First a hat tip to Got Tannins?, one of the many wonderful wine-related sites on the internet. This is the newest entry from:
The NFL has been in the news today, with the $500,000 "Nipplegate" Super Bowl show fine reversed by a Court of Appeals. But Got Tannins? points us to another NFL story, the League's over-the-top can-you-friggin'-believe-it hypocrisy about alcohol (and who gets to pocket the profits from it). In a way, it reminds me of States' attitudes toward "illegal gambling" and the lottery. They don't care about the people, just the competition.
Charles Woodson, the University of Michigan alum and defensive back for the Green Bay Packers, is also a wine afficianado. In fact, he got to really know wine while playing for the Oakland Raiders, and likes the stuff so much he created his own brand, Charles Woodson Wines. Some of the proceeds from the sale of Charles Woodson Wines go to Mott Children's Hospital. How did the NFL react? Well, they don't call it the "No Fun League" for nothing:
After he did an interview about his passion for wine recently, and as news of Friday's event spread, the NFL contacted his representatives this week to remind him of the league's alcohol policy, specifically that any interviews supporting alcohol would be seen as an endorsement and "may have a detrimental effect on the great number of young fans who follow our game."
Well 'hey,' you might say, that sounds pretty responsible of the NFL, caring about their brand and its influence on the maleable minds of our tykes and tykettes. Right?
Wrong.
Coors Becomes Official Beer Sponsor of NFL
Coors Brewing Co. on Wednesday announced it will become the official beer sponsor of the National Football League beginning with the 2002-03 season. Although terms of the deal were not disclosed, analysts speculated that the five-year contract could be worth $300 million, making it the largest such marketing deal in NFL history.
Beer sponsorship worth big bucks to NFL
The National Football League has launched a bidding war to find the "official beer sponsor" for the 2006 season and beyond, according to two of the brewers in negotiations.
The NFL is seeking a multiyear deal, potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The league's beer sponsor has the rights to use the NFL shield, playoffs and Super Bowl logos in advertising and promotional efforts. Incumbent Coors Brewing signed a $300 million, five-year deal in 2002. That contract gave the NFL an option to seek a new partner after four seasons.
Anheuser-Busch Wraps Deals To Sponsor Next 6 Super Bowls
Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis has completed agreements to be the exclusive sponsor in the beer category for the next six Super Bowls.
Anheuser-Busch Pushes the Big Beers for the Super Bowl
Fox Broadcasting, which will carry Super Bowl XLII, is charging an estimated average of $2.7 million for each 30-second commercial in the game. The audience in the United States for the telecast by Fox, part of the News Corporation, is expected to exceed 90 million viewers.
As the leading Super Bowl advertiser and a stalwart sponsor of TV sports, Anheuser-Busch pays less than the average rate. The company does, however, pay extra fees each year to be the only beer marketer to run spots in the game, shutting out rivals like Molson Coors and SABMiller.
Anheuser-Busch’s deals for exclusivity in the beer category with the networks that currently share the rights to broadcast the Super Bowl — CBS, Fox and NBC — extend through 2012.
I don't think the NFL has a big problem with alcohol. I think the NFL has a big problem with competition- what are the players doing hawking alcohol? That's the NFL's domain.
And that, as I noted in the introduction, reminds me of states, lotteries, and gambling laws.
HERE is a report from 2004, stating that the forty states (and D.C.) pulled in almost $45 Billion dollars in 2003, with the states keeping a third, or $15 Billion. That is a boatload of money, one scratch-off at a time. There can not be any doubt that states are in the gambling business, and in it big. You don't believe me? Just look at casinos.
Pawlenty's budget plan relies on $200 million from new casino
Pawlenty had said he would not use gambling revenue to balance the budget, but his budget includes $200 million from a one-time casino license fee. He's proposing a new casino in the Twin Cities metropolitan area, to be run by the state and interested tribes.
House approves record-breaking Illinois tax increase for casinos
Legislators and economic development leaders say although the Illinois Assembly's passage of a bill to increase casinos' taxes will help plug $200 million of the $5 billion gaping hole in the state's budget shortfall, it will also thwart the development of new casinos here and hamper operation of existing casinos.
Does that picture look familiar? Is it from the Hoosier Lottery, or maybe the Florida Lottery? Nope. Those are Bolita balls. Bolita is an illegal game, something the government would never want you to do, because it is a sin and destroys the family. Here is how it works- a bunch of balls with numbers on them are put in a bag. Somebody starts pulling out the balls at random. The person with a "bolita ticket" with the right numbers on it wins money from the pool of people who bought tickets. This is such a criminal enterprise that people in Florida have been sent to prison for running it. It is such a disgusting "game" that the only people willing to run it were people with names like Santo Trafficante, Jr.:
Oh, and this guy:
Gambling is a crime in Florida (unless you're the government, that is). Well 'sure,' you might say, 'but when the State runs gambling it is regulated, the games are fair, people aren't getting ripped off.'
Really?
Let's look at the Hoosier lottery just for kicks.
THIS is a fun class-action lawsuit. The Hoosier Lottery is alleged to have sold millions of tickets for which there were no possible prizes:
The overstatement of prizes occurred because half of the 5 million Cash Blast tickets printed were defective, according to their claims.
The lottery reprinted the 2.5 million tickets but did not announce that the prizes associated with the defective tickets were no longer available.
On June 22, 2006 — more than a year after taking the flawed tickets off the market — the lottery noted on its Web site that seven of the initial 10 $250,000 prizes associated with the game remained available, the suit says.
By July 7, 2006, after realizing it had too many prizes listed on its Web site, the lottery announced that the number of $250,000 prizes remaining had dropped to one. The number of prizes of $50 or more fell from 65,570 to 5,197.
But wait, as they say, there's more. From the Indianapolis Star:
People who plopped down $20 for the Hoosier Lottery's $1 Million Solid Gold scratch-off game faced long odds of winning the biggest cash prize -- 1 in 400,000.
Would they have played if they knew the odds were zero? They did for more than a month -- they just didn't know it.
...
A winner took the last $1 million prize for the Solid Gold game May 28, but tickets remained on sale last week and could stay on sale in some places until mid-month.
...
One other game, the $5 Monthly Money, also has no top prize available. Someone claimed its last $2.4 million prize June 26.
No bolita seller or numbers runner could get away with a scam of this magnitude. I am thinking the State couldn't, either, if it didn't have a statutory monopoly on the game.
The next time somebody starts preaching to you about protecting the children, or the wages of sin, take a look at who is speaking, because I would give you three-to-one odds (if it weren't illegal) that they are more interested in their pockets than your kids.