Sports Betting is Evil and We Should Talk About It
A killjoy writes
It’s impossible these days to be a target demographic and go through a day without being inundated with sports betting advertisements.
I open Uber and there’s a promo to bet- during my ride!- right from an easy app.
I go to the bar and a waitress comes up to me with an iPad and asks me to sign up for a sportsbook and they’ll comp my first drink.
I turn on the TV for 5 minutes and get 3+ ads with assorted sports icons all vying for my sign-up bonus.
And you know what, for me it worked.
The way that sports betting companies have dominated the sports industry and become an all-enveloping entity in the sports universe has been written about extensively. It’s hard not to notice it. What started as winks and nods as to a line has turned into full-fledged sports gambling TV shows and ESPN bet.
Again, that’s not what I want to talk about because it’s not original, rather why we’re on this path and why hasn’t anyone really stopped it.
Sports gambling has exploded overnight since its legalization, to the point you can’t have a sports discussion without it, and no one is doing anything about it.
This came to a head for me yesterday with how the media covered Kayshon Boutte’s arrest. He gambled, as it turns out, a lot. One bet per hour on average for years, and as laid out in his indictment lost a lot too. Roughly $80,000 down the drain. Sure, you can excuse that as a millionaire losing pennies but as a late-round NFL draft pick on a rookie deal that’s still a very sizable chunk of change.
I found all of that pretty easily, right in the plain text of his indictment.
Yet, we get tweets like this with 20,000 likes.
https://x.com/BostonConnr/status/1750616750994133315?s=20
Notice, even in stories like this from local media it makes it unclear the scope of what he lost.
https://x.com/RJ_Young/status/1750611047629586515?s=20
It doesn’t spell out like in the indictment the very explicit difference between the amount wagered, and the amount won.
Perhaps it’s an oversight, but the sports media at large has a huge incentive not to publicize the amount he lost and rather just the amount he wagered.
It’s just hard to give the benefit of the doubt to a sports media world that has all of their hands in the cookie jar.
Nowadays you’d be hard pressed to find a sports team, sports league, or sports media site without a gambling sponsor.
The inundation of the American media and sports landscape with gambling affiliations isn’t some unique evil, they all have alcohol and once had tobacco sponsors too. It’s just another sign of the profit-over-everything keystone of our economy.
Sports tv, regular tv, billboards, what have you all being held be a vice by the sports betting landscape is doing a vast amount of harm.
I’m not one to predict the future, and I don’t exactly know where this leads but 58% of 20’somethings actively participating in a known vice is bad. It’s even worse when the ‘adults’ in the room, universities and the media, prop it up even more.
Any university that has a ‘dry campus’ but partners with a sports betting company is shooting itself in the foot while covering its face.
We are doing real, irreperable harm, to young adults who don’t know any better. Sports betting is fun, I enjoy it, it’s fun with friends, and it’s really harmful. Addiction rates for sports betting have risen tenfold in 3 years and none of our institutions are doing anything to stop it.
I don’t proclaim to have a fix here, or even want to ban it, as I’ve mentioned I do it and enjoy it! But if we aren’t at least thinking about this critically without the money in front of our eyes the anvil is going to continue to slowly drop on addicted young adults.
I think this really is comparable to the rise of e-cigarettes. They’d existed for a while, the same as sports gambling, and suddenly appeared everywhere. Institutions propped them up, more tacitly than gambling, but who didn’t see their ads everywhere in the mid 2010’s. Martha Coakley the Attorney General of Massachusetts became Juul’s head lobbyist and they made an exorbitant amount of money.
Lately the FDA finally intervened and we're left with an enormous young adult population addicted to tobacco, and an ever-growing underground market of e-cigarettes that we have no idea the effects of.
It sucks to sound like a killjoy and suck the fun out of something. But I feel a personal responsibility to at least write my feelings about it. I became an avid sports bettor, I used the referral bonuses and sign-up codes to hook my friends in, which is exactly what they want. They preyed off me perfectly. I needed money, I got an influx of cash seemingly free, at the expense of my brain chemistry and trying to get my friends hooked.
It seems to me that the days of sports gambling being a taboo that you had to seek out to find was like many things, way better for everyone. No one wins when a generation gets addicted to wagering money on their phones, except the betting companies who aren’t even making money yet.
May 14th, 2018 was a seminal date for thousands of Americans. They probably didn’t know it yet, they were too young to, but the legalization of sports gambling was carefully constructed to target them and pick their pockets. It’s just a shame it was ever allowed to get this bad.
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