Legalize
gambling? You
bet!
Posted: Wed April 1,
1998
This is what we know. Periodically, for a half-century,
college basketball players have been caught point-shaving.
Everybody then weeps and wails and gnashes teeth, lamenting
the horrors that gambling
brings.
But this we know, too. All sorts of other sports are also
bet on, and there are no fixing scandals affixed to
them.
So, as inconvenient as this makes it for knee-jerkers and
moralists and the NCAA, it is easy to deduce that gambling
on college basketball is only an instrument of the fixes,
not the
cause.
You don't want the young children and impressionable adults
to hear this, of course, but I would suggest that these
regular college basketball scandals would be greatly
reduced, maybe even virtually eliminated, if betting on
sports—on college
basketball—was made generally
legal throughout the
Republic.
Now, empirically, the reason why fixing scandals occur more
in basketball—probably a
lot more than comes to the surface— is that basketball is the
easiest game to fix. Oh, but, why then are there no
professional basketball
fixes?
The answer, of course, is that NBA players to make too much
money to risk their careers on even a big one-shot jackpot.
Likewise, isn't it revealing that no college
stars are ever caught fixing? Rather, it is only pretty good
college players with no significant future in the
game.
You see, it's not just that college kids succumb to
temptation because they're offered money. Invariably, the
argument that turns their heads toward crime is couched in
terms of fairness. Hey, dude, everybody else in college
basketball is making
money: coaches, athletic departments, sponsors, sneaker
companies, bookies, the media, the airlines, the hotels.
Only the people who incidentally
play college basketball are locked out of the bonanza. Hey,
don't be a
sucker.
For an analogy, it's worth remembering the Black Sox
baseball scandal of 1919. The Chicago players who fixed
the World Series were not evil; rather, they were
vulnerable for one prime reason—they were grossly
underpaid by the White Sox owner, Charles
Comiskey. The players felt betrayed and used. It's the same
in basketball
today.
Besides, all the gum-flapping and hand-wringing about how
sinful sports betting is strikes any rational young man as
obscenely hypocritical. We live in a society where betting
is legal for lotteries, casinos, slot machines, horses,
dogs, but we draw
some transparent line and say that somehow it's only sinful
to bet on games...while at the same time we allow gangsters
to profit by that twisted reasoning. Besides, everybody
knows that legal sports wagering happily proceeds in the
great state of Nevada
and throughout much of the rest of the world. People will
bet. Everywhere, they will bet on
sports.
Now, if sports gambling were legalized in America, the
profits could pay college players a reasonable
remuneration; also, the money could be used to fund
inner-city sports and other worthy athletic
endeavors.
Or, we can, like the Pharisees, keep shouting to the
heavens about how dreadful gambling is...letting the
gangsters grow richer off our high moral
posturing.
The legal prohibition against sports gambling simply
doesn't work. After the breast-beating dies down, there
will be another college basketball scandal soon enough.
Kids who see that they are cheated will
cheat.
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