Bad money drives out good money.
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We are seeing Gresham's law at work in sports:
Gambling is taking over the game.
Guest post author Jack Mullen is a lifelong athlete and sports fan. He laments that the games themselves are losing prominence as a contest of athleticism, instead becoming recast as a mechanism for making bets. Jack remembers when gambling was considered a vice sufficiently immoral that it was underground, secretive, and illegal. Leaders of sports leagues understood that gambling would sow doubts about the legitimacy of their games.
Is Jack just a naive sentimentalist, resisting change in the manner typical of old men? The "good old days" were never as good as people remember them, and I hear arguments that gambling brings energy and attention to a game. If a multitasking, distracted American public now watches sports while holding a smart phone in their hands -- and many do -- at least sports gambling means that people are on a betting site, betting on the game they are watching, not deleting emails. That is more engagement, not less. Possibly a reader will make that argument as a comment or guest post.
But it isn't the argument Jack makes. He is old school. He loves the game.
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| Mullen |
Guest Post by Jack Mullen
“Say it ain’t so, Chauncey!”
Sports gambling has now inched forward and become the new, favorite, All-American drug, thanks to a 2018 Supreme Court decision that opened the flood gates for legalized sports betting.
Baseball, thanks to two strong-willed commissioners, kept its sport clean for as long as it could. Kennesaw Mountain Landis, Major League Baseball's first commissioner, banished “Shoeless Joe Jackson” and most of his teammates on the 1919 Chicago White Sox for “throwing” the World Series. Commissioner Bart Giamatti banned Pete Rose for life after an investigation found he bet on games while managing the Cincinnati Reds from 1985 to 1987.
Landis and Giamatti stand out as paragons of virtue compared to most of the knuckleheads who were, and still are, leaders in the sports world, amateur and professional.
Basketball is the scandal du jour lately. Once the Supreme Court gave the green light to nationwide sports betting, who would have been surprised to learn that last week’s indictments of 30 defendants, including Portland Trail Blazer coach Chauncey Billups and Miami guard Terry Rozier, would center in on gambling-related charges? The Supreme Court let the gambling genie out of the bottle.
In case you have not noticed, sports betting is everywhere, thanks to the professional leagues and the sports media, especially ESPN.
My enjoyment of watching games is diluted when ads, in cahoots with sports leagues, not only entice viewers with incentives to start gambling, but are marketed with current players like LeBron James in his Draft Kings commercial with Kevin Hart. Talk radio shows are consumed by analysis of “point spreads” in upcoming games.
Technology aids bettors who want to place a “prop bet” on their cell phone over, say, how many pitches Shohei Ohtani will toss in the next World Series game, even to the point that you can bet whether the next pitch will be a ball or a strike. The Oakland A’s, soon to be the Las Vegas A’s, market the fact that you will be able to place a “prop bet” on the next pitch right from your seat in their futuristic new Las Vegas ball park.
Not enough is said about gambling being an addictive disease. Why so little coverage when Michael Jordan gambled hundreds of thousands of dollars in a New Jersey casino? Why does ESPN play ads for gambling sites even as it covers the latest FBI gambling indictments?
The NCAA, the governing body for intercollegiate sports, ruled that college athletes can now bet on pro sports. Are you kidding? Most college football players have friends in pro football who can talk about their injury and whether they can play in the upcoming game. This is the kind of information gamblers love to ascertain.
President Trump wants Baseball Commissioner Robert Manfred to reinstate Pete Rose to be eligible for a spot in the Hall of Fame. You just know that Manfred, like so many big law firms and universities, will cave.
Where have you gone, you Kennesaw Mountain Landises and Bart Giamatties? We need leaders like you to bring sports back to a spot where fans aren't concerned about games being rigged by mobsters, the guys who used Chauncey Billups, maybe knowingly, maybe unknowingly, as assets.
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| Mullen, 1965. Catching a pass from Bill Enyart |
