When it came to sports gambling in the United States, we were, for the longest time, holier than thou.
Some newspapers wouldn’t print the betting odds for games because they were above something as vulgar as gambling.
Sports leagues publicly wanted nothing to do with gambling, seeing it as a toxin that could poison their games. The 1919 Black Sox had become Exhibit A for what happens when gamblers infiltrate a sport.
Never mind that those leagues, the NFL in particular, were built on and sustained by gambling. Never mind that NFL teams’ weekly injury reports come out on Tuesdays and then every day after until the game for a reason -- so that gamblers can make bets with as much information as they can possibly possess. The NFL doesn’t even try to wink and nod at their long-running practice anymore.
Never mind that the NCAA Tournament is basically America shutting down for three weeks while it sweats over its brackets.
Think of all the time and energy that has been devoted to keeping people from legally laying down money on games. Think of all the moralistic finger-wagging.
Look at us now.
On Friday, Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker signed into law a $45 billion capital plan that includes sports betting. It means that bettors soon will be able to go to a casino, a racetrack or a sports stadium and place wagers on their favorite teams. Online gambling in Illinois is 18 months away.
It means that you can legally gamble to your heart’s desire. It means that a century-plus of hypocrisy is finally over. It means business as usual, only with the state’s stamp of approval and its hand out.
Despite their prudish veneer, America’s pro sports leagues have been edging toward the betting window for a while. The NHL has a team in Las Vegas, a huge no-no for decades. Having a franchise in Sin City, the thinking went, would give gamblers access to players, who might be tempted to throw games in return for money. The flaw in that belief, of course, was that dirty gamblers always had the ability to get to players, no matter where those players were. Gamblers didn’t need legal betting in Las Vegas to try to change the outcome of a game.
That the Raiders are moving from Oakland to Vegas in 2020 is the final proof that attitudes about sports gambling have completely shifted. But we already had a good idea that they had. As online fantasy sports leagues became a multibillion-dollar industry, professional leagues wanted a piece of the pie that DraftKings and FanDuel were eating with gusto. The NFL’s charade that gambling was a moral horror show crumbled when the league saw how much it could profit from it.
Pritzker’s signing Friday is the inevitable last domino in the history of sports gambling in Illinois. Illicit wagering always went on. Now the state can take the money from legal bets and put it into roads, bridges and schools.
There still needs to be a red line between legalized gambling and the athletes and coaches who take part in games. If we’re going to have confidence that the sports we watch are what they say they are, we can’t have players betting on their own games. If a player knows that one of his teammates is playing hurt, how easy would it be for him to bet against his team in a particular game? And if his team was actually winning that game, how tempting would it be for a player who had laid down a bet to do something that might cause his team to lose, all for the sake of a payoff?
The national push toward legalized gambling does nothing to change the Hall of Fame hopes of Pete Rose, who was rightly banned from baseball for betting on games as a player and manager. What he did was wrong then, and it’s wrong now. If sports leagues want fans to believe in the legitimacy of their products, there has to be that separation of church and state.
(And, yes, I do apply that same standard to sportswriters. Would you trust the coverage of a beat writer who bets on the team he covers? Do you think her anger/joy over a bet would seep into her writing? Me, too)
You can bet (ahem) that all our local sports teams will race to set up sportsbooks at their stadiums. The Cubs already are considering it, according to an ESPN report. If there’s a dollar to be made, they’ll be there. In related news, I wonder if they’ve considered a cannabis shop at Wrigley Field called High and Inside. Hmmm.
For now, let the gambling begin. You know, like it did at the dawn of time.
