The recent press conference from FBI Director Kash Patel about gambling arrests had a dramatic "we got Caponed" atmosphere to it, with so many mentions of crime families that I thought I was watching a reboot of The Sopranos. Patel claimed that, "we're gonna take heat for this," implying that his agency courageously bucked a ground swell of support for the alleged criminals. Nothing could be further from the truth; the NBA coaches and the one player named do not move the interest needle one degree. And as far as illegal gamblers and crime families, Americans don't like them, either.
But Americans do like to gamble, and I'm not sure that even serious sports fans understand the extent to which gambling has overtaken American sports — professional and amateur. An infielder for San Diego and Pittsburgh was banned for life last June for betting on baseball, and four other pro players were suspended for a year. You no doubt heard about the two Cleveland pitchers who were recently charged with taking bribes for deliberately throwing arrant pitches in a gambling scheme.
The NCAA has declared six former Division I basketball players permanently intelligible after investigations found they tried to fix games and provided information to gamblers. A Toronto Raptors player named Jontay Porter has been banned by the NBA and pleaded guilty to one federal charge of wire fraud conspiracy for his role in a betting scheme.
And then there were the main NBA protagonists in the Patel press conference: one player charged with deliberately removing himself from a game to affect a bet, in another instance, an assistant coach offering info to gamblers about a player's availability, and a head coach helping to rig a high stakes poker game, something apparently divorced from organized sports gambling, though in the same steaming kettle of crap.
Congress has gotten interested, as Congress normally does in its timely manner. "Horses are gone? Well, time to close the barn door." But at least they sent a letter to the Major League Baseball commissioner expressing concern over the "new integrity crisis facing American sports," except it's not new.
In the late 1940s, college basketball faced an existential threat from game fixing and point shaving. By the time the scandal ended in the early '50s, 35 players from seven colleges had admitted to taking bribes to fix 86 games. In those days, gambling in sports was a hush hush underground operation, and just as the atmosphere surrounding sports gambling is so different than it was years ago, so is the type of betting.
The proliferation of prop bets, which are wagers on specific occurrences during a game rather than a final result, are now the coin of the realm. The concern these days is not that a player or players are throwing games in the traditional sense, but that prop bets could make them throw small parts of games, which is what happened with the Cleveland pitchers who deliberately threw pitches out of the strike zone, and the Miami basketball player who took himself out of games.
So, why not ban these prop bets? Uhh... one guess. The Wall Street Journal ran this headline recently: Prop Bets Are Scandal Magnets for Sports Leagues. They're also Serious Money Makers. The leagues claim to have a handle on these situations, but they do not. In the present atmosphere where pro leagues and teams have official deals with gambling houses, they send a message that gambling is organic to the game, and by extension, cheating is, too.
They better do something about it because every time there's a pitch in the dirt or a basketball player comes up limping or a wide receiver drops a wide open pass, there's going to be questions. Sports can't survive if every mistake is judged as a monetary calculation.
