I was never interested in gambling, or even in playing innocent cards, which is weird, because I had genetic reasons to be pre-disposed to the vice.
My paternal grandfather, allergic to shovels and panning in Arctic streams, would board ships from San Francisco to Alaska as prospectors in the ‘20s still dreamed of the booty from the turn-of-the-century Gold Rush. He’d play gin rummy games all the way up, and turn around as soon as he got there, playing gin all the way back to California. He made a lot of money that way, and never got his fingernails dirty.
I just never got the bug.
I do call gambling a vice. So do the big religions. As Danny Funt explains in his new book “Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling,” “Ancient Jewish law equates winning money from a game of chance to theft. In the Qur’an, gambling is described as ‘an abomination of Satan’s handiwork.’ Christians have long viewed it as epitomizing the sins of pride and greed.”
I realize that betting on sports, which everyone else but prudish me seems to think is the cat’s pajamas, is not precisely a game of chance. You study the team records, scour the injury reports, look at the weather forecasts to see if the track will turn up muddy, follow the odds.
And then, because the pot is so big and the temptation so great, you cheat. You put the fix in. You pay a young fellow to shave some points, or to leave the game early with a bad hamstring.
It’s because cheating and gambling go hand in glove that American professional sports organizations and the NCAA used to be entirely opposed to being at all associated with the betting class. For generations, no pro sports teams were based in Vegas precisely because that’s where sports gambling was legal. They used to say only half in jest that the NFL would reroute planes carrying teams from even flying over Vegas, much less landing there.
They used to. Then, surprise, surprise, legal sports betting that used to be legal only in Nevada expanded to many more states, and the billionaires who own the NFL teams were approached by the billion-dollar FanDuel, DraftKings and other betting sites and shown how they could make more billions by cooperating with the gamblers rather than shunning them. So were the NBA, NHL and MLB owners. Who doesn’t like more billions? Gamblers do. And now the bets are not just on who covers the spread. It’s on how many behind-the-back passes a point guard throws in a game – “props” bets on any weird number that an algorithm can figure out instant odds on. And that makes it even easier to cheat when you pay a player to throw as many behind-the-back passes as you would like to see.
Gullible me used to think that American sports were mostly on the up and up. Although I realize that bookies were always among us, as were poor schlubs like the Black Sox players, paid to throw a World Series a century ago, and rich schlubs like Pete Rose and Phil Mickelson, simply gambling addicts.
But with this month’s federal indictment involving a point-shaving and game-fixing scandal that includes over 39 players and at least 17 NCAA Division I basketball programs, “amateur” sports as well have become entirely untrustable. It’s all money ball now. When the top college players make millions off their NILs – name, image, likeness – the little guys without big names figure, Why shouldn’t I make 10 grand for missing a few free throws?
Legalized sports gambling has been a disaster for American sports fans who liked a little innocence, who liked everyone to play all out and see who won in the end. If it were up to me, it would be made illegal again. It’s not up to me. But could we at least lose legalized props betting – remember last year when Cleveland Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz were indicted for intentionally throwing balls in the dirt so gamblers who bet on individual pitches could make out like my cousin’s bandits?– before cynicism entirely destroys the beauty of the games?
Larry Wilson is on the Southern California News Group editorial board. [email protected].
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