A Casino in our Pockets (1980s)

How legalized gambling is swallowing sports.

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I.

When I was young, I knew a guy—let’s call him Guy—who owned the largest television set I’d ever seen. Guy was a friend from Hebrew School, and while we were not particularly close, we bonded over our mutual suffering every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon, the way the prisoners in Cool Hand Luke did.

Anyway. Did I mention that Guy owned the most gargantuan fucking television set I’d ever seen? It was one of those sprawling projection models that outweighed my father’s rusty Datsun, and it came with a satellite dish that offered unfettered access to literally every channel in existence. Every so often, I would score an invite to Guy’s house to watch a game, and I swear, for a television addicted pre-adolescent, the sheer size of this screen was itself a dopamine rush. It was like stepping into a dream.

I was told that Guy’s father sold these giant television sets for a living. But apparently, that wasn’t all he did. Or at least, this is the way I remember it: One day I found myself wondering aloud why in the hell we were still wedded to a 27-inch RCA with no remote control and a faulty volume knob when we knew a guy who could get us a great deal on a giant fucking television set and a satellite dish that would allow me to watch out-of-market football games every week. And my father said, You know what his dad actually does for a living, right?

I said yes. I said that he sold tremendously large television sets. And my father said, Yes. But he’s also a professional gambler.

This, of course, was quite surprising to me. I knew from television that such a profession existed, but, like those giant television sets and satellite dishes, it seemed to exist on another plane of reality. I did not know that otherwise normal people sometimes gambled, too. But now that I knew, it seemed like less of a big deal. Honestly, I was more fascinated by the big television.

I had not thought of Guy or his father or that television set in quite some time, but I thought about it the other day, when I began to realize just how much—and how quickly—the specter of sports gambling has cast a shadow on our everyday existence. And it’s becoming increasingly clear that we weren’t ready for this; that instead of normalizing it, we allowed it to become co-opted by the bleakest forces of modern capitalism. And in so doing, it’s threatening to swallow the games themselves.

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II.

I have a vague memory of Guy’s father often having to travel, which makes sense, given that the only way to gamble on sports legally for most of my lifetime involved traveling to either New Jersey or Nevada. That lack of access slowed the process; even if you could find a bookie who worked under the table, you had to call that bookie and place the bet and hand them the money. But none of that exists anymore. Now, you merely download an app and step into a dream forged entirely by DraftKings and wholly sanctioned by the National Football League.

We all know how absurd it is; we could all see how the sheer ubiquity of sports gambling was going to lead to bad things. And now, six years into the era of legalized (and largely unregulated) gambling, we’re beginning to get a sense of what those bad things are.

New studies have shown that sports gambling depletes household savings, increases the risk of bankruptcy and debt delinquency, and may even elevate the risk of domestic violence. This led the writer Charles Fain Lehman, in The Atlantic, to suggest that gambling prohibition should be reinstated. But that’s clearly not the answer, either. Pushing for prohibition ignores the obvious problems with prohibition that made gambling so problematic for so many years. Legalized gambling, for all its faults, allows for institutions to sniff out corruption and match-fixing more easily; legalization is the reason that idiots who ham-handedly attempt to fix college baseball games get caught in short order.

So I don’t think legalization itself is the problem. The problem, as Yahoo columnist Janna Herron points out, is that everything moves too damn fast now. Information is easily accessed, which leads to the illusion that we know more than we actually do (which would appear to be the problem with much of modern America); and then bets can be placed, based on that often-faulty information, with the push of a button. The dopamine rush is inescapable.

“We're basically walking around with a casino in our pockets,” one British researcher told Herron.

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III.

The solution, it would seem, is not to force sports gambling back into the underground. It’s to slow down the process; it’s to make it less easy to place a bet, without outlawing betting altogether. There should be some friction; as the writer Michele Catalano notes from her own personal experience, it’s now dangerously easy to tumble down a gambling rabbit-hole and remove yourself from reality. Because we screwed up the rollout, it’s going to mean attempting to regulate an industry that has already built itself into a monster, driven by speed and access and ubiquity.

It should feel normal to bet a few dollars on sports here and there; it should not feel like gambling is constantly available and endlessly advertised. They’re appealing to our id; they’re selling us on a dream. Instead of normalizing it, we glamorized it. We’ve gone from prohibition to ubiquity over the course of six years, and as is so often the case in this country, moderation and regulation and common sense has gotten lost along the way.

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