Leagues’ alliance with gambling wrecking sports
OU know the chant. It’s the chorus of the compromised, those tethered to money-diminished principles they explain as, “Well, it’s no worse than this” and “It’s no worse than that.” But what’s it ever better than? So much change is now predicated on hollow, sorry, cashier-window rationalizations.
When I was kid and taken to old Yankee Stadium for 1 p.m. weekend games — a logical, fanand family-embracing time to play baseball, now largely lost to big-market TV money — there was a prominent sign on the outfield scoreboard. It carried the foreboding caution: “Gambling Strictly Prohibited.”
I wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but I knew enough to know that gambling couldn’t be good, like spitting, using bad language or asking what happened to Cousin Jerome.
Now there’s a rush by every pro team, league and mass media enterprise to promote gambling — to partner with gambling operations — in order to race state governments for their share of the profits.
While the primary mission of gambling operations is to have customers lose their money, no commissioner or team owner would dare go on record telling that indisputable truth. Otherwise:
“Dearest Fans — We don’t want you to just gamble on our players, teams and games through our partner bookies, we want you to lose your money in that pursuit, losses guaranteed by house odds and meager payouts.
“We don’t care if your sense of the sport and its players are forever skewed or even abandoned to gambling and gambling’s attendant stench of suspicion and mistrust. Think what you will. Besides, with the bad odds and payouts the fix is already in.
“Your new daily and/or nightly job is to feed our new profit-sharing plan by losing your money to our new business partners.
“We’re now in the betting business. And no such business is designed for you, fans hopefully turned gamblers, to win. How could it otherwise exist and survive as a business, you saps?
“We don’t care if you lose your money and your good sense of our sports, as long as you gamble on them, preferably often and a lot.
“Yours In Sport, the Guardians of the Games, the Commissioners.”
Of course, not one commissioner, team owner or players’ union head would speak such an indisputable truth. There’s too much of the house’s cut to chase.
Gambling operations, legal and illegal, are predicated on customers losing their money. Period, end story.
And the more vulnerable the gambler — even if previously disinclined to seek to place a bet on games — the more cash-register music to the ears of the pied pipers, until, of course, the institutionally suckered wake up or tap out, perhaps 28 percent credit-card debt interest thrown in.
Our pro sports’ latest mission is to create losing gamblers from those once cherished as fans. Suck them in, carve them up, hope they boost or maintain the value of TV contracts, then dump the carcasses for curbside pickup.
The failure to reveal or even acknowledge such an incontrovertible truth is equally shameful and unsurprising. Next stop: Ancient Rome.