Growth of legal sports wagering comes with mounting human costs
Some 6.6 million Americans struggle with gambling addiction
We’re heading toward the Super Bowl, a time of joy and anticipation for most sports fans. But not for all. Certainly not for Steven Delaney. He has no plans to watch the big game. Watching sports of any kind could suck him back in.
“I stay away from it all,” Mr. Delaney, 37, a truck driver from Ballston Spa, N.Y., said recently. “I don’t talk about sports. I don’t read about sports. I don’t want to know about the teams in the Super Bowl. It’s a risk that I am not ready to take.” “Ican lose everything,” he added. Mr. Delaney battles addiction. His compulsion, which nearly ruined his life: betting on sports. He is hardly alone. About 2% of Americans, roughly 6.6 million people, struggle with gambling addiction, according to Keith Whyte, executive director of the National Council on Problem Gambling. A growing number bet on sports.
The flood gates opened in 2018 when the Supreme Court cut down a 1992 federal law that limited sports betting primarily to Nevada.
Now, about 30 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico allow sports gambling either online or in person. That means about 30% of Americans can place a legal wager on the Super Bowl where they live. In November, California residents will vote on whether to open their state to sportsbetting.
Wagering on sports is “endemic and acceptable and so mainstream that it is now a major pillar of American entertainment,” said Timothy Fong, one of the directors of the gambling studies program at UCLA.
“The question,” he continued, “is what kind of impact is this going to have on our mental health, on our publichealth?”
Most of us can put some money down, have some fun and walk away unscathed.But not everyone.
When I reached out last week to nearly a dozen people as old as 82 and as young as 17 in recovery for sports gambling addiction, I heard horror stories. They told me about shattered families, lost jobs and foreclosed homes. They spoke of arrests, convictions, jail time and suicide. I heard
how dangerous this time of the year is: the end of the college football season, the NFL playoffs, all the money that canbe won on the Super Bowl, or,more likely, lost.
How did we get to a point where wagering on sports became so seductive and encompassing?
It seems like every time we turn on the television or look at the internet, we are blitzed by ads hyping legalized sports bettingand online casinos.
Sports betting advertisements now bolster the bottom line for holders of broadcast rights, with their commercials popping up during game stoppages and branded drops read on air by analysts who gush about parlays and point spreads.
Casino ads can be spotted in all corners of the biggest stadiums. You can place bets on games inside stadiums in Arizona and several other states, and some venues have even sold their naming rights tobetting operations.
That’s a far cry from the hard-line stance against gambling the biggest pro sports leagues maintained for decades. Football, basketball and baseball all steered well clear of the gambling world, partly out of fear players would get hooked and end up throwing games to win big or clear debts with bookies.
In 1976, Pete Rozelle, the NFL’s commissioner, said this: “Legalized gambling on sporting events are destructive to the sports themselves and in the long run injurious tothe public.”
In 2012, the current NFL commissioner,Roger Goodell, said this: “It’s a very strongly held view in the NFL — it has been for decades — that the threat that gambling could occur in the NFL or fixing of games or that any outcome couldbe influenced by the outside could be very damaging to the NFL and very difficult toever recover from.”
In 2015, he was still singing that tune: “We oppose gambling. I don’t anticipate us changingthat going forward.”
Now, sports leagues and mediacompanies walk in step withthe casinos, all the way to the bank with multimilliondollarpartnerships.
The bitter truth of addiction is obscured by the smarmy ads and compromising relationships, and yet federal oversight is downright nonexistent.
Think about it. After years of consumer lawsuits and investigations that showed the tobacco industry was doing all it could to get people hooked on a deadly product, the Food and Drug Administration severely limited cigarette advertising: The last Marlboro Man commercial aired in 1999. You cannot buy a pack of cigarettes without being confronted by a label warning that smoking can lead to cancer, lung disease, diabetes or other terrible diseases.
But if you tune in during Super Bowl week, be ready to ingest an unrelenting stream of carnival barker ads. They will gush over how you can wager during the game on everything from the coin toss to who will be the first receiver to catch a pass. They will hype the fun of parlay bets and socalled risk-free bets, which are not risk free at all.
There’s a cost. It can devastate.