by Dave Fialkov, special to SportsFanParadise.
As a sports fan living in Washington, D.C., a city where politics, not horseracing, is the sport of kings, it’s easy to compare sports to politics and politics to sports. Generally, it’s my knowledge as a sports fan that informs my understanding of politics.
The concept of “momentum” is a good example. In the never-ending presidential election, I am always stunned when one candidate defeats another in a state by more than expected, and suddenly people talk as though the “big” win is a big deal. It seems to me that if Barack Obama beats Hillary Clinton in Iowa, he wins Iowa, whether he wins the state by 3, 10, or 20 percentage points. This, of course, is not true. It would be like saying a powerful dunk that brings the crowd to its feat and stops the visiting team’s 10-0 scoring run is just another two points. It’s not. The dunk shifts the momentum of the game from one team or another, and this has a strong impact over the course of the game. (Ask anyone who has played NHL 2004). Similarly, early this year, a big win in Iowa shifted the momentum of the presidential race from the “inevitable” Hillary Clinton to the “insurgent” Barack Obama.
So this is how sports helps me understand politics: I wouldn’t fully grasp the notion of “big wins” in the presidential primaries if I didn’t understand as a basketball fan why a powerful dunk is more than a mere two points. Until “Spygate,” however, I never experienced the reverse, where POLITICS informs my understanding of SPORTS.
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For eight years now, Dick Cheney has been the man that Democrats love to hate. Week in and week out we hear all sorts of allegations and accusations against the Vice President, but nothing generally comes of it.
The one time anything quasi-major developed as a result of Cheney’s extra-legal actions involved the leaking of a covert CIA agent’s name to a reporter. What happened there was President Bush said in his State of the Union address that the African country of Niger was selling weapons of mass destruction to Iraq. A few days later, Joseph Wilson, the CIA’s weapons expert in Niger came out and said it was not true. Angry, Cheney ordered his chief of staff, “Scooter” Libby, to tell certain newspaper reporters that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was an undercover CIA agent (which she was). This is illegal, and Libby was convicted and sentenced to prison, but given a get-out-of-jail-free card out of George Bush’s community chest.
Thus, to punish Joseph Wilson for speaking out against the Administration, and send a message to others that might even think of doing the same, Dick Cheney and his cronies ruined the career of Valerie Plame and jeopardized the lives of those with whom she had made contact overseas as an undercover agent.
What always baffled me as this story went on was not just the people who took the actions themselves (Bush, Cheney, Libby), but the hundreds of people the DEFENDED their conduct in the media. “They had to do it to protect our country,” the pundits would say. “The leaking of her name had nothing to do with the fact that her husband exposed the president as a liar.” These are the people I couldn’t understand. The people so drenched in their own ideology and worldviews that they were unable to step back and see Cheney for the criminal that he is. Their conduct, I thought, was inexcusable.
But the other day, as I saw for the first time the infamous “tapes” behind Spygate, I realized that I am those people. Me and every other Patriot fan that deluded themselves into believing that the championships that the Patriots won in the past eight years were legitimate. The fans that defended Bill Bellicheck as a “genius” who was able to turn the team from mediocrity to dynasty. We are all kidding ourselves. Bill Bellicheck is the Dick Cheney of the NFL.
These scandals never enter the media all at once; it is a slow, trickle of facts that come out every few weeks that build on one another to create a clear case for cheating or criminality. Initially, when these tapes came out, we were told that they just taped one Jets game, which they could have won anyway, and I said big deal. Similarly, when President Bush first made that statement in his State of the Union address that turned out to be not true, his defenders said “it was one mistake, unintentional, he means well, let it go.”
Then we were told there were other tapes, but none were from playoff games, and I said big deal. At this point, the Pats were like 8-0 and looking more dominant than Ali in ’67, and I knew that they weren’t taping games THIS YEAR so they had to be legit, I said to myself. Just like when the world later found out that the Administration’s weapons man in Niger said Bush was lying, people figured “Hey, the war in Iraq has already begun, lets just stick together as a country and get the job done.”
Then we were told that one of them was the AFC Championship game against Pittsburg. I remember the game well, because my boy Drew Bledsoe (I was a latecomer to the Tom Brady bandwagon) came in in the second half and led the team to victory. Big deal, I said to myself. The tapes only help them in future games after the team has time to review them. This is similar to the way Cheney defenders dismissed the leaking of Valerie Plame’s identity as an innocent mistake, totally unrelated to the ongoing scandal involving Iraq and Niger.
Over the last year or so, I have been impressed by the few brave conservatives that have stepped into the spotlight to criticize Bush and Cheney. John Dean, Richard Nixon’s former advisor who spent some time behind bars for Watergate, comes to mind. These people realize that it’s not necessarily in their political self-interest to go against the Administration, but they recognize that at a certain point, you have to stand up and say stop.
The other day, after watching those spygate tapes for the first time, and listening to people that know a lot more about football than I do describe their contents, I was astonished. They showed the opposing coaches give signals, followed by the endzone (Madden) view of the game to see how the teams set up, followed by down-and-distance. These tapes do not indicate a coach that “misinterpreted” the rules, but a conscious, malicious, and in the end successful attempt to cheat. The NFL guys on ESPN seemed sure that the tapes were used during games, and contained invaluable information for any coach or player to review during halftime. I believe them. Any Patriot fans that view the evidence and conclude anything else are deceiving themselves. Like ruining the career of a CIA agent to hopes of creating a false case for war, it’s not too bad to be true.
In one of the funnier scenes in The Godfather Part 2, a Senator is questioning one of the lower legmen of the Corleone crime family, Willy Cicci. Trying to get direct evidence of Michael Corleone’s criminal conduct, the Senator asks Cicci if Corleone ever directly asked him to kill someone. Cicci says no. “There was always a buffer, someone in between you who gave the orders?” the Senator asked. “Yeah, a buffer,” Cicci answered mockingly and sarcastically. “The family had a lot of buffers.” Laughter filled the hearing room.
Even though the scene was funny, it illustrates a larger point: Cheaters have buffers. Criminals, have buffers. Dick Cheney never told any reporter about the identity of a covert CIA agent; he had his cronies do it for him to insulate him from liability. Michael Corleone never told Willy Cicci to kill anyone, but he had someone else do it for him to insulate him from liability. The existence of a hierarchal structure where “legmen” never speak to the boss and are generally uninformed about the purpose of their orders is the strongest evidence one can find of intent to commit a crime, or intent to perpetrate a fraud.
Now, let’s look at how Matt Walsh—the Willy Cicci and Scooter Libby of the New England Patriots—acted throughout Spygate. He was some video flunky who was told to tape games by the Pats’ Research Director Ernie Adams. Walsh was given explicit orders of exactly what to tape, told not to tell anybody about it, and to return the tape to Adams after every game. What Adams did with the tapes, neither Walsh nor the public knows. These orders were not given to Walsh by an overzealous research director anxious to impress his boss. It was a sophisticated cheating plan, conceived of, outlined and implemented by Bill Bellichick, during the decade that saw the Patriots emerge as one of the all-time great pro-sports dynasties.
Patriots fans should be humbled and embarrassed. This past year, while I watched my team rack up win after win, I dismissed all accusations of cheating and illegitimacy with the same condescending arrogance that Dick Cheney’s cronies dismissed allegations of improper and illegal politicking. In a strange way, politics has informed my approach to sports, and has helped heal the wounds of the Patriots defeat in Super Bowl XLII. I am glad the Giants won.
