“That’s not cool. That’s not cool. They’re just being greedy pigs.” The Chiefs-Dolphins wild card playoff game is only being shown on Peacock, NBCUniversal Media Corp’s streaming service, and that was the reaction of the former Round Mound of Rebound and current professional pontificator Charles Barkley when he called in to @Balltalksource. “They” being the NFL.
In a letter to the NFL Commissioner Goodell, Congressman Patrick K. Ryan (D-NY), makes reference to the NFL’s antitrust exemption while demanding the game be aired on broadcast television. Peacock costs $5.99 a month, free trials are available and you can cancel anytime. But, NFL pay-for-view has now arrived. What’s good for the phony World Wrestling Federation (WWF) will be even better for the (phony?) NFL.
The late Peter Gent wrote of a pay-per-view Super Bowl in his deeply cynical novel The Franchise published in 1983. The ex-Dallas Cowboy wide receiver wrote on the opening page a scene with the fictional Texas Pistol’s quarterback Taylor Rusk and a bellman who was unloading Rusk’s bags into the penthouse where Rusk was checked in under the name E. Fudd. The bellman wondered if the Pistols would win the Super Bowl and cover the 16-point spread.
“We got it on pay TV here in the hotel. Every room‘ll be filled at triple the rate,” said the excited bellman.
Gent, who died in 2011, is most famous for his first novel North Dallas Forty. He contributed to the screenplay of the 1979 movie with that same title. Nick Nolte played a role based upon Gent’s career.
A review in the Washington Post called Gent’s book “fun.” At the same time, “The rub is that underlying the good-ol’-boy humor and Ludlum-like violence, there is a seriousness, a feeling that Gent, as he did in ‘North Dallas Forty,’ could be revealing something that the National Football League would rather we did not know.”
In the The Franchise Gent moved his focus from the drugs, sex and locker room to the front office. The Pistols were created as a tax shelter and financed with other people’s money, OPM. The owner’s family, “had begun its wealth by exchanging Confederate money for huge chunks of Texas land in the waning days of the Civil War and had since parlayed oil and government contracts into a multibillion-dollar conglomerate.”
The Times reviewer wrote that Gent was “persuasive in his depiction of the use of deferred contracts, bond issues and scalped Super Bowl tickets to keep the team owners in control and rich,” and closed with this: “I can see this story being told as a morality play. The late Ayn Rand would have made it a humorless story of good versus evil, the right of the strong and righteous to control pro football. In her version, Taylor Rusk would have been played by a young Gary Cooper. In Peter Gent’s version, he should be played by Clint Eastwood.”
Pete Gent not only told it how it was, but was precinct as to pro football’s future. I wish he could have been here to see it.
In not too many years, the $5.99 to see the Chiefs and the Dolphins battle on Arrowhead’s frozen tundra, will, no doubt, seem like a bargain.
