As Pete Rose will now famously tell you, sports and betting go hand in hand. When you participate in sports betting it is viewed as socially acceptable if you are Joe Smith on the street. Yet as a professional athlete it is considered a crime against the integrity of the game when you bet in games. This article looks at the relationship between gambling and sports.
Aside from former Big Red Machine star Pete Rose, many athletes in the history of sports have been caught gambling on sporting events. The majority of athletes get caught betting on sports, when the games involve their own teams or own games. For instance a few years back several NBA referees were caught in a sting operation for blowing games to help their bets along.
Now we realize that sports gambling is legal in some places, but we don’t condone giving yourself an unfair advantage over others by controlling the outcome of a game. I mean the main reason sports and gambling are intertwined is as a result of the games being of chance. Basically when you bet on something, you are betting on the chance it happens. When it comes to sports, you bet on your favorite team because they have a 50 percent chance of winning the game.
Back in the old days, all you could do was wager straight bets, a win or lose on your favorite teams. However now with the evolution of casino based gambling, one can only imagine how much the sport gambling industry has evolved.
As we noted in the title, sports and gambling being intertwined is no surprise. What is a surprise is that people are still shocked to this day that sports and gambling are linked. I mean as long as sports have become official, there has always been underground betting. The best example is in 1919 when there was a ton of speculation that the mob rigged the World Series and that is why the Cubs can’t win.
