Readers of this column may be surprised to learn that I don’t spend all of my time thinking about drones or diplomatic démarches. I’m also a huge — fanatical may not be inappropriate — sports fan. I devote a ridiculous amount of time to following my two favorite teams: the New York Knicks and the San Francisco 49ers. (Why New York and San Francisco? The former is my current home, and the latter is close to where I went to college.) I also follow, with lesser degrees of devotion, tennis (I never miss a U.S. Open), baseball, soccer, and college football and basketball (particularly the Cal Golden Bears).
I find that sports fandom provides a much-needed psychological salve when I’m encountering tough times either in my personal life or the nation’s life. I watched the Knicks particularly obsessively when my mother was dying, for example. Now it’s a relief to escape the dismal state of our politics by watching the dramas on the hardwood or gridiron. A sentiment attributed to Chief Justice Earl Warren, among others, runs something like this: “I always turn to the sports page first, which records people’s accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man’s failures.”
Integral to the spectacle is that the outcome must be unpredictable, with players on both sides competing as hard as humanly possible; I find nothing interesting or edifying about the scripted spectacle of professional wrestling. Thus, I am deeply pained by the possibility that the results we see on the field are corrupted by the prevalence of sports gambling. Yet that sobering concern is inescapable after the betting scandals in recent weeks.
Last month, the FBI arrested Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, Portland Trail Blazers coach (and Hall of Fame player) Chauncey Billups, and former NBA player Damon Jones, among many others, for alleged involvement in illegal betting schemes. While Billups was accused of taking part in rigged, Mafia-run poker games, Rozier and Jones were indicted for allegedly providing gamblers with insider information about themselves and their teams. On Nov. 9, federal prosecutors unsealed an indictment of Cleveland Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz for allegedly rigging pitches to provide lucrative paydays for gamblers making specialized “prop bets” that don’t turn on the outcome of games. (The accused are pleading not guilty.)
Unfortunately, such scandals have become commonplace since the Supreme Court in 2018 overturned a congressional ban on sports betting in most states. In 2018, Americans legally wagered less than $5 billion on sports. Last year, with sports gambling legal in 39 states and the District of Columbia, that spending skyrocketed to nearly $150 billion. (Of course, bookies operated illegally in the past — and still do, as a Post investigation revealed last year.)
With that much gambling money sloshing around sports, scandals are sure to follow. Just a few months ago, the NCAA permanently banned two Fresno State basketball players, and one from San Jose State, for involvement in betting after one of them was found to have manipulated his performance to facilitate payoffs. Last year, the NBA banned Toronto Raptors player Jontay Porter for life for allegedly disclosing confidential information to bettors, while Major League Baseball permanently banned Pittsburgh Pirates infielder Tucupita Marcano after determining that he had placed hundreds of bets on baseball, including games involving his own team. As The Post just reported, match-fixing concerns have even spread to lower-tier sports like table tennis, darts and surfing.
Sports executives profess to be shocked by players’ involvement in gambling, but they have no one to blame but themselves. All of the professional sports leagues, and many individual teams, have reached lucrative deals with sports books. The NFL, for example, signed five-year pacts in 2021 with DraftKings, FanDuel and Caesars, collectively worth just under $1 billion. Colleges are getting in on the action, too, with the NCAA and many universities striking their own deals. Anyone who watches sports on TV is exposed to nonstop commercials for sportsbooks and coaching on how to bet. ESPN even has its own sportsbook arrangement.
I have nothing against gambling per se; if you want to hit the casinos in Las Vegas, Atlantic City or elsewhere, good luck to you — you’ll need it. But I am troubled by the newfound prevalence of sports gambling, including countless in-game prop bets on everything from who’ll score the first touchdown in a football game to the over/under on Luka Doncic’s rebounds on the basketball court. The ease and ubiquity of sports gambling, especially on smartphone apps, is tawdry and morally compromising. The potential for corruption abounds.
Sports leagues used to avoid any association with gambling because they recognized it as a threat to their integrity, and the occasional scandal was met with severe penalties (see: Pete Rose). Now they embrace gambling and seem to regard the arrests of players — and the threats they receive from disappointed gambles — as a regrettable cost of doing business.
The 2018 Supreme Court ruling in Murphy v. NCAA did not say that states had an obligation to allow sports gambling. It did not even say that Congress was forbidden from outlawing the practice. It merely said that Congress had infringed on states’ rights by forbidding them from legalizing sports gambling. But states can outlaw betting directly, as a few still do, or Congress can make it a federal crime.
Lawmakers should not wait for a replay of the 1919 Chicago “Black Sox” scandal — when baseball players conspired with gamblers to rig the outcome of the World Series — before acting to protect the integrity of the sporting contests that so many of us watch so avidly and sometimes need so desperately. It would be wonderful if all sports betting could again be banned, but, failing that, at least ban prop betting, which invites manipulation.
The post I’m a huge sports fan. Gambling, especially prop bets, is ruining the fun.
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