by Will Hobson, The Washington Post
On a June morning in 1991, the most powerful men in American sports gathered to petition a Senate subcommittee to stop the spread of something they saw as a growing evil.
“We do not want our games to be used as bait to sell gambling,” NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue said. “We have to make it clear to the athletes, the fans and the public, gambling is not a part of sport, period.”
Tagliabue’s argument helped push the passage the following year of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act, which confined legal sports betting to Nevada and three other states. More than 20 years later, America’s widespread legal ban on sports gambling is under siege like never before.
NBA Commissioner Adam Silver, whose predecessor David Stern sat alongside Tagliabue that day, has called for the repeal of the 1992 act and expanded legal sports betting. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) wants Congress to re-examine the federal ban. This spring, an appeals court will hear New Jersey’s challenge to the act’s constitutionality. Elected officials in other states are mulling similar challenges.
In the past 50 years, while the United States has undergone an unprecedented expansion of legalized gambling, sports betting has been the only holdout, a testament to the impact of game-fixing scandals and the political power of the country’s professional sports leagues. America’s legal stance on sports betting puts it in unusual company; it’s the rare issue in which the United States has more in common with Russia and China than it does with Britain and much of continental Europe.
America’s sports gambling prohibition has created what many consider (these things are difficult to measure) the world’s largest black market for sports betting. While nearly $4 billion is bet on sports legally in Las Vegas yearly, an estimated $80 billion to $380 billion is wagered illegally through a shadow industry of offshore online betting houses, office pools and neighborhood bookmakers. Legal or not, the money continues to flow, and a growing number of power brokers advocate legalization so government can tax those billions and sports leagues can track it for signs of corruption.
Sports gambling in the United States in 2015 sits on a precipice; while it seems too big to continue to exist in its current form, legal hurdles and strong opposition remain. This debate is the latest that falls along the fault lines of familiar but contradictory American heritages, pitting moralistic puritanical ideals against the anti-government values of the frontier.
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