Former Toronto Raptors centre Jontay Porter pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud after admitting to competitive manipulation in two NBA games.Rick Osentoski/Reuters
Declan Hill is an associate professor of investigations at the University of New Haven and lead of its Sports Integrity Center. He writes a Substack called CrimeWaves.
A silent plague is sweeping our athletes, from the very top leagues down to high-school students: gambling addiction.
Jontay Porter, the former Toronto Raptors player now banned for life from the National Basketball Association, is the poster child of this plague. He says he was entrapped by his addiction in an illegal poker game, accruing so much debt that would-be mobsters were able to force him to help them win proposition bets by underperforming in games and providing insider information. “If I don’t do a special with your terms. Then it’s up,” he told them on Telegram. “And you hate me and if I don’t get [$8,000] by Friday you’re coming to Toronto to beat me up.”
He is not alone. Buried within the judicial indictments that have again hit professional sports – a wide-ranging investigation into allegedly rigged poker games and illegal sports betting in the NBA that has ensnared a head coach and a starter, and an MLB scandal that has seen two major-leaguers suspended for allegedly providing insider information about pitches they threw – is apparent evidence of gambling addiction in the leagues themselves.
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The mob knows this is something they can leverage, including by using poker games to recruit sports insiders. As an ex-member of the Lucchese crime family told me: “We use these card games to figure out who the degenerates are and then pull them in.”
Numerous top athletes were also gamblers: Pete Rose, Michael Jordan, Phil Mickelson, John Daly, Tiger Woods, Gianluigi Buffon, Sandro Tonali, Wayne Rooney. These are some of their sports’ biggest names, and there are many more like them who aren’t as famous.
And it makes sense: Everything that makes an athlete good at their sport – compulsive competitiveness, never giving up, a self-belief in their ability to overturn great odds – makes them inclined to gambling and, often, to making bad bets.
A study by McGill Prof. Jeff Derevensky and others found that athletes have a higher probability of developing gambling problems than the general population. This danger increases with the new “frictionless” gambling that North American sports leagues have decided to enable, where bettors effectively walk around with casinos on their phones – apps that are then advertised widely during sports broadcasts and in arenas.
I have seen first-hand the pain that this addiction can bring in the sports world, through my own research into threats to sports integrity. In Hungary, I walked down the long, dark corridor at the top of a tall Budapest building that, in 2012, the coach of a Hungarian soccer team being investigated by police for match-fixing by players ran down to throw himself over the rails. In South Korea, I learned of other suicides – of players feeling shame and dishonour after match-fixing linked to gambling. In Belgium, I interviewed a former national-team goalkeeper whose career ended because he had followed coaches’ orders and fixed soccer games. I watched the goalkeeper’s father, who drove his son to practice when he was young, weep beside him as the player spoke about being threatened by pistol-waving mobsters, his eventual arrest and his conviction.
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The time has come to speak about this silent plague. We need to openly discuss the pain that the recent tsunami of changes to the gambling landscape has brought to our sports world: not just the pain for the athlete, but for the athlete’s families, friends and teammates. And we must recognize the wider set of victims, too: the sporting public. If you are watching a sports event and you cannot be certain that you’re not witnessing a piece of theatre orchestrated by organized crime, the joy of sports will be lost.
This is not a fight against legalized, well-regulated sports betting; it’s a fight for legalized, well-regulated sports betting. Instead, what we have today is a wild west that puts people, especially young people, at risk.
North American governments need to implement sports gambling bills that implements key regulations, including oversight of artificial intelligence in the betting market, ending “ban or bankrupt” algorithms at bookmakers, and proper safeguards against money-laundering. In Canada, Bill S-211 is making its way through the process, but at an iceberg’s pace. But governments and leagues must also ensure that athletes are properly educated about the dangers they face in particular, with addiction.
Canada is a great sporting nation, rich with memories of victories and well-fought defeats. We need to name the plague that is hitting our sports people to ensure our legacy persists, and be silent no longer.