With all the talk of tanking, a seasonal pastime for the desperately wishful, the only time I witnessed a “tank job” it wasn’t particularly successful. In fact, it was a farce.
It was the plot of Mel Brooks’ 1967 movie, “The Producers,” the comedy in which two Broadway producers scheme to procure several hundred percent in backing in order to cash out by presenting a show so bad, so revolting that it closes immediately after opening night.
The first part is accomplished. By intermission the audience is so appalled by the content and music it barely waits for the second act.
But the audience soon warms to it as high satire, a brilliant, five-star, low-brow spoof. It’s a hit. The producers are ruined by their own plot to tank.
Every year at this time of the NFL season and near the close of the NHL and NBA season we daily read and hear about teams “tanking” — committing competitive fraud to intentionally improve their next year draft pick in order to select a player who is adjudged most likely to succeed as an extremely expensive addition. And that often doesn’t work out as an honest endeavor.
But “tanking” is written and spoken so often as a matter of fact one would think they’re a matter of fact.
OK. But though plans to tank have become a given, how do they work? How does a professional team conspire from within to lose games as per “The Producers”?
And do team owners, even with winks and nods, approve the financial betrayal of their customers — their escalating devotion of money often paid over generations — to produce a product so inferior it fails flat on its head?
Or do they openly admit that they’re tanking in your (their) best long-term ticket/PSL-purchase interests?
How does tanking work? Bench your best players or have them fabricate or exaggerate injuries, as if losing teams don’t already include such pros, especially among those with multimillion dollar guaranteed deals.
Too bad nothing prevents their replacements, college standouts finally given a chance albeit for bad reasons, from dazzling, perhaps keeping the game close enough to win with a desire to impress so much he’s signed for next season as a valued who knew?
Or should the front office instruct all players to kick opponents’ fumbles out of bounds rather than return them for TDs? Intentionally drop passes that are unintentionally thrown their way by the tanking QB? Should regulars fail to block or defend, thus greasing the skids for their own displacement or replacement in a business with a short shelf life?
Should players arrive on game day prepared for their exit interviews? Or should they all get stuck in traffic?
How about coaches? Do they decline all penalties against their opponent? Encourage conspicuous fouls among their players? Punt on first down? Is there language in their contracts that financially rewards them for throwing games?
What reward above a you-never-know higher draft pick and potential lawsuits for fraud and bait-and-switch in the first degree is there among team owners for tanking? A lifetime of infamy, someone who traded his reputation, dignity and credibility for a crack at a bag of Grade A “Maybe”?
But by all means, tank. Listen to the media experts and those who parrot them: Tank! Tank! Tank! By all means, whatever it takes … whatever whatever is.
Modern media has no grasp of history
I’ve calmed down a bit, but Sunday it left me spitting.
On June 6, 1944, World War II’s Allied Supreme Commander in Europe, Dwight D. Eisenhower, made a famous radio speech to the Allied Expeditionary Forces — primarily American, British and Canadian — as the liberation of France from Nazi Germany began with the invasion of Normandy.
The speech was stirring for its candor, hope and solemnity, as Ike knew that slaughter awaited thousands of young men. Eisenhower began with, “You are about to embark on the Great Crusade.” Still gripping as it brings moving images of young American soldiers mowed down the moment they set foot on the beach.
Well, over the weekend a moron, or more likely a team of morons, attached that speech, with Eisenhower’s actual day-of voice, to Fox promotions for Saturday’s Ohio State-Michigan, a bleepin’ football game.
The number of dead, wounded and missing from the landings on the five beaches remains incalculable. Yeah, Ohio State-Michigan. Morons.
We’ve seen similar, but certainly no worse, before. ESPN’s Quint Kessenich, as a roving reporter covering a 2005 stakes race from Saratoga, tried to interview 85-year-old Harry Aleo, the owner of the favorite who survived the Battle of the Bulge. He asked how the pre-race excitement compares to his Battle of the Bulge experience. The veteran angrily dismissed him.
Two months ago DraftKings offered a solemn “Never Forget” parlay: bet three New York teams on 9/11 — to both memorialize and cash in on the murdered.
I often wonder how much better sports and sports TV would be if only networks’ lead voices stopped their frightened pandering to even briefly speak the obvious truth.
CBS’ Jim Nantz knows right from wrong. But Sunday, late in Jets-Bills — as he so often does on NFL, golf and college basketball telecasts — he asked us to share his delight with what’s laying sports low.
As lineman Dior Dawkins tangled with Jets defensive lineman Michael Clemons — Dawkins was hit with an unnecessary roughness penalty — Nantz and Tony Romo shared what was heard as forced laughs.
They approved? They approved!
Had they stuck around they’d have had even more laughs as Dawkins and Clemons tried to continue the fight after the game.
Too bad Kelces can’t do halftime
Kinda like the Kelce Bros. Christmas song. For starters, and this would disqualify them from Roger Goodell’s annual Super Bowl entertainment requisite, it’s clean.
And they sound like two of my favorite bad-voice singers, Tom Waits and Leonard Cohen.
So Paul Azinger is out at NBC where he was the lead golf analyst. Reportedly saving money, after boosting Cris Collinsworth from $8 million per to $12.5 million, played a role.
Though most golf fans in my milieu didn’t care for him, he had some keeper moments.
While with Fox during its brief tour the PGA Tour, Azinger was instructed to speak atop video of a long birdie putt taken by a player way out of contention yet shown as if the scene were live.
As the putt was struck, Azinger said, “This is going in. Why else would we show it?”
The daily dramatic, social media-delivered hassles within LSU’s women’s hoops program has been revealing. It has revealed another Division I, full-scholarship team loaded with barely decipherable student-athletes now available to the highest NIL bidder.
But Coach Prime now knows that Mount Rushmore — that thing with “those little four heads” — is not in California.
Good grief, when do we hit bottom?
Two inevitables arrived Saturday: On BTN, a graphic listed Michigan State, allowing 27.7 points per game, as “11th in the Big Ten.”
That night a thoughtful, intelligent podcast on Abraham Lincoln’s first presidential campaign was interrupted by a sports gambling commercial.
Seriously.
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