SPORTS GAMBLING IS NOT MY GAME AND HERE’S WHY, FOR LOST SOULS
I could list wasted friends and men such as Michael Jordan and Pete Rose, but mostly, I like sports and enjoy writing about it because of the competitions within — and not the selfish betting behavior
The writer’s name is Xxxxx. He covered the NBA and was destroyed by gambling. One day, he borrowed money from a superstar who played for the team he covered. A West Coast trip allowed him a day off, which he spent in Las Vegas. He called me and asked what he should do next.
I pleaded with him to go home and have an immediate meeting with his top editor. He would acknowledge all wrongdoing, including his use of money from the player — a scandal that could have brought him down and tainted the star. If it was possible, he’d wear an old pair of pants so he could kneel, cry and beg. He sought help, kept his job and covered another sport for years in a market that wasn’t Chicago.
Don’t tell me I don’t have a functioning heart. He was a friend. I never revealed his name, though I was asked to do so by an official.
This was my immediate exposure to betting and how it almost ruined a man. I could proceed, such as the playoff series when Michael Jordan spent his off night in Atlantic City, leading to a loss to the Knicks in Madison Square Garden. Dave Anderson of the New York Times wrote it. I did the same in Chicago, ignoring a weak editor who said it “might be the last column you ever write.” Did Jordan, atop the world, not realize he was exposing himself to unearthly scumbags who climbed from sewage? I wound up writing many thousands of commentaries, including this one. The editor was fired. Or my first column in the business, at age 25, when I walked into the Reds clubhouse in Cincinnati and noticed creeps who helped Pete Rose gamble away his baseball life.
Unless someone explains why a wager is bigger than the competitive action of an athlete beating another, I will view the act as selfish, foolish, far beneath me and a complete trashing of how I’ve made a living for decades. For six years, I’ve watched how the Supreme Court never considered America’s problem gamblers and allowed professional and collegiate sports to swerve into inevitable corruption. I’m referring to tens of millions of long-goners, a number rising by the night, who allow gambling to disfigure why they’re here and what they do.
But I’m also referring to athletes, in all sports. It could be Shohei Ohtani, unable to explain publicly how nine wire transfers containing his name were used by his all-day, all-night, seven-years-running interpreter to pay $4.5 million to an illegal bookmaker. We still have no idea if Ohtani is playing dumb for Ippei Mizuhara, but as he shows up every evening at Dodger Stadium, watching Mookie Betts rule the theater as the true star, he is allowed to carry on because he makes fortunes. Will we ever know what happened? Even if Ohtani was gambling himself? Aren’t the Guggenheim ownership crew and commissioner Rob Manfred hoping this goes away before they find out?
It probably will vanish. Not enough people care if Ohtani was dirty because, well, they are too busy gambling themselves. When legal sports gambling opened locked doors in 2018, only $5 billion was wagered in this country. Last year, the total was $120 billion. What’s next, a trillion? Did the Supreme Court decision consider Rose, the Black Sox, Tim Donaghy — the lost integrity brought by every scandal? Did they recall when anti-betting Paul Tagliabue, who preceded love-the-sportsbooks Roger Goodell as NFL commissioner, said legal wagering would produce “the fast buck, the quick fix, the desire to get something for nothing” in his league? Hell, it was Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg who had the nerve to say, “The court wields an ax instead of using a scalpel to trim the statute.”
The ax has thrashed everyone. The biggest NBA story has nothing to do with the emerging postseason but daily concerns about gambling’s influence, surfacing as the league investigates Toronto’s Jontay Porter for alleged suspicious activity. We barely were hearing words from Tyrese Haliburton — “To half the world, I’m just helping them make money on DraftKings or whatever. I’m a prop. You know what I mean?” he said — when Cleveland Cavaliers coach J.B. Bickerstaff said a gambler made serious threats. “I personally have had my own instances with some of the sports gamblers, where they got my telephone number, were sending me crazy messages about where I live, and my kids and all that stuff,” Bickerstaff said. “So it is a dangerous game and a fine line that we're walking for sure. It brings added pressure, a distraction to the game that can be difficult for players, coaches, referees, and everybody that's involved in it. I think we really have to be careful with how close we let it get to the game and the security of the people who are involved in it because it does carry weight. A lot of times, people who are gambling, this money pays their light bill or pays their rent, and then the emotions come from that. So we have to be extremely careful in protecting everybody who's involved.”
Protection, he said. As Goodell, Manfred and Adam Silver count their new revenues, do they realize they sit atop a public health crisis? Should a stretcher and a fire hose be brought to every game for the gamblers? Scandals aren’t going to happen. They are happening, thanks to ESPN and other networks that plant betting’s seeds and make their own hay with too many commercials. The biggest star of the men’s Final Four can’t get through a moment without a contact. “Oh, yeah, it happens all the time. Like after every game, probably,’’ Purdue’s Zach Edey said. NCAA president Charlie Baker wants to ban prop bets. Should he have remained in Massachusetts politics?
“On May 14, 2018, sports and sports betting came crashing together and will likely never be pulled apart again,” said U.S. Integrity President Matt Holt, whose company is supposed to be monitoring what’s left of the purity.
So forgive me for balking when my golden appreciation for Caitlin Clark was rudely interrupted. Hours after another breakthrough, a story broke that Iowa’s victory over LSU had the highest betting handle in the history of American women’s sports. That was confirmed by DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, Caesars and, naturally, ESPN BET, which seemed more intrigued by this amount than the game’s 12.3 average from, oh, some of the rest of us. Never mind that the total rating was higher than every MLB game last season, higher than every NHL game last season, higher than every NBA game last season except one, higher than every ESPN men’s college basketball game in history and, of course, higher than every women’s basketball game of all time.
Wow! Gee! Now we have something else to bet!
I will watch Clark play Connecticut on Friday night because I enjoy the show and like writing about it. I will not gamble. I’ve never gambled. The people who do it for fun and a few bucks don’t bother me. Those who do it for life and death … the Supreme Court disgraced sports for those who don’t. Congratulations to the justices.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.