The Future of American Sports Isn’t Pretty
Irresponsible legislators and greedy sports leagues have led to a dangerous rise in gambling.
Last month, a scandal broke when representatives of the Los Angeles Dodgers released a statement alleging that Ippei Mizuhara, the Japanese-language interpreter for the once-in-a-century talent Shohei Ohtani, had stolen $4.5 million of Ohtani’s money to cover gambling debts.
Ohtani has been described as the second coming of Babe Ruth—he may be even better, a two-way stud who can both hit and pitch better than nearly everyone.
Reporting conducted earlier by ESPN indicated that Ohtani had knowingly transferred the cash to help out his indebted friend, a man who’s hardly left the player’s side since he became his interpreter six years ago. Fans and commentators are now speculating it may not have even been Mizuhara placing the bets, but Ohtani—or, at minimum, that Ohtani may know more about his friend’s woes than he’s letting on.
Just a few days after the story emerged, another scandal broke: the NBA announced it had opened an unprecedented gambling probe into Toronto Raptors forward Jontay Porter, who exited two games early this season due to injury and illness, resulting in multiple unusually large bets—some amounting to tens of thousands of dollars each—paying out. The allegation is that Porter deliberately ducked the games. If proven, it would be the most serious point shaving incident in basketball for over a decade.
Nearly six years after the Supreme Court overturned a decades-old ban on sports betting, simultaneous scandals at the highest level of professional sports are forcing a long-delayed reckoning about the proper place of a runaway industry whose prominence is threatening to overwhelm the thin barrier between the increasingly symbiotic worlds of sports and gambling. Professional leagues have played the willing accomplice, making their own bet that they could net billions in profit without addicting their own fans, compromising the integrity of their sports, or socializing young fans into a world of vice.
Those assumptions are crumbling. And the costs may prove great—not just to normal people’s wallets, but to their psyches, too.
Here’s how it started.
In 1992, sports betting in the United States was effectively banned nationwide by the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, nicknamed the “Bradley Act” for its author: then-U.S. Senator, former Princeton basketball star and two-time NBA champion Bill Bradley. To Bradley’s mind, the bill was necessary to spare the nation “the harm that state-sponsored sports betting causes” among America’s fans, especially impressionable younger spectators.
As a consequence, from 1992 on, sports betting was effectively legal only in Nevada (the home of Las Vegas) with a few other partial exceptions across the country. To place a wager, most Americans would have to seek out some dimly lit corner of a neighborhood bar and hazard their money with a bookie, often shifty characters whose recreational activities did not typically end at operating sportsbooks.
But as fate would have it, PASPA, long considered by some scholars to be a juicy target for a legal challenge on constitutional grounds, was struck down in 2018 by the Supreme Court’s decision in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, throwing the betting issue back to the states: “The legalization of sports gambling requires an important policy choice,” wrote Justice Samuel Alito in his 6-3 majority opinion. “But the choice is not ours to make.”
Critics of PASPA, with some sense, argued that no matter its constitutionality (surely the Founders did not object to games of chance?) the ban was counterproductive because it pushed gamblers further into the margins and the clutches of unscrupulous criminals—men who may stop at nothing to get their money. The legalize-and-regulate faction had in mind victims like the poor, fictional Davey Scatino in The Sopranos, whose excessive wagering and inability to pay back the mafia leads to grievous bodily harm, bankruptcy and thoughts of suicide.
Proponents advocated for a “sunlight” approach, perhaps best exemplified by a 2014 New York Times op-ed by NBA Commissioner Adam Silver: “I believe that sports betting should be brought out of the underground and into the sunlight where it can be appropriately monitored and regulated,” Silver wrote. Sunlight, it was reasoned, would cleanse darkness from the arena, at long last.
38 states have since legalized sports betting in some form. Most of those have adopted a regulatory approach that approximates to nothing so much as just letting it rip.
The marketing enticements of gaming titans like FanDuel and DraftKings are now ubiquitous, and bag a windfall of profits for their corporate partners, including every major professional sports league in the country. While gambling is still formally considered a vice, the last six years are notable for how quickly we’ve metabolized such a colossal change.
But on the heels of the decision in 2018, Bradley was prescient about what it would mean. “I think the court ignored the impact that the ruling will have on sports in America,” he said. “They’ve turned every basketball player, football player and baseball player into a roulette chip.”
Indiana Pacers star Tyrese Haliburton was similarly blunt: “To half the world, I’m just helping them make money on DraftKings or whatever. I’m a prop.”
The American Gaming Association estimates that Americans still wager $63.8 billion with illegal bookies and offshore sites. This is down from pre-PASPA estimates of $150 billion—a seeming victory for the sunlighters, who argued that legalization would bring gamblers out of the shadows.
Still, it’s likely that by ushering some forms of sports betting into broad daylight, legalization has simply led to more and more accessible options for gamblers, reinforcing their habits and sending them in search of more betting venues.
“There is much more gambling since 2018, but how it breaks down between legal and illegal, no one knows,” Lia Nower, Director of the Center for Gambling Studies at Rutgers University, told me. “What legal sites have done is introduce a whole new generation of bettors—youth, adolescents, emerging adults—as well as fans who didn’t bet before in high proportions, such as women, to legal gambling.”
In other words, the “sunlight” approach has not led to monitoring, regulation, and a more tightly guarded market, per se, but to an efflorescence of all kinds of betting.
In fact, several bettors I spoke to who started gambling after 2018 resided in states where it was still illegal. They made their wagers via Bovada, a Costa Rica-based, Latvia-hosted sportsbook which users can access almost anywhere. One spoke of exhausting the betting options offered by U.S.-registered smartphone apps and resorting to Bovada, wagering $180 on the outcome between EuroLeague basketball competitors Saski Baskonia and Panathinaikos B.C. “at 3 a.m., wide awake.”
“My heart is racing. I’m like, sweating in bed, refreshing my screen for this.”
The “regulated” side of things isn’t much prettier. Public health concerns around betting are starkly illustrated by the finding, often replicated, that suicidality is highest, among all addiction categories, in problem gamblers. It seems like a promising area for possible bipartisan cooperation, but so far only a few pieces of legislation have been introduced, and with little chance of passing. One of them, the Betting on Our Future Act, introduced by Representative Paul Tonko, would regulate gambling advertising along similar lines to the existing limits on the tobacco industry. Tonko also recently introduced a framework for the SAFE Bet Act, which will curb advertising during matches and the offering of incentives for betting.
“Through these constant promotions, the gambling industry has hijacked America’s deep-rooted connection to and love of sports to peddle a known addictive product,” said Tonko in a statement.
But the NBA is actually doubling-down on a more-is-more approach to gambling, recently adding live in-game betting to its streaming service, NBA League Pass, allowing viewers to see betting lines on the screen in real-time and select specific wagers, whereupon they’ll be redirected to FanDuel or DraftKings to place their bets.
When Adam Silver wrote his “sunlight” op-ed in 2014, he spoke unequivocally about erecting a barrier between his sport and the bettors who would mine it for entertainment and profit: “Let me be clear: Any new approach must ensure the integrity of the game.” But as betting giants jostle with each other in search of greater market cap, and leagues continue to shake out the cushions for spare change, it’s not clear that the infiltration of betting will end short of permeating the entire professional sports landscape.
It may well lead to a thoroughly gamified fan experience which, once ensconced, will be hard to uproot; where the players are no longer just those on the court or the field, but everyone in the stands, too; and where the games unfolding within the game—endlessly recursive in the limitless potential of prop bets, in-game odds adjustments and byzantine parlays—come to obscure the sport itself.
For his part, Shohei Ohtani denies having any part in the gambling of his Japanese interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara. But he isn’t answering questions from the press, as the FBI closes in on the southern California bookie accused of taking $4.5m of his money—somehow transferred from his account, without his knowledge, by Mizuhara.
Major League Baseball has since announced its own investigation. Any information directly implicating their “once-in-a-century” talent could have catastrophic consequences. But no matter the damage to Ohtani, or MLB, the gambling horse has bolted from the stable. What more havoc it will wreak, no one can tell.
Before walking back the claim that Ohtani knowingly covered his debts, Mizuhara, who claims he first started making wagers on the DraftKings app, gave an interview to ESPN. “I learned my lesson the hard way,” he said. “I will never do sports betting ever again.”
Brendan Ruberry is Production Editor and Podcast Producer at Persuasion.
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Sports betting and advertisements have become legal in Canada for a couple of years now and IMHO it has ruined the viewing of sports. Intermissions between periods in the NHL broadcasts have betting segments, pop-ups during game play and between whistles. It's beyond annoying. I can only imagine the harm that this is causing folks with gambling addictions.
The question, which will now be answered quite publicly, is how courageously will sports leagues, teams, and clubs address sports betting that is illegal and/or against organizational ethics and policies. Alas, given the state of our society, I would imagine that there are bookmakers giving odds on that right now.