WHEN ATHLETES ARE ALLOWED TO GAMBLE UP A STORM AND KEEP PLAYING, SPORTS IS RUBBISH
Brendan Sorsby won an injunction against the NCAA, allowing him to play for Texas Tech because a wacky judge agrees betting is a "compulsion" — meaning he’ll be in uniform against Houston on Sept. 18
So, bookie scum, it suddenly doesn’t matter if Brendan Sorsby placed thousands of bets and spent fortunes in gambling foolishness. Nor does it matter if he continued to wager after leaving Cincinnati and Indiana — where he bet 40 times for the Hoosiers — and arrived this year at Texas Tech. Sorsby employs a lawyer named Jeffrey Kessler, who argued his client has a “compulsion” and should be forgiven.
He won. By the same rationale, murderers and rapists also have a “compulsion.”
Do we forgive them, too?
There is no need to ask if society has lost the entirety of mental might. That can be formally confirmed now. The outrageous decision Monday by a district judge in Lubbock County — home village of the Red Raiders — might have destroyed sport as we know it and allowed wagering fools to overwhelm what still made sense about our fun and games. Judge Ken Curry believes anyone who screws up a life, even as America tries to control gambling’s vices, can rightfully declare a disorder. Sorsby will miss only the first two games this year, against nonconference schools Abilene Christian and Oregon State, and will be in uniform against Houston on Sept. 18.
Throughout college athletics, players who want to bet on their own teams can declare a monster heyday. Lay down your money, between ages 18 and 23, and the worst penalty is missing a game or two while committing to a rehab stay. Sorsby went down the dark road at Indiana, pre-Curt Cignetti, but what stops the next cretins from gambling against their own teams? It has happened often in football and basketball, but rather than go to jail, welcome back the high rollers. Same goes for folks betting ungodly sums on sports, including prominent media members. They catch a major moral break, too.
According to Curry, Sorsby would “suffer a probable, imminent and irreparable injury” if he sat out the season. That was the hope of the NCAA, which continues to fight for its existence. When he returns to the lineup, Sorsby becomes the symbol of the NCAA’s court filing — “the first and only major American sports league to allow an athlete to compete after betting on his own games.”
This was one of the ugliest moments in sports history. Quickly, the NCAA said the ruling “undermines and corrupts the integrity of sports.” Why would anyone continue to follow games when moral uprightness is trashed? Is it all about spreads and no longer about hearts, brains and souls?
“The NCAA strongly disagrees with the court’s ruling in Sorsby’s case and is deeply concerned about the damaging, far-reaching and broadly destabilizing ramifications of this outcome — which undermines and corrupts the integrity of sports,” the NCAA said in a statement. “The NCAA is committed to supporting student-athlete mental health but must continue to aggressively defend against actions that defraud college athletics and threaten competitive integrity, such as betting on one’s own sport.”
Curry should not have been making the call. He is a retired judge from Tarrant County, from Fort Worth, which is hundreds of miles from Lubbock. Who paid him? An appeal has been filed, but Texas Tech’s season will be over before it’s heard. “It is a just result,” Kessler told ESPN. “Brendan gets to devote himself to his team and the education of athletes on the dangers of gambling addiction. He will continue his treatment, miss two games, and there is no injury to the competitive integrity of the NCAA. It is what we proposed and what the NCAA should have accepted had it been true to its promises to prioritize the welfare of athletes.”
The welfare of athletes? How about the pockets of bookies, digital or human? When a player is introduced to a program, we once asked about his past and his dreams.
We’ll now ask about his gambling portfolio.
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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.