Perhaps there’s a lot we don’t know happening in the dark; additional revelations could change my perspective. But, given the fanfare with which the F.B.I. presented the cases against Billups and Rozier, it’s hard to imagine that some epidemic of point shaving is going on. The most likely scenario might be that, yes, a few more athletes than before, perhaps especially those who are in financial trouble, are turning to sports betting as a way to generate a modest amount of extra income—or, in some instances, to work off their own gambling debt. Looking over the landscape now, I find I am less concerned than I was eighteen months ago, not more.
In that earlier column, I noted my resistance to grandiose moralizing before confessing that I was becoming genuinely worried about how all the new gambling talk might affect children and their enjoyment of the game. Of all the arguments advanced to regulate and restrict the new apps, “think of the children” is the most common—and, I now have to admit, as a parent of two young children, the silliest.
One of the more full-throated versions of this case was made in December, by the Washington Post, which published an editorial titled “For a New Generation of Kids, Sports and Gambling Now Go Hand in Glove.” The piece described the current state of affairs like so:
For decades, professional sports considered gambling taboo. But now, with 38 states and D.C. allowing legal betting on games, the ubiquity of sports betting advertisements, and lucrative tie-ups between professional teams and gambling companies, a generation of young people has grown up with gambling as a normal—even integral—part of spectator sports, one which, according to the impression that ads create, is an easy money, no-lose proposition.
But is this actually true? I thought about it after watching Game Seven of the World Series, last Saturday. Were any of the kids who stayed up to see Yoshinobu Yamamoto heroically close out the series thinking about prop bets or the over/under? I was watching while chatting online with a group of dudes with whom I’ve played fantasy sports—itself a modest form of sports gambling—for the better part of two decades. Everyone in the group has bet on sports for their entire adult lives. Outside of a few ironic comments, there was effectively no talk about bets or spreads or parlays throughout the entire eleven innings. After the game ended, we argued about whether we had witnessed the greatest World Series game of all time. If this group of hardened degenerates was able to enjoy the action at this level, who, exactly, are the spiritual victims of sports betting? Who has had their fandom stripped away? What is “fandom,” anyway?
I have begun to suspect that much of the moralizing about children must come from people who don’t have any—or who, at the very least, do not take them to many sporting events. In the past year, my eight-year-old daughter has attended a variety of collegiate and professional contests and watched many more on television, and she has never once asked about DraftKings or why the commentators are talking about moneyline odds. If she did, I would explain that all of that was for adults, which is also what I would say if she asked about the ads for erectile-dysfunction medication that appear between innings.
This leads me to a final question: Do we really want to sanitize sports into some childish endeavor that exemplifies all the innocent wonderment found within the spirit of human beings, or whatever? In the past few years, a handful of former N.F.L. players have died at a startlingly young age. Demaryius Thomas, Vincent Jackson, Marion Barber, and Doug Martin were all in their thirties when they died, and all of them were struggling with depression or other severe mental-health issues that were very possibly related to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (C.T.E.). Meanwhile, the N.B.A., which once loudly proclaimed its commitment to social justice, has developed a robust financial partnership with the United Arab Emirates, a country that is sending weapons to further the brutal massacre in Sudan. These issues concern me far more than a handful of players gambling on games they weren’t playing in. I would probably have a hard time explaining to my child why Peyton Manning was nearly in tears at Thomas’s posthumous induction into the Denver Broncos’ Ring of Fame. And I also would not want to tell her why her favorite hoopers were competing in a meaningless in-season tournament funded by the U.A.E.
This isn’t an attempt at cheap whataboutism—and it certainly doesn’t mean that gambling isn’t a problem. Nor does it mean that harsh punishments shouldn’t be doled out to players who bet on their own games. Rather, what it means, to me, is that we abandon moralizing mythmaking around professional and collegiate sports altogether. We shouldn’t lie to preserve abstract ideas such as fandom and integrity, nor should we pretend that the first bet on a football game happened on an iPhone. Professional sports are rapacious for-profit enterprises that produce wildly entertaining, sometimes violent, and sometimes inspiring athletic competition. Isn’t that enough? ♦