Sports Gambling – It’s an Addiction, Not a Game

ACCORDING TO LIZ – Striking down Roe v. Wade set a political precedent for Supreme Court with consequences that continue to ricochet around the country. 

Another disastrous Supreme Court decision dates back to May 14, 2018, when the unholy nine struck down the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992, a federal law that barred gambling on games in most states, clearing the way for the legalization of betting on football, basketball, baseball and other sports. 

And subject only to individual states passing laws to enable sports wagering. An easy win in most places where the incentive of taking a share of the revenues in taxes was a compelling lure to cash-strapped governments. 

Lucrative beyond-their-wildest-dreams profits spurred wanna-be billionaires to buy out every persuadable politician. 

But a potential financial boon for states and the gambling industry was not in the best interest of all. 

Something for nothing – even lotteries and scratchers – are additional taxes imposed on the poor, money that was budgeted for food and rent, for commuting costs and education, straight out of the bank accounts of millions. Budgets that too often had no room to gamble. 

Risk was a survival technique in the mists of time, but people rarely choose to roll the dice if there isn’t real need. Early humans gambled just to survive. But they could just as easily have become an appetizer for the cave bear instead of bringing it home for their cave’s dinner and for for its pelt to provide a warm cover on cold winter nights. 

Today’s instant gratification entrepreneurs would not have survived back then. Trump would be long gone, if not the rabbit to a wolf, then dead from a duel due to his womanizing proclivities. 

California may have dodged the bullet with the defeat of Props 26 and 27, but Californians are still very much at risk with the proliferation of online betting. 

Who let the genie out of the bottle? And why? 

Beginning in the 1970s, the Supreme Court started stretching the First Amendment to protect advertisements. Tobacco and alcohol as extremely lucrative industries foresaw that medical and public opinion would turn against their engendering harmful activities to pad their bottom lines and hopped on board. 

As did companies using the expansion of children’s television programming to market directly to kids. 

Then the Supremes took the position that if something was legal, it could be advertised. The view of a corporatist court that companies should be able to make money, and governments should not be able to stop them. 

That it was up to consumers to decide for themselves whether to drown in the deluge of hard-sell gambling ads or believe the Chicken Littles warning of the dangers leaking through the dike of good government. 

The reversal of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992 in 2018 built on the 2010 Citizens United opinion on corporate personhood and that money is just another expression of free speech and empowered an explosion of industries designed specifically to separate Americans from their money. 

And then spread like wildfire through marketing sports betting apps and convincing more people to gamble. 

Commercial sports betting revenue has increased twelve-fold since 2019; with billions made during the most recent March Madness, the gambling industry has a vested interest in getting as many people to participate as possible, regardless of the consequences. 

Sports leagues get their cut of the profit, and the media are all too happy to accept advertising dollars to the point where it’s almost impossible to watch an American sportscast and not be inundated with exhortations to throw cash at getting something for nothing. 

The odds are heavily stacked against a major payout, and only enough small ones. Heavily publicized to prime the pump for the revenue flow the sportsbook operators are reveling in. Enough to pay for the original legal investments made to overturn the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act in the first place, set up the infrastructure, and buy all that advertising. 

It’s a payment in exchange for tolerating certain risks. A gamble. 

The American Gaming Association claims sports betting ads guide people from illegal to legal markets, which raises tax revenue for governments, but the intent is to drag in more and more Americans who don’t have quite enough with the lure of a quick jackpot. 

A single bet that is rarely a one-off, and too often leads its victims into a worsening spiral of debt, ensuring that they will NEVER be able to get ahead, NEVER have a run at the American dream. 

Since the implementation of legal sports betting, clients of problem gambling helplines and similar services complain about being unable to enjoy sports and other activities without being inundated with hard sell advertising. 

The incessant marketing glamorizing gambling is increasingly disruptive to addicts both seeking and in recovery. 

Fox Sports’ morning talk show features Craig Carton who also hosts a podcast and public service show dedicated to the stories of gambling addicts like himself. Paying for his gambling put him in prison five years ago for using ticket investor funds to float his own debt with modern-day bookies. 

Legalized gambling has also had a heavy impact on the games themselves. Prop betting, where people predict how players perform, has led to threats against athletes who fail to live up to erstwhile fan predictions. 

Players can surreptitiously adjust their play and bet on their own performance to make a little on the side. To set a major example, the N.B.A. recently banned Jontay Porter for life in an effort to deter players from betting on games in this new lucrative world of pro sports gambling and damaging the integrity of competition. 

In the biggest betting scandal involving a player since states began to legalize sports betting en masse in 2018, Porter, the now-infamous Toronto Raptors power forward, shared his own injury information with someone he knew was an NBA bettor; pulled himself out of a game after three minutes claiming an illness to ensure an “under” prop bet on his stats paid out; and placed over a dozen bets on NBA games using another person’s online betting account. 

Sports leagues do make money but fear the consequences from such disclosures of privileged information, sports betting’s version of insider trading; the manipulation of in-game results, especially player-specific and consequently player-controlled outcomes; and the looming possibility of players manipulating games to lose. 

With games no longer left to chance, league sports may have to join the WWE and players join SAG-AFTRA as paid personalities – attracting a different and much less lucrative audience than the one it now has, the one that enjoys the suspense when the outcome is not predetermined. 

A sport or a series of scams? 

The Supreme Court essentially ruled that advertising is a service, and if people want to spend their savings on legal sports wagers, they should be able to find out how to do so. But how righteous is it, if Americans are risking their future, their home, their children’s education and their retirement so that others can profit? 

How much debt can people run up as “entertainment” before it’s clear there’s an addiction in play that needs to be treated as the disease it is. 

Dis-ease, because whatever is driving people’s quest to obtain something for nothing does not sit well with them and those around them emotionally, economically or socially. 

No-one can deny the obscene profits those profiting from the sports betting industry are raking in. 

No-one can deny the negative impact on too many Americans’ lives. 

No-one would set out a buffet of sugary foods in front of a diabetic but that’s essentially what the Court did by allowing sports betting to proliferate in the time of online commerce. 

Gambling is a medically acknowledged addiction yet the Supremes have backed the sports-betting pushers who gamble for corporate profit, and cruelly play hardball with ordinary people’s desperate desire to get something for nothing. 

Their Supreme Court gamble – oops, investment – has paid off handsomely for sports betting entrepreneurs greedy to capitalize off the hoi polloi’s unrealistic desire for unimaginable riches. 

Reversing or even controlling the damage will be a heavy lift against the mountains of cash involved. But legislators and regulators must weigh the evisceration of families economically devastated by the disease against the narcissistic gluttony of the few.

(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City’s budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions.  In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today’s world.)