In 1963, two of the NFL’s biggest stars were suspended for the season. Paul Hornung of the Green Bay Packers and the Detroit Lions’ Alex Karras, both Hall of Famers, were forced to sit out an entire year. Not for performance-enhancing drugs, domestic abuse or any of the other offenses that cause players to be suspended today.
Hornung and Karras’ crime? They were gamblers.
“It would be like Aaron Rodgers and J. J. Watt being suspended for the same season in the thick of their careers,” says Sports Illustrated Executive Editor and Senior Writer L. Jon Wertheim, who oversaw the magazine’s latest issue devoted to sports gambling. “One offense, one defense, players from Middle America. We’ve come a long way from suspending MVPs and the equivalent of Pro Bowl players to where we are now.”
SI’s gambling issue examines how attitudes about sports betting have changed since the early 1960s and shows how pervasive sports betting has become. Every professional league has sponsorship agreements with gaming operators. Retired athletes such as Brett Favre (Caesars Entertainment), Shaquille O’Neal (WynnBet) and Jerome Bettis (BetRivers) have endorsement deals radically different from the meet-and-greet agreements casinos once forged with Joe Louis, Mickey Mantle, or Willie Mays.
Both Mantle and May were banned from MLB because of their association with Atlantic City casinos, The distrust of gambling interests remained strong as recently as 2012 when MLB Commissioner Bud Selig and NBA Commissioner David Stern railed against efforts by the state of New Jersey to legalize sports betting.
Wertheim thinks both Selig and Stern would have changed their views if still commissioners (their successors, Rob Manfred and Adam Silver respectively, have embraced sports betting), and not only because of the money involved.
“The big concern, of course, is that if we can’t trust the outcome of sports it’s professional wrestling and the whole field goes out the window,” Wertheim says. “I don’t know if (Selig and Stern) would have come around if it had been just the realization of how much money was in play. or just the fact that maybe these games aren’t as easily corrupted as they think they are.”
The high salaries of professional athletes ostensibly make them invulnerable to fixing games. But what about college athletes, especially those who are not benefiting from name, image, likeness (NIL) deals.
Wertheim anticipates that with so much money being wagered, it’s only a matter of time until temptation strikes.
“We are all creatures of incentives,” Wertheim says. “It’s not going to be an NFL quarterback, it’s not going to be someone making hundreds of millions of dollars, someone with a brand. But would a college athlete who’s unpaid give into temptation? That’s what we’re all waiting to see.”
As more money is being poured into sports betting, as more people wager on games and outcomes, there’s been a concurrent increase in athletes being subjected to vitriol from fans via social media. During the recent U.S. Open, American tennis player Shelby Rogers said she anticipated receiving threats after losing to eventual women’s champion Emma Raducanu in the round of 16.
And in the SI issue, Green Bay wide receiver Marquez Valdes-Scantling said, “When you get people’s money involved, you start getting all sort of hate mail,” and wondered if the expansion of sports betting in the U.S. would increase threats to athletes.
Wertheim believes threats against athletes are mostly a byproduct of social media rather than sports betting. But he admits that athletes, especially in individual sports, are increasingly vulnerable to backlash from anonymous posters.
“All the glory falls to them, and all the blame falls to them,” Wertheim says of tennis players and others in individual sports. “When they lose, no one is writing hate mail to the Golden State Warriors. But if it’s one tennis player or UFC player … I think it’s more of a social media conversation than sports wagering, but there’s no question that it’s one of the dark underbellies when players hear from people who have lost a few hundred dollars.”
