Bradley Beal And The Pandora's Box Of Widespread Sports Gambling (johnwilmeswords on how gambling already has a Too Big To Fail place within sports and more unintended consequences are inevitable)
It probably won’t be the last time this happens. Last week, Bradley Beal was placed under police investigation for becoming too interactive with an angry fan. That fan, as is his prerogative in a society rich in certain strains of freedom, bought himself into misery byon the live Washington Wizards game he was attending.
Feelings on whether Beal acted appropriately will vary, but what’s important in the macro sense is that this will not be the first trial of its kind between fan and athlete. With sports betting becoming legalized, popularized, and rammed down the public’s throat through constant advertisements, lots of people are engaging with live games in much more fraught and troubling ways.
I am a genetic descendant of multiple gambling addicts, who had to know someone to place their bets, and often ended up wishing that they didn’t know anyone. One of them lost it all. So, I know it when I see it, and today I see it everywhere: this is depraved, awful, soul-sucking stuff. It’s bad, and it should make you feel bad. You are in a mud where you don’t belong, day-trading on the projected capacities of physically greater men.
The scene, and the movie itself, is cartoonish in the way that the hyper-violent Hollywood pulp of its day was, and as such, it was and is easy to dismiss. Beal’s boil-over, however, suggests that sub-fatal altercations caused by the machinations of widespread gambling could be on the rise. Because there is, at baseline, something unwell about many sports fans—grown men who have never been to therapy, screaming about the exploits and downfalls of different men, who are sometimes children.
To hyper-charge this mess with an unending series of potentially tragic financial risks is to unseal a box of spirits that we will almost certainly regret ever seeing the faces of. You won’t hear much analysis of the moral nature of this ongoing phenomenon, though, because most of the channels that might deliver it are financially dependent on the gambling outfits, which are their biggest advertisers.
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