The return of March Madness is a reminder that perhaps the most common of all the unenforced laws in America — after changing lanes without using turn signals — is the ban on sports gambling. An estimated $10 billion is going to be wagered on the NCAA basketball tournament this year — only 3 percent legally. A Sports Illustrated report on Monday depicted this as not just reflecting denial over such gambling’s popularity but as helping the unscrupulous at the expense of you or me:
Currently, Nevada is the only state to allow single-game wagering. “Our current sports betting laws are so out of touch with reality that we’re turning tens of millions of Americans into criminals for the simple act of enjoying college basketball,” said Geoff Freeman, president and CEO of the American Gaming Association. “The failed federal ban on sports betting has created an illegal, unregulated sports betting market that offers zero consumer protections and generates zero revenue for state and tribal governments.”
But now a big shake-up may be just around the corner. The U.S. Supreme Court is considering the state of New Jersey’s appeal of a lower court decision that held federal law blocked New Jersey lawmakers’ 2014 vote to allow sports gambling in their state. A USA Today analysis written after oral arguments in the case noted that Chief Justice John Roberts was sympathetic to the view that the Constitution didn’t give the federal government the power to prevent states from setting their own rules on sports gambling. Sports-law expert Ryan Rodenberg suggested that with about 20 states interested in allowing such betting, change was close to inevitable.
An ESPN analysis in December pointed out that gambling companies weren’t the only ones ready to cash in. That report said:
Media companies have launched ventures ready to cater to a new marketplace. And the NBA and several of its owners have positioned themselves to be at the front of the line to siphon money from new revenue streams.
And, yes, bookmakers have set odds on the chances their profession will be emancipated by the courts. Legendary bookie Jimmy Vaccaro, now of the South Point Casino in Las Vegas, thinks there’s a four in five chance — 80 percent — that sports betting will become legal nationally.
So are Americans on the brink of a journey that leads to gambling aficionados such as Cousin Sal of The Ringer website becoming national figures? Where legendary football announcer Al Michaels no longer has to hide behind euphemisms and hints at the end of games about how late action affects point-spread and over-under wagers? Where “bad beat” — a Las Vegas term for a sports or poker bet lost because of unlikely or unusual events — becomes a household phrase? Where smartphones put a sports book in the pockets or purses of tens of millions of people?
Maybe. But those questions may not be ambitious enough. It’s possible that the world is actually on the brink of an even-wilder adventure in which betting not on sports but on life in general becomes much more common — with consequences that could be far-reaching.
Consider the range of offerings from Sportsbook, the popular Antigua-based gambling website, and William Hill, the British gambling giant. Bets are available on the Oscars and the Emmys, among other entertainment events. Wagering is also available on retail politics — Sportsbook, for example, has California Sen. Kamala Harris at 15-1 and Kid Rock at 250-1 in the 2020 presidential race — and on geopolitics — which nation will be the next to exit the European Union.
There’s an anything-goes vibe that portends gambling could go places no one has yet imagined. Consider this invitation on the William Hill website:
Create and bet on your own markets. … [L]et us know what you come up with and we’ll price it up for you.
Where might this outcome lead us? There are strong hints to be found in the history of Intrade, a Dublin, Ireland-based “prediction market” company that from 2001 to 2013 offered a stunningly broad range of bets on real-life events — perhaps most notably the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — before it abruptly closed for reasons that remain murky.
In 2011, International Monetary Fund Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn — then considered a likely future president of France — was pulled off a Paris-bound flight by New York City authorities responding to allegations that he had sexually assaulted a maid who came to clean his Manhattan hotel suite. The case was initially considered a slam-dunk, with Intrade posting odds of 84 percent that Strauss-Kahn would be convicted. Soon after, as questions about the accuser’s credibility emerged, the odds shrank to below 10 percent. As an Intrade customer/devotee at the time — it was then still legal in the U.S.; my preferred bets were $2 wagers on weekend box office totals for new movies — I followed the case closely. While the Freakonomics blog pooh-poohed my theory, it certainly seemed plausible that someone in the New York District Attorney’s Office, or someone with a source in the office, could have cashed in. Criminal justice insider-trading, anyone?
The endless hunt for an edge is common in Wall Street circles. But if betting on real-life events becomes common, what happens then? These bettors won’t just be gambling addicts; they’re likely to include the hedge funds that already bet on sports using algorithms, artificial intelligence and well-placed insiders. And whether big or small, these bettors are going to be highly motivated.
As a result, we’re likely to see a world in which people try to monetize information more than ever. Some possibilities are obvious. If athletic trainers who use sophisticated biometrics to determine the health of pro athletes — as Chip Kelly required when he coached the Philadelphia Eagles — see evidence that a star player has an undiagnosed or undisclosed ailment or injury, the lucrative possibilities of initially keeping that information secret are plain. Other angles may one day be as apparent. If paparazzi come upon a blotto married celebrity leaving a club at 4 a.m. with three groupies half his age, will they sell footage to TMZ — or first bet on the likelihood of the celebrity’s divorce? If a journalist hears persuasive dirt suggesting the president is having an affair — which is what happened with Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff in early 1998, when he was told of Bill Clinton’s relationship with young aide Monica Lewinsky — will his first call be to his editor? Or will he first send an email to William Hill bookies asking for odds on that president being impeached?
Such scenarios may just scratch the surface of where the world is headed. Game-fixing scandals happen in sports. There’s no reason to assume life-fixing scandals won’t happen if public figures can make fortunes gambling on their actions.
In October 1988 — when the presidential race between Vice President George H.W. Bush and Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis was seen as a dead heat — Dukakis was asked during a presidential debate by CNN’s Bernard Shaw whether he would support the death penalty if his wife, Kitty, were “raped and murdered.” The Massachusetts governor responded with cliches about the unfairness and ineffectiveness of the death penalty that only confirmed his reputation as a robotic technocrat — an answer that NBC News’ Chuck Todd said “ruined” his candidacy.
My first thought at the time was that Dukakis wanted to lose. But if something like that happened in a presidential debate in 2024, my first thought would be that the fix was in. Then I’d grab my phone and open my William Hill app — because when life is a sports book, you cash in while you can.
Reed, who bet on the NFL in junior high using SweeTarts as currency, is deputy editor of the editorial and opinion section. Email: chris.reed@sduniontribune.com. Twitter: @chrisreed99. Column archive: sdut.us/chrisreed.
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