Editorial
Americans love their sports. Whether it’s New York City’s euphoria over the Knicks’ NBA triumph after a 53-year drought or the newfound mania in the U.S. over soccer due to the World Cup games being played within our own shores, or the savagery of ultimate caged boxing on the South Lawn of the White House, sports fans can’t get enough of their fix.
Many of those same sports fans, of course, require a fix to satisfy an addictive appetite. Those who have developed an addiction to sports gambling have a multitude of options these days that our cherished sports institutions are only too eager to accommodate. There used to be a strict separation between these institutions and the world of gambling. No more.
Previously it was thought that the “integrity of the game” was sacrosanct, that it was to be safeguarded at all costs. The memory of the Black Sox fixing of the 1919 World Series or subsequent sports gambling scandals involving point-shaving of college basketball games caused the caretakers of these sports institutions to guard against gambling at all costs. There was a zero tolerance of any gambling by the athletes who played the games.
Pete Rose, Major League Baseball’s all-time leading hitter, was banned for life, even though his bets on games were not thought to have led to the fixing of any outcomes. Other less prominent players have suffered similar repercussions when caught gambling on games.
Everything changed when the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018 struck down a federal law that prohibited betting on sports in most states. In Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, a majority of the court ruled that the 1992 Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act violated the U.S. Constitution’s 10th Amendment, which protects the power of states to write their own laws. Thus a federal ban on sports gambling was struck down and the floodgates opened.
Instead of urging Congress to attempt to draft new legislation to at least attempt to safeguard the sanctity of the game, professional and collegiate sports embraced the newfound freedom of being able to allow and even profit from unfettered sports gambling. Today, professional and collegiate sports are reaping the benefits of sharing in the proceeds of billions of dollars’ worth of legalized gambling.
Sports enthusiasts express surprise with the inevitable consequences of such widespread gambling. A sprawling federal investigation last year led to the arrests of dozens of people implicated in rigging NBA games and other criminal acts. The guess here is that this is the tip of the iceberg.
The sports world that has embraced organized sports gambling expressed outrage last week over a judge’s ruling that Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby be allowed to play in the upcoming season despite the NCAA having ruled him ineligible for having bet on games a few years ago when he was at Indiana University. He was an 18-year-old redshirt freshman when he made the wagers.
The hypocrisy regarding gambling on collegiate and professional sports is abundant and abominable. One can’t peruse a sports media website or watch a game on television without being bombarded with betting lines or commercials enticing viewers to bet on the outcomes of games or nearly every minutia involving sports.
This unholy alliance between our cherished sports institutions and organized gambling is permitted to persist, yet allowing a now 22-year-old with a past gambling problem onto the field of play would somehow cause the collapse of Western Civilization. The hypocrisy is truly astounding.
