Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier plays against the Washington Wizards in March. Rozier was among more than 30 people arrested in a takedown of two gambling operations.Terrance Williams/The Associated Press
Darragh McGee is the author of the forthcoming book Imitation Games: How Gambling Hijacked Sport.
A week is a long time in the headline-hungry world of sport, not least when news breaks of an FBI investigation into a sordid illegal sports gambling operation that reads like the script of a Hollywood crime blockbuster. Just days into a new NBA season Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier, Portland Trail Blazers head coach Chauncey Billups, and former NBA player and assistant coach Damon Jones, were among more than 30 people charged in two separate indictments that allege how the leaking of inside information and rigged card games greased the wheels of a multimillion-dollar organized crime network.
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Mr. Jones stands accused of leaking injury information about unnamed NBA stars, while Mr. Rozier allegedly told people close to him that he would leave a 2023 game early in a preplanned move that guaranteed huge prop bet wins for those in the know. Mr. Billups, meanwhile, is an alleged conspirator with notorious crime families in underground poker games that used X-ray-equipped tables and wireless signalling to cheat wealthy gamblers of more than US$7-million.
That is the kind of nightmare week that should trigger a national debate about the anatomy of a corruption scandal in which the gambling stranglehold on North American sport was exposed like never before.
Yet the week that began with the sordid revelations has had a depressingly routine feel to it. The NBA covered their procedural first base by placing both Mr. Rozier and Mr. Billups on “immediate leave” and reassuring one and all that they have their house in order. (Through their attorneys, Mr. Rozier and Mr. Billups have denied any wrongdoing.) As ever, they did so with an insistence that “the integrity of our game remains our top priority” – which wouldn’t be a problem if such statements didn’t ring hollow and reek of hypocrisy in an age when the integrity crisis klaxon is part of the soundtrack to the sporting calendar.
In April, 2024, the Toronto Raptors’ Jontay Porter was handed a lifetime ban having admitted to disclosing “confidential information about his health” to known bettors, while manipulating his on-court play and betting through an associate’s account. Then, too, NBA commissioner Adam Silver, celebrated the ruling as an act that protected “the integrity of NBA competition for our fans, our teams and everyone associated with our sport.” Former Raptors president Masai Ujiri was also quick to declare that “none of us, I don’t think anybody, saw this coming.”
A decade ago, back when the NBA fought tooth and nail to keep the corrosive threat of gambling caged away in Las Vegas casinos, such a claim would have been defensible, but not today, some eight years on from the 2018 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that set in motion the total intrusion of gambling into every edifice of sport across North America. Wall-to-wall adverts headlined by celebrities and sporting icons have long since become normalized as have a slew of irresistible “free bet” offers and new products from an incessant stream of gambling brands in recruitment mode, voraciously seeking out the new customers they need to power a business model that only profits when people lose.
It is a dramatic pivot that mirrors the state of play across the Atlantic, where the Darwinian struggle for market share has re-engineered European soccer into a giant marketing panopticon for warring sportsbooks programmed to plant their flag on as much prime sporting real estate as possible. The march of the brands has also extended deep into the mainstream media, making it virtually impossible for fans to consume sport that isn’t directly produced by, sponsored by or officially linked to a gambling brand.
Historians will no doubt chronicle the early decades of the 21st century as a time when sport became a hyper-capitalist enterprise predicated on the extraction of surplus value from every edifice of every game. Revenues must grow, year on year, by any means, at whatever moral compromise.
Yet gambling is not a benign economic fix, nor a harmless leisure industry like another. Purpose-built for a digital age, a new wave of sportsbooks have embraced the technologies of Silicon Valley, pairing the surveillance power of Big Tech with all the addictive alchemy that was once caged away in the casinos of Las Vegas.
Moreover, the gravitational pull of new products that carve up sporting events into an infinite array of micro-markets have unlocked accelerated rates of real-time play in a global market that is faceless and frictionless, open 24/7, at the swipe of an app, the dangerous premise being that the smartphone in our pockets is now a slot machine waiting to be activated.
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The dire reality is that many among a new generation of sports fans have not yet grasped the extent to which this digital gambling infrastructure has come to supplant the unscripted drama of sport, not only inflecting our emotions and allegiances as we watch it but denaturing our relationship with the athletes who have long been heroes we idolize. One of the most depressing spectacles of modern fandom is the abusive tirades and threats levelled at athletes in the rageful aftermath of a losing bet. Fans turning on athletes feels like a tipping point.
All of this moves us far from empty platitudes about “integrity” that deflect from the fundamentals of a sports-gambling-industrial-complex that is harming athletes and fans on a global scale. Whether we know it or not, we’ve all been consciously schooled to view the punitive sanctioning of individuals as a form of justice, rather than an act of deflection from a broken system. With each lifetime ban issued, we look for answers in the deviant behaviour of individuals, scapegoating them in ways that fail to hold the executive superstructure of sport accountable for an experiment that sacrifices human welfare and public health in pursuit of short-term profits.
Until that changes, and sport assumes its duty of care toward all in its orbit, athletes, coaches and fans, the gambling scandals will be a reoccurring event. Left unchecked, it is likely only a matter of time before a sportsbook is brazen enough to take bets on when the first gambling scandal of each new season will break.