliminated. They tend to see a powerful motive behind it, and that motive is usually money. Major League Baseball, the National Football League, and the National Basketball Association get enormous amounts of money from national television contracts. The television networks pay millions (and sometimes billions) of dollars for the rights to secure these contracts because they charge advertisers millions of dollars to promote their products to the millions of people tuning in to their broadcasts. The more people watch, the more advertisers will pay the following year. (Television networks get their money up front, and advertisers pay for projected ratings; sometimes networks will air additional commercials to “give back” to the advertiser, when the rating is somehow much lower than projected.) Therefore, it is always better for baseball when a team like the Yankees makes the World Series than when any other team advances, because the Yankees bring with them the widest possible national viewership. A popular team like the Yankees maximizes the number of viewers and advertising dollars. And because of this, many have speculated that Major League Baseball has a vested interest in seeing the Yankees make the Fall Classic.
The trouble with that is, there is entirely too much evidence proving why teams