A gang of us bet weekly on pro football games back in the day in a pool run by a local guy I never met. It was illegal, though we didn’t think about that. Wrong picks would cost each of us around two bucks. A winner would get us beer money. Lost a lot more money than we drank. Sinners.
That’s my gambling career. I was never much of a bettor. In college we played “Hearts” ruthlessly, but for the competition, not money. I avoided poker later on because it bored me and I was cheap. I got to work on other faults.
The Supreme Court recently voided a federal ban on sports’ betting, and we await the flood. States are expected to set up all kinds of legal sports’ betting apparatus. Gambling money will be pouring from the pockets of the suckers into a variety of private and public coffers, rather than Joey down at the corner. Wonderful.
Most of the talking heads tend to think it a great thing. You know the arguments: If you don’t like it, don’t bet; everybody does it (the third grade rationale); who are you to judge; great source of tax revenue; yadda, yadda, yadda.
A host of social pathologies go with gambling — addiction and lives torn up by it; the regressive tax of gambling that falls heaviest on the poor; a moral climate that defines everything by money and getting more of it any way we can.
The newest “new” morality is that if it harms someone, too bad for that someone if a majority wants it or is apathetic at best. Everything is morally fluid. Any restriction on anything is now a court-mandated nothing. Add betting on the Super Bowl to the madness.
Take a look at your local sports page and think about what it will look like in the new world of legalized gambling. Bettors will no longer be the hard core. They will be everyone. There won’t be sports dynasties. Just betting dynasties. Bottom line: Games and players will be judged by the bets, not the performance.
This decision will ruin organized pro sports in the long run. Throw in college football as well. Why? Because the innocence will be gone. Or at least the façade of innocence. We won’t be able to pretend any longer that money isn’t everything in the game. It’s Tom Cruise shouting, “Show me the money!”
The addicts will be encouraged, and the tragedies multiplied. Sure, consciences will be eased by a tiny percentage of the profits going to PSAs during football games with an 800 number to call if you got a problem. Kind of like the beer ads telling you to drink responsibly. Who’s kidding who?
Bill Bradley is a former New Jersey senator and basketball star with the New York Knicks. He authored the bill ruled unconstitutional. Bradley said that “betting on sports was betting on human beings, and I thought that was wrong,” he explained in response to the ruling on National Public Radio.
Bradley said the decision turned “every baseball player, basketball player, football player into a roulette chip.” And every bettor a dehumanized cash machine subsidizing whatever the state wants.
I can hear Knute Rockne: “Win one for the Gipper … I got a sawbuck on it.” The court’s decision will fundamentally change our view of sports, and any remaining sense of purity in our sports.
Purity? I know. I’m being naïve. They were betting on baseball when Ty Cobb was swinging a bat. But most thought that wasn’t a good idea. There was something about it just not right. Purity was important to us.
Well, we’ve lost purity in just about everything over the last few decades. Why not sports?
So it goes.
On and on.
Yadda, yadda, yadda.
