Having betting out in the open is uncovering the wrongdoing that has likely been going on forever.
Having betting out in the open is uncovering the wrongdoing that has likely been going on forever.
‘T he high level of lawlessness,” said Walter Lippmann in 1931, “is maintained by the fact that Americans desire to do so many things which they also desire to prohibit.”
Lippmann was talking about alcohol prohibition, but his words apply just as easily to the state of sports gambling in 2025. The allure of massive cash windfalls for both state governments and professional sports leagues has led to the virtual legalization of gambling nationwide, which has lured America’s professional scolds out of hiding to denounce the “damaging” effect legalized wagering is having on competitions everywhere.
A number of high-level arrests by the U.S. Department of Justice last week gave the anti-gambling crowd just the ammunition they needed. Basketball Hall of Fame guard and current Portland Trailblazers coach Chauncey Billups was arrested for allegedly taking part in fixed poker games, where his celebrity was used to lure rich dupes to the tables. Charlotte Hornets guard Terry Rozier is accused of faking an injury so his associates could cash in on some “prop” bets that measure an individual player’s performance in a game. Other players have been accused of leaking information about injuries to bettors.
But Billups’s arrest had nothing to do with basketball and everything to do with notorious Mafia families separating foolish poker players from their money. Rozier’s “crime” took place in one game in 2023, and betting websites immediately identified the distorted betting pattern and reported it to the NBA. The league, on the basis of limited evidence, looked into it and cleared Rozier; he wasn’t so lucky with the feds, who have far more investigative power.
Neither incident is evidence of any widespread corruption within the league. But that isn’t good enough for society’s hall monitors, who think we should return to the days of criminalizing economic transactions willingly made by adults who fully understand the risks of what they are doing. And there is no evidence that the growth in legalized betting is affecting sports other than by making people watch more obnoxious commercials for gambling websites.
Take former sports reporter Joon Lee, who this week burned thousands of words in the New York Times explaining how expanded gambling is “killing” sports. “For generations, sports was one of the few places where Americans could still gather around something bigger than ourselves,” Lee wistfully declares. “Now, that shared space is controlled by the house.”
It is unclear during which period in American history the anti-gambling crowd thought sports were blissfully untouched by the hand of bettors. Gambling scandals are a famous part of American lore, from the “Black Sox” scandal of 1919 to Pete Rose betting on baseball to NBA referee Tim Donaghy cooking calls to shave points. And these are just among the ones we’re aware of.
Lee mentions the baseball examples to show how seriously sports once took gambling. All the White Sox players accused of throwing the World Series were banned for life, as was Pete Rose. But that isn’t evidence that the major sports leagues aren’t taking it any less seriously now; Rozier will likely never play again in the NBA. If we learn more about Billups, he’ll be gone, too. Jontay Porter, a former Toronto Raptors player found to have been tipping off bettors as to the status of his health, has been banned for life.
The idea that this is all the result of more legalized gambling is hopelessly naïve. Sports gambling has been around as long as athletic competition has existed. Its prohibition has also helped fund both some of America’s largest organized crime cartels and the State of Nevada.
The reason we are now finding out about these recent sordid actions is that they are out in the open. In the anti-gambling movement’s “golden years,” betting was mostly done secretly, with a shady bookie about whom you could only whisper. If there was any funny business that drained a bookmaker’s bank account, the penalty wasn’t jail time; it was a long hospital stay with broken legs.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, bolstered by a 2014 Supreme Court decision striking down a national gambling ban, took to the pages of the Times to explain how betting should be “brought out of the underground and into the sunlight.” But Lee simply waves away the suggestion that more disclosure in gambling is better, writing that some anonymous people he has talked to will publicly support legalized gambling but privately worry it is taking over sports. Okay.
(Lee also lists the stock market as an example of how betting is “everywhere” now. He’s just figuring out that speculation has been the lifeblood of the American economy for centuries? Has he never joined a March Madness pool? What makes those any more morally superior than gambling on point spreads?)
The idea that sports is somehow dying because scolds are seeing advertisements they don’t like is absurd. The quality of what’s being put on the courts and fields is better than we have ever seen. Take ten minutes to watch 7-foot-4 Victor Wembanyama of the San Antonio Spurs and you begin to adjust your assumptions about the limits on what the human body can do. The Los Angeles Dodgers’ Shohei Ohtani is currently playing baseball better than anyone has in the history of the game, serving as one of the league’s best hitters and pitchers. This physical poetry is completely unaffected by point spreads.
Sure, you’ll hear all the sob stories about how gambling is “ruining” young men. Throw it on the pile with all the other weekly excuses for male underperformance. Pornography, loneliness, video games, social media — move over, there’s a new whipping horse in town!
History has shown us that pushing gambling back underground simply enables a black market. “Moralistic and unrealistic laws,” wrote Daniel J. Boorstin in his 1973 classic The Americans: The Democratic Experience, “provided the underworld with its own effective protective tariff. The result, in the twentieth century, was perhaps the most flourishing array of outlaw enterprises ever found in a modern nation.”
Many of the choices we make, in various parts of our lives, entail risk. But that doesn’t mean we want a government department to tell us whether to post an edgy joke on Instagram.
Of course, gambling is a terrible idea: the majestic casinos in Las Vegas weren’t built because people were winning money. Yet one can abhor betting and still think it should be up to Americans to make their own awful decisions. America is (for the time being) a free country. People have the right to do things that are potentially bad for them, whether it is drinking, smoking, marrying David Harbour, or any other patently inadvisable activity.
From fantasy football leagues to bingo nights at VFW halls, the American love of gambling will always be stronger than those nagging us to criminalize it. And the only reason it appears there is now more corruption is because we have ways of identifying it. Americans have to ask themselves: Which is the more moral society, one that takes action against corruption or one that pretends to have swept it away?