Refried Screens

The NY Post broke a story that an NBA ref was fixing basketball games. It doesn’t surprise me, since I heard it before from a guy who believed all sports were fixed. He never got over Villanova beating Georgetown, The Chicago Bulls dynasty, or the Bad News Bears. For a while, I could see his point, but I moved on.

Now that the fix has been confirmed, fans are seeing it everywhere:

The fix is something that can make you crazy, like the humans on Battlestar Galactica who believe everyone is a cylon agent (robots posing as humans). Soon, you’ll be seeing the fix everywhere, and it will ruin sports for some, much like these guys who ruined Harry Potter for everyone.

And it’s going to get worse.

A co-worker from Singapore would always talk about fixes in soccer matches. Whenever a player performed poorly, the crowd would scream: “FIX!”, forcing the embarrassed coach to pull the player from the game. Immediately afterwards, the player would hold a press conference and talk about their strong beliefs in family and religion.

I don’t know about you, but if U.S. athletes had to consistently defend themselves from the fix, I’d TIVO post-game press conferences in a heartbeat.

After reading ESPN’s fix article, I was amazed at how easy it would be to fix a game:

ESPN.com: Given your expertise in watching and wagering on games, what influence does a referee or official have in the gambling outcome?

BL: If he has action on the game and wants something in particular to happen, I’d say 75 percent. I’ve been asked for years if games could be fixed. And I always told people not by players. Because the guys in the key positions who could get something done, your quarterbacks and running backs, are making millions and aren’t going to risk it all to help some friend make $100,000. An official, though, could do it.

I’ve actually seen a couple of fixed fights in the world of MMA. Japanese fighter Nobuhiko Takada’s matches were fixed.

Because he was bringing in so much money as a Japanese fighting stud in a Japanese market, Pride FC company executives didn’t wan’t to run any risk of him losing. As a matter of fact, his fixed fights were better to watch than his real ones, where he’d spend the entire time in a defensive position, scared to get knocked out. Don’t believe me? Watch the Mark Coleman v. Takada fixed fight and then the Mirko CroCop v. Takada real fight and holla back.

When current UFC Champ Quinton Jackson fought for Pride FC, some folks wanted his black ass to throw a fight against Japanese star Kazushi Sakuraba. Jackson refused and Sakuraba beat him legit.

And I cried.

This runs in sharp contrast to the UFC, which doesn’t fix fights in a continued attempt to gain legitimacy. After all, it hasn’t been long since folks considered it human cockfighting, which I could never understand, since I’ve never seen a penis in a UFC bout…thank goodness!

As far as I’m concerned, I could care less if all sports were fixed. Movies are fake, but so what? They destroy documentary movies. Consistently. I’ll take a good zombie flick over Red Hot Ballroom in a red hot minute.

If the fix happened to be on, we’d never know for one simple fact:

People choke.

And you can’t tell the difference between a guy having a bad day versus a player who is on the fix. And even if we did, this guy here pretty much sums it up for me:

I hear you, man. Fixed sports are still real to me, too!