The Bekavac Files: A Three Part Manifesto on Sports and Society (Part Two)

(Editors Note: Part Two in the Bekavac Series. Part One here)

Part II – Who Shaved the Dice?

“Baseball’s been a favorite sport of mine ever since a friend of mine, Arnold Rothstein, fixed the 1919 World Series.” – Hyman Roth

Boxing died, and Mixed Martial Arts began the night of March 13, 1999. I was a senior in high school, and a bunch of friends and I went in on the pay-per-view of the first bout between Lennox Lewis and Evander Holyfield. Despite clearly winning, the fight was ruled a draw and Holyfield retained the title. All of us went off of our heads, immediately suspecting the fight had been fixed. The media zeroed in on judge Eugenia Williams, which was so clearly off the mark with her scoring that it raised eyebrows and prompted investigations and even a statistical analysis of subjective scoring anomalies by Carnegie Mellon University.

Whether or not the fight was fixed wasn’t important. What was important was that the air around the fight smelled fixed. Boxing lost credibility. Mixed Martial Arts filled the void our society needs for gladiatorial bloodshed. If the fight was fixed, then the chance for chance was gone by the ringing of the Round One bell. It became pro wrestling. Scripted, predetermined, and set. Boxing was dead.

That loss of chance is the loss of the very core of sports. When that core begins to be questioned, a death pallor drops over the sport. Pete Rose’s gambling cast doubts. What Bart Giamante did was to excise him like a tumor from the game. It wasn’t that what he did was unseemly or unlike what most Americans do on sporting events, it was that he undermined the idea that we have that the game is being played out impromptu. It was convienient for Mr. Giamante that Rose’s gambling was against the laws of the game.

Jose Canseco’s Juiced and the Mitchell Report casts doubts. Some in the American public wanted Rafael Palmeiro’s and Mark McGuire’s and Barry Bonds’s heads. Mr. Riley, and many highly intelligent legalistas, will say that this is an unfair reaction, and comparing it to Rose is unfounded because what Rose did was against the rules of baseball. When these players were juicing, it wasn’t against the rules. Hold on Riley; what they were doing was altering the randomness of the home run. God-given talent, weight room time, and hand eye coordination all factor in. But there is an idea that the genetics, capacity and drive to work and drive to work and psychosomatic development is something that all humans have access to. When there is a magic potion that only some have access to, it alters the playing field. It tilts it. It makes things more likely, rather than by chance. The removal of the chance is the ruin of a sport.

However, there are some athletes that can, by their own talents or work ethic, tilt the field all the same. And that’s what makes them great.