Just a few days to go now until the men’s national college basketball championship will be played in the cozy confines of Houston’s NRG Stadium. And with UConn making hash of the competition, the only lingering suspense is: now that sports betting is the new national pastime, can they make it through March Madness without a major betting scandal?
We may have one to mark the occasion, pending the outcome of an ongoing probe of suspicious activity surrounding the Temple Owls basketball squad. (Their response: “Who?”) Just recently 16 athletes at Iowa and Iowa State pled guilty to illegal betting.
It was a huge scandal when a BC basketball player was caught point-shaving for the mob in the late 1970s; at this rate, you’ll need a scorecard to keep track of the on-campus criminals.
But hey, these young jocks have got to get ready for the pros, where corrupt behavior is cropping up like crocuses in the late-March sun. Poised for induction into the World’s Dumbest Perps Hall of Fame, Toronto Raptors forward Jontay Porter is being scrutinized by the NBA for a pattern of huge wagering on him compiling game statistics that became impossible to reach when he left early with “injuries.” It was smart to bet the under on Jontay!
In line with the Trump-era political norm which encourages losers to threaten legislators who don’t vote the way they want them to, players and coaches are being terrorized by degenerate gamblers. “They got my telephone number and were sending me crazy messages about where I live and my kids,” reports Cleveland Cavaliers coach J.B. Bickerstaff. “It’s scary at the end of games,” UConn guard Andrew Hurley told the Globe’s Tara Sullivan. “In the locker room after the game I’m thinking ‘I hope nobody is out there jumping me for what I did in the game.’”
Nice. Hope Beacon Hill is enjoying the drop-in-the-bucket $111 million the state pocketed during the first year of legal sports betting here as its cut of the $4 billion-plus the industry raked in.
Meanwhile, the allure of the flashing colored lights and constant action on the iPhone casinos in everyone’s pocket — along with the relentless tsunami of sports book advertising — is proving so pervasive, Attorney General Andrea Campbell is hollering for help. She and former Governor-turned-NCAA President Charlie Baker have launched the Youth Sports Betting Safety Coalition, a well-meaning but seemingly overmatched effort to steer kids away from this new form of crack cocaine. “An addictive product,” Campbell called it. Added Baker: “If you think kids under the age of 21 aren’t doing this, you’re kidding yourselves.”
It says right here in the Bible Trump wants to sell you for the low, low price of $59.99: “The love of money is the root of all evil.” So true. The developing sports-betting disaster is exhibit A.
At a moment of maximum hand-wringing over the shaky mental health of adolescents, and a growing movement to protect them from addiction, bullying, and academically-fatal distraction by taking away their phones during school hours, we nonetheless allowed the invasion of a toxic industry, eager to push the state’s flimsy regulatory oversight and exploit our well-documented gambling obsessions.
We couldn’t just sit there while neighboring states went ahead and destroyed their own in exchange for peanuts. We had to get our piece of that action too.
How big a price will we pay? Bet the over.