That’s just one of the melancholy thoughts inBrian Tuohy’s The Fix is In: The ShowbizManipulations of the NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL and NASCAR (Feral House). The Kenosha sports writertrades the usual boosterism of his profession for the mantle of investigativereporter. What he finds are league officials and team owners desperate to hidescandal, athletes guilty of everything from fixing their own games to spousalabuse.
Tuohy argues his case forcefully, or maybe casesis a better word. As a compendium of wrongdoing and rule breaking, The Fix is In tends to conflate thevictimless crime of an athlete betting on his team to win with theegregiousness of an athlete shaving points for the bookies. The failure to testplayers for pot smoking emerges alongside failures to identify and prevent theuse of performance drugs.
But even if there are no shades of gray inTuohy’s perspective, he certainly finds enough blackness in misconduct and evenMob-controlled criminality. Although many of the charges he unearths were neverproven in court, the smoke is so thick that the fires must be numerous andspread across the entire playing field of professional sports. Along with thepower of money, loyalty to the game and the human tendency to protect one’s ownin explaining the action and inaction of owners and sports commissioners, thehappy talk media is to blame for failing to play watchdog. Tuohy’s depressingconclusion is that professional athletics has more to do with entertainmentthan sports. Football then becomes little different than professional wrestlingexcept for one thing: everyone knows that wrestling is just a spectacle.
