The red flags seem to be everywhere.
Gambling scandals in sports used to be rare and devastating.
In baseball, eight members of the 1919 Chicago White Sox were banned for life after they accepted money to throw the World Series, as was Pete Rose after the Cincinnati Reds legend was found to have gambled while serving as manager of the team. There was the occasional basketball point-shaving scandal, like those centered around Boston College, CCNY, and Tulane.
But these were few and far between as sports distanced themselves from the seedy world of casinos – Hall of Famers Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle were banned simply for being greeters at a casino.
Those days are now over, after the Supreme Court made sports gambling legal in every state in 2018.
It was almost immediately that MGM Resorts became the official gaming partner of Major League Baseball and, since then, gambling advertising permeates every corner of most professional sports facilities.
And gambling is big business. According to multiple estimates, Americans bet over $27 billion on online sports betting and over $130 billion in gambling overall.
Those are big numbers and gambling is also much easier now. No longer does someone need to drive great distances to find a legal sportsbook or ‘know a guy’ in order to bet on sports. Betting is now just a click away on everyone’s phones, the same place many of us watch or read about sports.
It should come as no surprise that gambling scandals within the sports world are on the rise. Italian Football, Tim Donaghy, Calvin Ridley, Arizona State, Australian Rugby are all still fresh in our memory and have been followed in recent years by controversies involving Terry Rozier, Chauncey Billups, Jontay Porter, and Arizona Cardinals executive Ryan Gold.
And who in Indianapolis can forget Art Schlichter, whose promising football career was destroyed by gambling and has spent most of his adult life behind bars?
Former Indiana, Cincinnati, and (briefly) Texas Tech quarterback Brendan Sorsby is one of the latest to lose a career over gambling problems.
I’m not square enough to believe gambling should be outlawed completely. I have enjoyed a few trips to the casino to play the slots and I used to partake of fantasy baseball and football.
But as long as there is an Internet and the industry deals with only a mild degree of regulation, these scandals will continue to pop up with increasing regularity.
I look forward to reading about the next one while sitting in an arena under a Fanduel.com sign.
Contact Rob Hunt at rob.hunt@heraldbulletin.com or 765-640-4886.