Seeing Jon Hamm on my TV screen is usually a welcome experience. It means that I’m either watching one of the best shows of all time, or the Fletch remake (underrated). But when Hamm appeared during a commercial break in the NBA season-opening game between the Houston Rockets and the Oklahoma City Thunder, I found myself irritated.
In the ad, which is for Bet MGM, an online sportsbook, Hamm asks you to imagine a scenario where you pull up their app at a sports bar and place a live bet. For some reason, everyone in the bar cares about your wager, and it hits. The place erupts in jubilation, people jumping and cheering. You’re a local hero. Hamm grins as he delivers the tag line: Make it legendary.
That ad has about as much to do with my experience of betting at bars as Kendall Jenner’s infamous Diet Pepsi spot had to do with the reality of how police confront protestors. In fact, the advent of online sports betting—the kind you can do on your phone in real time—has been quietly ruining the sports bar experience for me. The sports bar was once a haven for fleeting but wholesome encounters with the avid fans of perennially doomed teams. A place where everyone’s allegiances were apparent, and bonding over middling sports organizations felt like an act of civic pride. But today, the sports bar is becoming a bleak gathering point for men who cannot meaningfully converse about anything beyond their lottery-esque parlay slip. Guys who put way too much money on results they cannot control, rendering every TV screen in the bar into a vector for disastrous news. The result is an angrier, more obnoxious environment that makes me miss a simpler time.
On a recent trip to a sports bar on the Lower East Side, I ordered a pilsner and settled in to watch college football: Ohio State vs Minnesota. A cold beer during a low-stakes Ohio State game is one of my purest pleasures. For three and a half hours, everything else disappears. But that night, a group of guys showed up for the much more anticipated matchup: Miami vs. Florida State. A few of them were Miami alums, and I struck up a conversation before kickoff, chatting about playoff hopes, recruiting classes—standard fare. But one of the guys, a Miami fan, had concocted a parlay bet as long as a CVS receipt, with several legs that went against his Hurricanes. Judging by his near-constant, obnoxiously furious screaming, every single one of the game’s plays seemed to sabotage his bet. I shared glances with other, seemingly equally disturbed patrons. The atmosphere was atrocious.
A man yelling in a sports bar is not a rarity. What’s truly dark, though, is watching someone root against their own team, their own joy, because of the potential payout. Miami won the game decidedly, so if it weren’t for the proliferation of online sports betting, this guy might have been a fun hang, high-fiving random people and ordering celebratory shots. Instead, he was incentivized to bet against his own interests because Miami was the favorite to win the game, and you win more money if you bet on the underdog. This incident, while one of the more extreme I’ve witnessed, is far from unique. At a dive bar in Brooklyn, I watched a guy I was chatting with place $500 on the under for a Ravens game. His bet lost before the game was over, and his terrible mood was a drag on the few of us who were genuinely interested in the game’s outcome.