In a dramatic break from both his predecessor and the other three major professional sports leagues in the U.S., NBA commissioner Adam Silver recently said legal gambling on professional sports is “inevitable.” Silver argued that professional basketball, with its 82-game regular season and several rounds of playoffs, could benefit from the increased fan interest generated by legalized gambling.
John Kindt, an emeritus professor of business and legal policy at Illinois, is a leading national gambling critic who has testified before Congress about the societal, business and economic impacts of decriminalizing gambling. The author of a forthcoming book on sports gambling, Kindt spoke with News Bureau business and law editor Phil Ciciora about the present and future of gambling on professional sports.
What is your take on NBA commissioner Adam Silver’s stance on professional sports and gambling?
My take on that is that it’s equivalent to opening Pandora’s box.
It’s especially disheartening, because we should be pushing professional sports more in the direction of protecting the integrity of the game, not toward encouraging people to commit a federal crime, which is what gambling on sports is.
With a few notable exceptions – Las Vegas and a couple of other jurisdictions, among them – gambling on sports is 100 percent illegal. Congress has also repeatedly tried to close the so-called “Las Vegas Loophole.” One example that comes to mind is the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992. But as long as Nevada Sen. Harry Reid controls the Senate’s Democratic majority, it’s very likely that the loophole will remain open.
The bottom line is, professional sports leagues need to recognize that it’s not only an issue of protecting the integrity of the sport itself, but also of protecting future fans of the sport. Sports gambling is particularly attractive to young people, who are more apt to think they’re bulletproof and then take risks.
So we should be very concerned about the NBA’s reversal and this new message the league is sending to young people.
Silver framed the issue more in terms of a “gentleman’s bet,” citing the popularity of betting on soccer matches in the U.K. via smartphone, arguing that it increases the chances that spectators pay attention to games until the very end. Do you agree?
It’s a slippery slope down from the so-called “gentleman’s bet” to full-blown gambling. And that slope gets even slipperier and steeper when you introduce smartphones into the equation. The U.S. National Gambling Impact Study Commission enacted by Congress in 1999 concluded that it was a national imperative to maintain a complete ban on gambling via the Internet.
If gambling on the Internet – whether it’s through a desktop computer, tablet or smartphone – is the “crack cocaine” of gambling, according to the commission’s study, I would argue that sports gambling is the gateway drug.
The younger generation – that is, the generation that has grown up with the Internet and can’t remember a world without it – is showing nearly double the gambling addiction rate of the next oldest generation. And certain demographic groups within that youth cohort are showing even higher rates of gambling addiction, which is increasing at an alarming rate, according to the medical and psychiatric communities.
If you combine gambling, sports and smartphones, well, that leads sports enthusiasts down what can be a very dangerous path. In some aspects, that is what’s happening with fantasy sports, which is sold to people under the guise of fun and games. Really, it’s just getting people used to the idea of taking risks in the context of professional sports.
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is now backing sports gambling at racetracks and casinos in New Jersey. Is that move legal – or even a good idea?
It’s ironic, because in 2012, the NCAA and all of the major professional sports leagues – including the NBA – banded together with the Department of Justice to sue the state of New Jersey, which at the time wanted to do exactly what they’re doing right now – bring sports gambling to racetracks and casinos.
Gov. Christie lost that case, and he’s going to lose even more now, because he’s in a legal gray area. In the past, the DOJ allowed groups operating in these gray areas to move forward, but then they slammed the door shut and prosecuted them. They did that with the three major purveyors of Internet gambling about five years ago.
The reason Christie is proposing this measure at this time is that gambling at casinos and racetracks is failing all across the country, and New Jersey is being hit especially hard by this trend. In Atlantic City alone, four casinos have gone under, including the Revel Casino Hotel, which the governor himself tried to prop up with millions in taxpayer subsidies.
Essentially, Christie gambled on a casino and lost, and now he’s trying to cover his losses by legalizing sports gambling. But as the old saying goes, never throw good money after bad.
(Watch a video of Kindt discussing the effect of Internet gambling on the economy.)
