Against The Super Bowl: Why I Don't Watch Football (Or Other Rigged Games) But The New York Times Does
You, too, can strike a blow against the Mob by just turning it off -- if it will let you
Sometimes unconnected things are very much connected.
Let me tell you two stories: one about private investigators, the other about football leagues.
A few years ago I got a phone call from a private investigator who was investigating some lawyers and private investigators representing Dan Snyder, the owner of the team formerly known as the Redskins. Apparently I knew one of those people and I politely said what I knew and wished the person calling me the best. It felt very spy versus spy and I wondered what the hell I had gotten myself into once again.
I found the call somewhat strange but then googled “mafia” and “Dan Snyder” and I learned a lot. Did you know Snyder wanted to install Huawei in his football stadium?
“The NFL is a mafia,” he recently told an associate. “All the owners hate each other.”
“That’s not true,” one veteran owner says. “All the owners hate Dan.”
Let’s say you were a hated NFL owner. Would you partner up with foreign intelligence and would you begin seeding stories on your co-owners to various publications like the Washington Post?
One might also say that a lot of the coverage condemning sports betting is, in fact, advertising it.
Is it a “risky wager” if you’re participating in the economics of the NFL? Why does the New York Times want to attach its brand to what is essentially a mobbed up operation? I get that the New York Times isn’t officially a sponsor of the NFL but do you really think that one of their columnists would write anything and risk getting banned from their properties?
The second story I’ll tell you was in was reading about my grandfather, Rear Admiral Dwight L. Johnson. Some years ago my grandfather was on the Coronado school board, and he made the mistake that all neophyte politicians make. He actually tried to change things. Whoops!
His target? Football, specifically junior varsity football where the young were being damaged and damaging one another by trying to play a grown man’s game.
The community loved its football and he was recalled. Things got so hot that my father was shipped away to an East Coast boarding school.
Now I can see why a man who was stricken down by rheumatoid arthritis and confined to a wheelchair could see the waste that American football really is — and this was before the acronym, CTE, or “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy,” entered the popular lexicon.
Why can’t we see football for what it is — a waste of our youngest, fittest men in what amounts to a gladiatorial blood sport?
And that’s before we even discuss how the game — when played at its highest levels — is totally rigged by mobsters, their descendants, and their front men?
Are we sacrificing our young people for a game that’s totally rigged? How many other things are totally rigged?
****
Leonard Cohen died from a fall and “contributions from leukemia” but I have my doubts. I think he was pushed and I think — more importantly — he was pushed out of the way before Donald Trump would win the election on 2016. Cohen was seemingly a threat.
Cohen’s song “Everybody Knows” came out whilst the Reagan-mafia takeover was all but complete.
Everybody knows that the dice are loaded
Everybody rolls with their fingers crossed
Everybody knows the war is over
Everybody knows the good guys lost
Everybody knows the fight was fixed
The poor stay poor, the rich get rich
That's how it goes
Everybody knows...
Apparently everybody knows that the NFL is fixed. You might notice, as I have, that the Las Vegas Raiders were brought there by the late mob boss (and Donald Trump supporter) Sheldon Adelson. Naturally the best seats are at the Wynn Clubhouse. Did you know that Steven Wynn is still being investigated as an unregistered foreign agent of China? Yes, that same Steve Wynn who is long known to be tied into various transnational mobs.
So can we ask the obvious: Is the NFL tied into organized crime? That was the argument behind Dan Moldea’s very excellent book Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football (1989).
You should stop what you’re doing and watch an interview.
For Moldea’s troubles he was smeared by the very same New York Times. Moldea pointed out all the things that longtime sports reporter Gerald Eskenazi got wrong. He went to the editor and then he sued all the way to the Supreme Court — and the Court declined to hear his lawsuit. You can follow the whole legal battle and its chronology here.
We might end by asking the larger question: what is the purpose of the NFL anyway?
I submit that its to have a plausible reason for conversations to take place that might otherwise not take place. When you understand that stadiums exist for a lot of people to have off the books conversations you know an awful lot about how business and politics get done.
On that point did you know that Dave Portnoy, frequent guest of Tucker Carlson, is backed by Rupert Murdoch’s right hand man, Peter Chernin? Is this an op to get all college men addicted to gambling? Or other forms of degeneracy? Roger Goodell has banned Portnoy at all NFL events but not seemingly his business partners.
Makes you wonder that maybe, just maybe, the news might be mobbed up too and maybe, just maybe, you’re hoping for some courtroom justice. After all, have you even heard about the poison clouds stemming from a train crash in Ohio?
Oh, were you disappointed by the outcome of the Super Bowl?
Well, in Arizona, they rig all kinds of games — sportsball and elections. Frankly I’m okay with both outcomes.
Just let’s not have America’s fifth largest city run out of water, OK?
Let’s just stop pretending this stuff is legit.
One final thought…
Funny you mention Barstool. One of their podcasters, Eric Sollenberger, has a brother at the Daily Beast and went after your guy Gates. Before that, he worked at DJI. Looks like Grandpa did a lot of work in China too…