Make Sports Sacred Again Gambling promotes addiction and decay

The arrests of three basketball pros — Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups, Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, and former NBA player and assistant Damon Jones — made for the kind of cable-news spectacle the new FBI leadership clearly loves. Director Kash Patel stepped to the Justice Department podium to describe what he called “a historic arrest across a wide-sweeping criminal enterprise that envelopes both the NBA and La Cosa Nostra.” The timing was impeccable: right as the basketball season was beginning, guaranteeing maximum humiliation for the league and its commissioner, Adam Silver.

Silver must have been livid. Yet in a sense, he helped make this moment happen. A decade ago, he took to the pages of The New York Times to call for legalizing sports betting nationwide. The argument then sounded pragmatic: Americans were already gambling illegally, so why not bring it into the open, regulate it, and tax it? What Silver helped set in motion was the merger of sport and speculation — a regime in which the game itself becomes an advertising vehicle for constant wagering, and every fan morphs into a potential bettor.

Once, gambling was the seedy underbelly of sports culture, the business of backroom bookmakers and shady offshore sites. Now it’s the official sponsor of the pregame show, the banner scrolling under highlight clips, the push notification buzzing our smartphones. Players, coaches, and fans alike have been folded into a vast machine that monetizes the uncertainty that makes sport so compelling to begin with.

The scandals were bound to multiply. Toronto Raptors power forward Jontay Porter’s lifetime ban last year for betting on his “over/under” stat line was a canary in the coal mine. Major League Baseball soon faced its own embarrassment with the Cleveland Guardians’ reliever Emmanuel Clase and pitcher Luis Ortiz placed on leave amid gambling investigations. Each time, the league officials express shock. Each time, they pretend these incidents are isolated. But when you turn the entire emotional economy of sport into a betting market, moral rot is just a cost of doing business.

I used to sympathize with the liberalizers. I thought legalization could make gambling safer, draw it out of the shadows, and starve organized crime. It was the same logic many of us on the Left used for dealing with other vices: regulate, don’t prohibit; treat people like adults; reduce harm.

But what we’ve seen since 2018 — the year the US Supreme Court struck down the federal ban on sports betting — isn’t harm reduction. It’s market expansion on a scale that would have astonished the old mobsters of Las Vegas. In less than a decade, 39 states and Washington, DC, have legalized wagering. Americans legally bet $148 billion on sports last year, billions more than the gross domestic product of entire countries. And that’s just the above-board total.

The total volume of betting, legal and illegal, is likely much higher than it was before 2018. This shouldn’t be surprising: when you normalize and advertise a vice, you don’t just displace the old market, you expand it. Imagine a black market where two people are harming themselves at a certain quantifiable level. Legalization might, in theory and with the right regulations, lower individual harm, but by expanding participation, it increases the total amount of suffering.

After all, what changed in the last few years isn’t just the law, it’s the technology and marketing that power the gambling industry. Betting used to require effort: making a trip to Vegas or at least knowing a local bookie and dropping off an envelope of cash with him. Then it required tech savvy: navigating sketchy offshore sites, converting cash in and out of Bitcoin. Now it requires nothing more than turning 18, owning a phone, and linking a credit card. Push notifications nudge users to “get back in the game.” Algorithms track every habit and weakness. The house no longer waits for you to walk in, because it already lives in your pocket.

Every industry now traffics in behavioral addiction, but sports betting weaponizes it with a particular cruelty. The product being sold is not a physical high or even an illusion of connection — it’s the brief jolt of predictive mastery, the feeling that you understand something about the game that others don’t. And when you lose, the next tap offers a chance to win it back.

The results are visible everywhere. Gambling helplines across the country report record call volumes, mostly from men in their 20s and 30s. Surveys show nearly 40% of young men admit they’re betting more than they can afford. Some are wagering their rent money, while others are just dealing with small debts that make their lives a little more frustrating and unpredictable.

Yet there’s no real political appetite to reverse course. Many Republicans invoke freedom when arguing against the “nanny state.” Some Democrats see a new tax base and a new way to undercut organized crime. Even worse, the media are literally bought: ESPN runs its own sportsbook, and podcasts on new media outlets like The Ringer are sponsored by the very companies they should be scrutinizing. In this world, the idea that sports should embody integrity sounds almost absurdly old-fashioned.

But integrity and decommodification are two things we need more of.

A healthy society doesn’t eliminate every vice, but it draws lines. It understands that some freedoms corrode the conditions that make freedom meaningful. The case for recriminalizing bookmaking and banning betting from the airwaves isn’t an extreme form of paternalism. Rather, it’s about creating friction again through banning live-betting apps, curbing nonstop ads, and making it harder for gambling to reach people before common sense does. We don’t need to prosecute individuals who gamble, but we do need to dismantle the infrastructure that invites and normalizes it.

For all our talk about “harm reduction,” there’s something perverse about designing digital opium dens and calling it liberty. The Left, at its best, has always believed that society should cultivate the conditions for a good life. And a good life doesn’t involve compulsively wagering on the performance of 20-year-old sports stars and DMing them death threats if they lose you money (yes, this happens).

But beyond the individual toll that rising addiction has on people, we’re going to see a mounting crisis of trust in sports. Sports offer a rare civic commons, a place where our differences recede before the live drama of chance and skill. When every play is a potential payout, that trust evaporates. If you look at the discourse around athletes and especially umpires, it’s clear that fans increasingly see a rigged spectacle instead of the purity of competition.

In that sense, the growth of gambling represents more than a policy failure. It’s a cultural catastrophe. It reveals how little confidence we have left in collective meaning. The rituals that once bound us together have been turned into platforms for extraction. The market doesn’t merely exploit our appetites; it shapes them, then sells us the means of our own disintegration.

Across the political spectrum, people should demand that Congress thinks about more than profit and starts helping us draw moral boundaries around our beloved pastimes. We live in a cynical era, one where even virtue seems performative. But if we want to rebuild trust — in one another, in the games we love, in the idea of fairness itself — we have to start somewhere.

 

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