Sports always a gamble

[Qbins Missile Crisis]

Once upon a time, a fellow named Joe P ran a saloon on the corner of Halsey Street and Branford Place in Newark with several pool tables and Joe himself behind the bar taking bets, if he knew you.

Across Halsey Street, a short distance from Joe P's place, Johnny the barber booked an occasional wager while giving his client a haircut. It was customary in those days to take a trim once a week.

Some 50 yards farther south on Halsey Street, in a modest place with just one pool table, Dirty Dave took any action you wanted to give him, if he knew you.

At the busy intersection of Halsey and Branford, a nice cop directed traffic. If he knew anything of such activity, you couldn't tell.

I mention this as a modest prototype of illegal betting not just at Halsey and Branford but most everywhere else in the country.

Only horse racing, and only at a track, offered legal betting. Eventually, just about everything else in the land has become legal except sports betting, which thrives today in Nevada and a few other states.

But not in New Jersey. Periodically, the issue of legalizing sports gambling in New Jersey pops up, like a renewed lament for a lost cause. But what's the point? New Jersey already has sports gambling.

It may be illegal, but in some ways the creative at-your-service bookmaker even provides a better break for the gambler than the casinos. He can negotiate the odds to accommodate a special client, and best of all, he gives credit. Try asking the casino for an unsecured loan, unless you're a celebrity like Charles Barkley, who said he repaid a $400,000 debt the other day.

The downside on bookie credit is that your legs are your collateral.

Of course, the cops once in awhile break up a betting service and stick the operators in the can for a time. But there is an endless supply of replacements, and the beat goes on.

If this sounds like a plug for the bookies, it isn't. It's just to remove any notion that New Jersey is in a state of deprivation without legal sports gambling.

The cause here for legal sports gambling, an industry of uncounted billions in the country, was lost back in 1993 when the state legislature failed to book a referendum on whether New Jersey wants it, although odds were that the public would have knocked it down anyway.

When it comes to gambling, New Jersey is at odds with itself. New forms of betting have little chance of winning public approval, even though the state offers more gambling opportunities than just about any other state in the union.

Legal sports betting may be the only outlet missing. Casinos, horse racing, chicken fights, lotteries, on-line poker, bingo and other predatory attacks on a gambler's economic well-being are available to a panting public that can't wait to get at it. And now on the horizon is keno, wherever it can be installed.

Meanwhile, when times are bad, and times are bad, the inclination is to try Lady Luck at a casino or race track. But Lady Luck ain't no lady.

Gambling is an addictive disease, all right, but New Jersey would do well to have legal sports betting if only to tax it. Bookmakers don't pay taxes.

Meanwhile, the media couldn't be more helpful to the gambler. Whether it's starting pitchers, weekly football injuries, selections, odds and point spreads on the games, they are published for the benefit of the plunger.

There even was a ticker flashing odds in the visiting locker room at Yankee Stadium for years, although lately the odds have disappeared.

Football is not only the most popular sport today, it also leads all others as a gambling outlet. Billions are invested on a Sunday NFL program. "Over-under" has even insinuated itself into the general language. For the uninitiated, it means betting on the total number of points a game will produce, either more or less than the posted number. Very popular.

Actually, all pro leagues swing into protests the moment someone suggests gambling, responding with a fiery sense of morality.

Back in the early 1990s, this is how David Stern, the NBA's commissioner, unloaded before a New Jersey State Assembly committee in Trenton:

"State approval of sports betting would send the wrong message to America's youth, and sports wagering would destroy the special relationship between the fans and the players by forcing fans to concentrate on point spreads rather than the athletic nature of the game itself."

A NFL spokesman added:

"Gambling brings ugliness to sports ... a source of dishonor and shame for professional and college sports alike."

Maybe so. But much of the appeal of sports still remains the ability of the public to wager on them.

The latest effort to legalize sports betting must start, of course, with repeal of a federal ban against it. That won't happen so soon, but even if it did, it would require the state to approve it.

Odds? I'd say 5-1 the state wouldn't. Wanna bet?

Sid Dorfman
Wednesday, May 28, 2008
NJ.com: Everything Jersey