Rigged
By Mitch Berg
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Everybody knows that All Star Wrestling was rigged. The wrestlers themselves were big and strong and skilled, no doubt. But the outcome was never in doubt. The “Good Guy” always won because they were in the entertainment business. It made for better television and that’s where the owners made their money – tv advertising revenue. Which, incidentally, is why Hollywood is going broke now – too much emphasis on the Misunderstood Bad Guy. He’s not misunderstood. He’s Bad. That’s his job, to play opposite the Good Guy and eventually fail, like the Harlem Globetrotters beating the Washington Generals. Nobody wants the Bad Guy to win and nobody will pay to watch it, time after time.
People are talking openly about the NFL being similarly rigged. The league is an entertainment business, too. Sure, the individual franchises have separate owners but they play by league rules under league refs and the league has a vested interest in making sure the Good Guys win to maximize tv ad revenue. Which explains why the officiating is such a big deal – it looks as if the league puts its thumb on the scale to affect the outcome.
Make every play instantly reviewable, put a chip inside the ball for accurate spotting, transparency is possible with technology. Unless that would force the thumb off the scale. That might let the wrong people win. That would be BAD.
Now let’s talk about elections.
Joe Doakes
I suspect after this past two years that the DFL has a lot to cover up, and the rigging is going to be over the top. WIth a little luck, perhaps too over the top
January 30th, 2025 at 8:59 am
Well, wrestlers and the ASW never pretended to be free and fair, unlike NFL. To go back to free and fair elections, you have to go back to before dead people started voting in Chicago. All for libturds of course.
January 30th, 2025 at 2:26 pm
There are times I enjoy a more morally ambiguous story. The world is more grey than black and white.
But there are definitely times that I enjoy the simplistic, black and white, good triumphs over evil stories too.
I also can enjoy a movie about good people doing really bad things to absolutely worse people for a good cause.
Part of Hollywood’s problem is that the Studios go all in on one type of story or another at a time. They don’t tend to give us much variety.
And one of my favorite movie openings, which this post brought immediately to mind, is Swordfish. Travolta’s character posits an alternative version of a classic with the villain winning.
January 30th, 2025 at 5:01 pm
My thought is that the draft and other rules the NFL has actually works well to make things fairly equal. The goverment, by taxing the wazoo out of player salaries, probably does a great job making it less equal, but it’s not that bad.
The big area that seems likely to bring up a lot of problems is the NIL money coming into colleges for athletes. More or less, the college with the richest alumni and other donors will have the inside track on the best athletes, and I’m seeing rates of athletes transferring schools (and delaying degrees) that I never saw growing up. I guess the bright side is that athletes at least get a little butter & egg money for their skills that might get them hurt for life, but the whole spectre of college sports is getting to be a lot closer to pro wrestling than I think is good.
Put differently, try telling the star quarterback with millions in NIL money that he needs to go to class and have a decent degree program. Gonna be hard, and that’s also going to make a lot of player discipline very difficult.