Because sports alone aren’t that interesting: gamblers.
For the average fan, the problem with being emotionally invested in a team is that emotional investments have no tangible payoff. Yeah, your home team winning a championship is a nice feeling. But let’s face it: you gotta wade through a whole lot of shit just to get to that one moment. It can take years of suffering through any number of pointless regular season games and entire seasons of rebuilding. And, even then, it’s never a guarantee your favorite team will win it all. Especially if that team is the Minnesota Vikings. Fucking Vikings. There’s only one thing that can make the eternal wait somewhat tolerable: the excitement of losing money.
Why do sports fans gamble? It’s a self-esteem thing. If a fan places a bet on a team and that team wins, he gets to fancy himself a genius. He can even tell people of his little victory and offer gambling advice until he becomes as insufferable as Sarah Jessica Parker, which is what all gamblers do. You, the professional athlete, get to experience the glory of winning games at the highest level of competition. Gambling is a fan’s way of becoming indirectly involved in the outcome of a game, and then experiencing a seedy, bastardized version of that glory. And what better way to try to mimic the thrill of winning a Super Bowl than by placing a $10 wager on it at the MGM Grand sports book, then watching the game in an overcrowded, smoky lounge surrounded by eighty-year-olds who are hoping to die before facing the next month without their lost Medicare stipend? It’s a pretty ingenious line of thinking.
The other purpose gambling serves is to get fans excited about games they otherwise wouldn’t care about. Remember, the reason for being a sports fan is to distract oneself from having to think, or from having to live life. By gambling on more sports, fans have an excuse to watch more of them, thereby blocking out an even greater portion of the real world. And this is good, because the real world is fucked up.
Now, most gamblers lose. Big. Most of them accrue a pile of debt that not only bankrupts them but also bankrupts the family members who try to bail them out. But if you think that stops a gambler from being a smug asshole, you’re wrong. Extremely wrong.
You see, the more a gambler loses in cold hard cash, the more he gains in supposed gambling experience. This is why you’ll hear gamblers say things like, “Four and a half? Pfft. Vegas clearly has no clue how to set the line for this game.” They have no better feel for gambling than you or I. But that lost money allows them to pretend that they do, to pretend they’ve actually learned something to change the outcome the next go-round. And that’s all that matters. Vegas has long thrived on people dumb enough to believe they can outsmart Vegas. And, as long as morons roam the Earth, it will continue to do so.
During your career, you may be approached by bookies and gamblers looking to wrangle useful betting information out of you. You can usually spot one of them from a mile away. Is he wearing a baseball hat pulled way down? Are his fingernails chewed down to disgusting little nubs? Does he have psoriasis? Bingo. That’s a gambler.
Nothing like Kenny Rogers described, is he?
Don’t give him any information. You could be violating the most sacred rule of your league, which is to never become involved in gambling on your sport. Everyone else can gamble on your sport, but you cannot. Why? Because you could ruin the integrity of your sport, which would, in turn, ruin the integrity of gambling on your sport. If gamblers knew your sport was fixed, they’d stop watching it, which would hugely impact league revenues. Your league can’t afford to have you gamble on games when they have so much invested in fans who gamble on games. You’d be breaking the circle of trust.
Many players have given their reputations a black eye by colluding with gamblers. The 1919 Black Sox conspired to rig the World Series and paid a heavy price. They became the most notorious team of all time and even had movies made about them. Hell, no one remembers the 1919 Reds, who actually won the Series. The 1919 Black Sox became true immortals. You don’t want to have that happen, do you? Look at Shoeless Joe Jackson. The guy had no shoes, for fuck’s sake. Nor do you want to end up like Pete Rose, who was banned from baseball both for gambling and for having persistent, terrible BO. It’s best if you avoid the whole gambling scene altogether. You don’t want to know about stuff like parlays and vigorishes anyway. That’s a douchebag’s vocabulary.
Besides, traditional sports gambling is becoming a thing of the past. Fantasy sports are the real wave of the future.