The 30 Greatest Sports Conspiracy Theories of All-Time - Elliott Kalb [59]
This was, without a doubt, one of the greatest sports conspiracies of all time. The players conspired to fix the game, and then bet on the outcome. The league president conspired with the team owner to quietly make the problem go away. And the commissioner ultimately bowed to the attorneys, rewriting history.
CONCLUSION:
#13
Are some NASCAR outcomes too good to be true?
One of the best things about sports is that it’s unscripted. One never knows when a powerful, emotional moment will come. When the events are scripted and planned out in meetings, as they are in professional wrestling, the entire event is cheapened (in my opinion). But with so much at stake, sometimes the players, teams, and leagues have incentive to manufacture theatrical outcomes to tug at the heartstrings of the fans.
It makes sense that there would be conspiracies to alter the results of auto races. Motorsports has seen its popularity grow by leaps and bounds in the last two decades. Strangely, there have been more than one Hollywood-type ending in a key race, with many ways to exploit and nudge the outcomes. That makes for a powerful recipe for conspiracy.
People who cover NASCAR (the National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing) and who know a whole lot more about it than I do tell me that there is still a lot of mistrust between NASCAR and its core fan base. There are phantom caution flags—often when no debris appears on the track. Some skeptics believe that cautions are thrown because the racing is boring, or because officials want someone other than the front-runner to win the race. Some think that the governing bodies might have caution flags thrown so that certain drivers (like Dale Earnhardt, Jr. and Jeff Gordon) can be more competitive. NASCAR doesn’t help the matter, since they don’t share their information with the media. Drivers are thus trained not to speak up or criticize NASCAR. Sometimes, the saying goes, NASCAR has to show the drivers who the boss is.
Clearly, there are ways that NASCAR can fix races, if they wanted to. Here is what fans of conspiracy theories might say about certain races that raised some eyebrows.
1998 DAYTONA 500
In his 2002 book, Daytona: From the Birth of Speed to the Death of the Man in Black, Ed Hinton wrote how, to Americans and Canadians these days, Daytona is synonymous with NASCAR. Hinton wrote that “NASCAR’s showcase race, the Daytona 500, has supplanted even the Indianapolis 500 as North America’s premiere motorsports event.” The Daytona 500, sometimes referred to as “The Great American Race” has the largest purse in all of auto racing, attracts the largest television audience, and is generally considered the most prestigious race of the year.
It makes sense that everyone wanted to see Dale Earnhardt win Daytona in 1998. The man known as “The Intimidator” and “The Man in Black” had won everything else, beginning with his 1979 Rookie of the Year season. Yet despite winning seventy-six Winston Cup races (and seven championships), Earnhardt had always come up short at the Daytona 500. By February of 1998, Earnhardt had entered nineteen previous Daytonas and had come away empty-handed each time. The forty-six-year-old had few chances left at the most prestigious of races. During pre-race ceremonies on February 15, 1998, at Daytona International Speedway, NASCAR (owing to a tradition borrowed from the NBA a year earlier, and to be copied by Major League Baseball the year after) honored its own. The thirty-four living members of NASCAR′s Fifty Greatest Drivers were honored before the race. It would have been a perfect script for Earnhardt to win his first Daytona 500 on the fiftieth anniversary of the first stock car race, and in front of all the surviving members of the Fifty Greatest Drivers. It would have been good for the sport.
What happened was storybook. According to Hinton,