WE ALL SAW THIS COMING
Of course players will be tempted to bet when leagues promote gambling
THAT DIDN’T take long, did it? So now what? Anyone have a copy of the plan? My guess is there will be no changes, no effort to rid or even reduce leagues-partnered gambling as there’s too much money to be vacuumed from the jeans of self-imagined slick young fans, especially via parlay bets, the big-payoffs super-sucker bets the leagues’ bookies sell hardest for that cynical reason.
The reason singles tennis became the most suspicious international sport is that it took only one player to attach the con to the piracy, making for a one-pronged conspiracy.
Even for sports execs who prefer ignorance to caution, Jontay Porter has proven that prop bets, short of leaving computerized paper trails, beckon like Pandora.
And what are the odds, forgive the expression, that Porter is the first to bet the Under on himself in any legal capacity?
What the commissioners, their charges and team owners largely don’t understand — or don’t care about for the sake of maximized TV dough — is that proposition bets were rarely available to bettors through illegal bookmakers.
Illegal bookies didn’t have marketing departments, advertising agencies, demographic researchers and number-crunchers to create prop bets, then aim them at — as seen on TV — young, thoroughly self-convinced, caps-backwards wise guys.
Prop bets didn’t exist for individual players. That’s what office polls provided. So that the NFL, NBA, MLB and NHL eagerly provided their rosters for, say, FanDuel prop bets that included players’ daily Over/Under totals made for a vortex into which its games, players and fans would be swallowed whole.
Thus, this lifetime suspension of Porter is based entirely on his misconduct as sold and promoted to the public by NBA profit design. Adam Silver has borrowed from the old comic strip, Pogo: “We have met the enemy and he is us!”
What did it take to see this as highly flammable material? A league more concerned with caution and credibility rather than profit. Fat chance. Full speed ahead! And there’s plenty more where this came from. Reader Stew Summers has applied the common sense that may have gone unused on Rob Manfred’s myopic watch. Summers:
“You know those emails you receive from your bank about how they will provide you with alerts should they detect suspicious activity in your accounts?
“Well, it appears Shohei Ohtani never received those memos while $16 million was being swiped from his accounts. No one — business managers, accountants, lawyers, bank managers, bank security employees — noticed it?”
Still to come, if the day ever arrives, the outcome of an investigation into four highly suspicious line swings and corresponding results produced by Temple’s losing basketball team. The university’s investigation, according to Temple, was launched in early March.
Ah, but the toothpaste is out of the genie. As long as TV ratings and ensuing contracts can be enhanced by gamblers, this is our life. Even if we saw it coming and now see it going. Again, you can’t shame the shameless.