In 2006, Charles Barkley admitted to ESPN that he feels that he has a gambling problem that had cost him close to $10 million A year later, Barkley told ESPN he won $700,000 in one weekend betting. Wayne Rooney: The soccer star has publicly struggled with gambling addiction for years, accumulating over $1 million in debt by the age of 20 and blowing over $100,000 in two hours at a British casino in 2008. After that incident made headlines, he pledged to control his gambling in the future. To examine prevalence and associations of gambling problems and health risk behaviors among college athletes from the first national survey of gambling among U.S. College student-athletes. Methods Conducted by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), this self-administered and anonymous survey collected information from a nationally. See Problems as a Wonderful Gift. While others only see problems and give up, successful people use the problem as a lesson to find improvement in themselves or the task at hand. Keep Looking for Solutions. Even if they’re knee-deep in problems, successful people will still put all of their focus on finding solutions. 'Gambling has been an issue even stretching back to my playing days,' said Adams, who founded the Sporting Chance Clinic to help athletes suffering from addictions. 'But it seems to be the biggest issue now, more than alcohol.' Evans says players who have a gambling problem deserve sympathy not criticism.

Editor's note: Part 1 of ESPN's future of sports betting series focused on the paths to legalization in the United States and what the resulting marketplace could look like.

Part 2 looked at future bettors -- humans and robots. Part 3 focuses on the pitfalls, or what could go wrong if sports betting is legalized.

When Dr. Christopher Hunt first began working at the University of Sydney Gambling Treatment Clinic in Australia, he recalls seeing 'one or two' troubled sports bettors every six months.

Today, after what he calls the 'gamblization' of sports in Australia, Hunt says sports bettors make up one-third of the clinic's patients.

If sports betting is legalized, will the United States be headed for a future with increased addiction potentially spurned by a rampant barrage of gambling advertising? Proponents point to the expected economic benefits and increased game-integrity protection of legalization. Opponents say those perceived pluses won't outweigh the pitfalls.

'For the two-thirds-plus of Americans who rarely or never engage in commercial gambling, the change will be negative,' said Michael K. Fagan, a former federal prosecutor and current adjunct professor at Washington University School of Law. 'Anyone fairly and comprehensively evaluating the unbiased, independent academic, health-care and economic evidence readily finds that it weighs in favor of continuing prohibitions on commercial sports gambling.'

Australia, a country which legalized sports betting around the turn of the century, is a prime example of what America wants to avoid.

Widespread legalization of online sports betting arrived in Australia in 2001, but even in a culture with a longtime acceptance of gambling as a form of entertainment, it didn't explode onto the market.

In the beginning, mom-and-pop bookmakers competed against the government-owned sportsbook TAB. Teams entered standard sponsorship deals with betting operators, and sports commentators casually began referencing odds during broadcasts. Overall, though, the impact of legalization was minimal and sports betting was looked at as a niche product with niche problems. But trouble loomed.

Around 2009, Australians began to notice a dramatic shift in the atmosphere surrounding sports and how the games were presented by the media. International bookmaking companies, with much larger marketing budgets, began arriving on the scene. Soon, advertising for betting could be found near schools and on public transportation. The gambling talk during game broadcasts went from subtle to constant, with commercials from sportsbooks bleeding into the media coverage. At one point, one of Australia's biggest bookies was a regular in the broadcast booth.

'All of a sudden, it was like you couldn't talk about sports without making reference to what the odds were, what the prices were, whether they thought this bet was value or this bet was value,' said Hunt, a clinical psychologist. 'It was what we came to call the 'gamblization' of sport.'

In 2014 and 2015, Aussies bet $7.1 billion and lost nearly $815 million on sports, according to the recently released 32nd edition of Australian Gambling Statistics. Both figures are records and sharp spikes from the previous year. The data mirrors the increase of sports bettors seeking help for gambling addiction.

Advertising is at the heart of the debate in Australia. According to gambling researcher Dr. Sally Gainsbury, the Australian market became so flooded with gambling advertising in recent years that consumers began complaining.

'It was similar to what you were seeing [in the U.S.] with the [daily] fantasy advertising,' Gainsbury said. 'Sports events are just now completely dominated by sports betting advertising. All throughout the sporting events you're seeing these complete bombardments of advertising for betting. And community members are now saying, 'Hey, my kids are watching this.' Gambling was supposed to be put be off to the corner and now it's front and center.'

The United Kingdom, home to one of the most mature legal sports betting markets in the world, took steps over the past decade to combat socially irresponsible gambling advertising. Betting and gaming companies in the U.K. have been permitted to advertise across all media since 2007, under strict guidelines monitored by the Advertising Standards Authority. The regulations require that advertisements for gambling must not 'portray, condone or encourage behaviour that is socially irresponsible or could lead to financial, social or emotional harm.' Ads likely to appeal to anyone under 18 or that link gambling to 'seduction, sexual success or enhanced attractiveness' also are prohibited.

Aussie politicians and regulators are pushing for federal reform to restrict sports betting advertising. But bookmakers counter that if the rules are too strict, they won't be able to compete with unregulated bookmakers.

'Advertising is this key and that's what jurisdictions really have to understand when they regulate [sports betting], is the extent to which they enable advertising,' said Gainsbury, a faculty member of the University of Sydney and an editor for International Gambling Studies.

An increase in problem gamblers?

In the weeks leading up to the 2015 NFL season, U.S. daily fantasy sites DraftKings and FanDuel ran a television ad every 90 seconds. At the peak of the daily fantasy sports (DFS) advertising surge, they combined to air almost as many ads (1,285) as there are minutes in the day, according to iSpot.tv, which tracks advertising data. The CEOs of both companies recently signed settlements with the New York Attorney General's Office, which found each company had 'targeted users with a propensity for gambling and addiction.'

Fagan, the former assistant U.S. attorney in Missouri, who successfully prosecuted offshore sports gambling website BetOnSports.com a decade ago, said the daily fantasy media explosion highlighted the concerns about any future with widespread legal sports betting.

'Expanded and heavily marketed sports gambling significantly shifts the focus of fans from the athletic contest to the pursuit of personal profit,' Fagan told ESPN. 'Other non-wager-determinative aspects of sport wind up diminished. This means the increased viewership sought by greed-driven, short-sighted league and network executives will be driven to a marked degree by money fans, not sports fans who will have been converted, in whole or part, to money fans, and this will work a change in life in America.

'Only the gamblers, in the short term, and those profiting off their losses, in the long term, will see this change as a positive one.'

Other experts agree.

Sam Skolnik, author of 'High Stakes: The Rising Cost of America's Gambling Addiction,' believes the only thing truly inevitable about the future of sports betting in the U.S. is that similar pitfalls to what Australia is experiencing will follow any expansion of legal sports betting.

'Voters, state legislators and other stakeholders should start thinking about the potential downsides of what would be a major expansion of legalized gambling,' Skolnik said. 'You're going to have this pool of new gamblers, and there is going to be a subset of problem gamblers. This is extremely painful for them and not just their families. It's for their employers, the whole communities that will pay the costs of increased gambling addiction.'

In the U.S., gambling addiction peaked at about 2.7 percent in the late 1990s and early 2000s, according to the National Council on Problem Gambling (NCPG). It has been on the decline ever since, even as gambling has expanded across the nation, and has now settled around 2 percent. At state-run problem gambling hotlines, calls from sports bettors are rare. In 2014, less than 1 percent of callers to the Nevada's gambling hotline identified sports betting as their most problematic form of gambling.

In fact, the NCPG does not oppose the legalization of sports betting and will announce a resolution later this year that will lay out recommended safeguards for an expanded regulated market.

Currently, U.S. sports bettors outside of Nevada and Delaware gamble in a massive unregulated market. They are often offered informal credit and are allowed to bet until they are up or down an agreed-upon amount, $1,000, for example. While convenient for bettors and bookies, credit betting is also dangerous.

Keith Whyte, executive director of the NCPG, says unsecured credit betting puts people at risk for developing a gambling problem.

'The average problem gambler that seeks treatment has gambling debt twice their average annual income,' Whyte said. 'The vast majority of that does not come from formal casino credit. It's either personal credit card or credit from a bookie, informal credit. [For problem gamblers], the substance abuse is money. If you're at risk for a gambling problem and you're betting on unsecured credit, if and when you start to lose, you can rapidly find yourself in severe problems.'

A shift in integrity of the game issues

At a September gaming conference, four respected Las Vegas sportsbook directors were asked how many games in the past three years they had deemed suspicious enough to contact authorities.

'None,' said Bob Scucci, a veteran bookmaker who ran the Stardust during its prime and is now in charge of all the Boyd Gaming sportsbooks in Nevada.

The other three bookmakers nodded in agreement. If games are being fixed, no one's seeing it in Las Vegas. Nevertheless, nearly a century after the infamous Black Sock scandal of 1919, the negative link between gambling and game integrity remains the No. 1 concern for sports leagues.

But does the current environment better protect the integrity of the games, when the bulk of the money bet on sports in the U.S. takes place in an unregulated market?

Challenges to game integrity were cited repeatedly in the lead-up to Congress passing the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) in 1992. PASPA was designed to protect sports leagues from the perceived ills of sports betting spreading across the country.

But that argument has now been somewhat flipped recently. As discussed in part 1 of this series, professional sports leagues are increasingly of the belief that a regulated sports betting market that allows wagers to be transparently tracked would help protect the integrity of their games, not hurt it.

This is consistent with recent partnerships with big data companies by the professional sports leagues, representing a profound shift in the leagues' position on line monitoring, the task of tracking gambling data in an attempt to identify unusual moves or unnatural money.

The NFL, NBA and NHL have deals with Sportradar, a Switzerland-based conglomerate that is the parent company of Betradar, a major player in the global sports betting industry, and Major League Baseball has partnered with Genius Sports, a multi-faceted gambling data firm located in London. Even the NCAA has a commercial affiliation with Sportradar, with the Pac-12 conference using the services of CG Analytics, a subsidiary of a prominent Nevada sportsbook.

'The issue of sports integrity is something that always comes up,' said Michelle Minton, consumer policy specialist who has opined on sports betting legalization as part of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a Libertarian think tank. 'The argument is if we legalize sports gambling, the games will be rigged, people will be taking dives, et cetera. I think that's a red herring argument. I would make the argument that it's less likely to cause match-fixing.'

Legalization won't, however, eliminate attempts to compromise games for gambling purposes. There will be gambling scandals in the future; the hope is that maybe they'll be detected sooner.

'It's big money,' Minton said of the American sports betting market. 'Anywhere there's big money there [are] going to be scandals. In the financial industry, there [are] always scandals. I'm not sure why with gambling, it's always considered such a landmark case every time a player or handful of players do something wrong. They're just people, and people do things wrong all the time in every industry.'

Tennis, which is second only to soccer in terms of global betting interest, has dealt with significant match-fixing issues, raising red flags for experts.

'Who exactly is supposed to be responsible for such oversight and policing?' Michael Mewshaw, an industry expert and the author of several books, questioned. 'As we see in the NFL, it's had no end of trouble simply enforcing the rule about properly inflated footballs.'

Setting the stage for the inevitable

Whether in three years, five or a full decade, the normalization process that leads America down a path toward nationwide regulated sports betting is expected to be complete. With it, passive fans rooting for a favorite team or player will increasingly be replaced by active sports consumers with a financial stake in the action. Technological changes, evolving societal views and increased media coverage have contributed to wider acceptance of sports betting.

Over the course of ESPN's four-month inquiry, the inference from the evidence was clear: The vast majority of the key stakeholders -- operators, bettors, broadcasters, advertisers and sports leagues -- are positioning themselves for Adam Silver's 'inevitable' arrival of expanded legalized sports betting. Indeed, in 2013, the NCAA, NBA, NFL, NHL and Major League Baseball filed a crystal ball-worthy document in the New Jersey litigation and argued that they 'have an essential interest in how their games are perceived and the degree to which their sporting events become betting events.'

Certain law enforcement officials are on board, too.

'The current U.S. approach to sports betting is not working,' wrote a five-person panel of former federal and state law enforcement officers in a 15-page report released by the American Gaming Association last month. 'An open, transparent, regulated sports betting market boosts law enforcement oversight.'

Such conclusions stand in sharp contrast to statements like those made by former U.S. Senator and New York Knicks player Bill Bradley, the chief supporter of PASPA during Congressional hearings in 1991.

'Athletes are not roulette chips, but sports gambling treats them as such,' wrote Bradley in a 1992 academic article. 'If the dangers of state sponsored sports betting are not confronted, the character of sports and youngsters' view of them could be seriously threatened.'

Now, NBA players, led by their union, are looking at sports betting legalization as a commercial opportunity.

'We're all on the same page as Adam [Silver] and the NBA,' Jordan Schlachter, chief marketing officer at the National Basketball Players Association, told ESPN during the summer. 'It's an opportunity to grow the game. It's an opportunity to grow the exposure of our players. We're in the business of supporting our players and looking out for their best interest.'

Sen. Bradley's position has now been turned on its head, with the dangers of massive unregulated American sports betting market a focus now more than ever.

PASPA turns 24 years old on Oct. 28. Most experts don't see the federal ban on nationwide sports betting celebrating its 30th. The next few years will reveal what the epitath on PASPA's tombstone will say and what's in store for the future of sports betting in America.

Supreme Court’s Decision on Sports Gambling – Effects on High School Games

By Lee Green, J.D. on September 11, 2018 hstPrint

The Issue

The May 14, 2018, decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in Murphy, Governor of New Jersey, v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, a ruling which struck down as unconstitutional certain components of the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) – a 1992 federal law that barred most states (all but those grandfathered-in by PASPA) from allowing sports gambling – opens the door to the enactment by states of legislation authorizing betting on sports events in a wide variety of forums and contexts.

The high court’s decision will almost certainly lead to the enactment by numerous states of laws authorizing gambling on professional sports contests and college sports events through the placement of bets at casino sportsbooks, race tracks, off-track betting (OTB) parlors, and – eventually – online methodologies such as websites, social media tools and mobile apps.

Of concern as one possible outcome of the Murphy case is the possibility of legalized wagering on high school athletics and youth sports events such as interscholastic football and basketball games, AAU basketball tournaments, 7-on-7 football competitions, Little League Baseball games, Pop Warner football contests and other similar sports activities.

The History of Youth Sports Gaming

Although widespread gambling on high school and youth sports might seem like an unlikely possibility because of the misconception that there is a relative lack of interest by bettors in school and youth contests as compared to professional and collegiate athletics, for years illegal gaming has taken place involving youth sports competitions.

For instance, offshore, internet-based, illegal gaming sites have for more than 20 years set betting lines and accepted wagers on high profile interscholastic football and basketball games, in particular during state playoffs, and on high visibility national youth sports events such as elite AAU basketball tournaments, the Little League World Series, Pop Warner Football playoffs and Biddy Basketball championships.

One such gaming website – Costa Rica-based 5Dimes – sets odds and accepts bets on prominent high school football games such as the Texas state high school playoffs, with its founder, Tony Williams, arguing that gambling on high school sports is justified by the logistics of supply and demand. “The customers who bet the games don’t have a problem with morality. Walk to any street corner in the United Kingdom. You can bet on under-16-year-old soccer events, boys or girls. Any match, any amount. What is the difference betting on 15-or-16-year-old girls playing soccer or 17-and-18-year old boys playing American football?”

Illegal gambling on youth sports has also taken the form revealed by a 2012 investigative report by ESPN’s Outside the Lines into widespread betting on games played in the South Florida Youth Football League, an organization for players from ages five to 15, following which nine youth football coaches were charged in Broward County with felonies. An undercover reporter filmed bets being placed and money changing hands between bettors and bookies in the stands at games and in a barbershop functioning as an OTB parlor with a separate betting window for those wishing to place bets on the youth football games. The typical regular season game would draw bets totaling approximately $20,000 and a league championship game attracted total bets exceeding $100,000.

Murphy v. NCAA

In 1991, Congressional hearings were held at which a wide range of representatives of professional and college sports leagues and governing bodies testified regarding the potential for corruption and game-fixing if a framework of authorized gambling on athletic events was to be allowed across the United States, along with the presentation of evidence by mental health and addiction specialists as to the threat posed to bettors by widespread legalized sports gaming.

The hearings led to the enactment of PASPA, also known as the Bradley Act after the legislation’s original sponsor – U.S. Senator from New Jersey, NBA Hall-of-Famer, Air Force veteran, Rhodes Scholar, 1964 Olympic Gold Medalist, and 1965 NCAA Player of the Year – Bill Bradley.

With the exception of state laws authorizing gambling on horse races, dog races and jai alai, PASPA prohibited the enactment by states of legislation permitting any other type of sports gambling. However, four states had pre-existing sports gaming laws that were grandfathered-in and thus exempted from the coverage of PASPA. Nevada had since 1949 had licensed sports betting through casino sportsbooks and Delaware, Montana and Oregon operated statewide sports lotteries that functioned as parlay wagers for bettors.

The enactment of PASPA and its implementation on January 1, 2003, was lobbied for and supported by all major and minor professional sports leagues in the United States, including the NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB, along with amateur athletics governing bodies such as the NCAA, the NAIA, the NFHS and state associations.

In 2009, as part of a broader effort to rejuvenate the state’s struggling gaming economy, New Jersey filed a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of PASPA, arguing that the Tenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution reserves to the states all rights not explicitly granted to the federal government, including the regulation of gambling. In other words, New Jersey asserted that the “anti-commandeering doctrine” principle incorporated into the Tenth Amendment by the founding fathers barred the federal government from seizing away from or interfering in the enactment by states of legislation governing gambling. Oral arguments in the suit took place before the Supreme Court on December 4, 2017, and the Court’s 7-2 decision, issued on May 14, 2018, in favor of New Jersey, was based on states’ rights and federalism principles.

It is important to note that the high court’s ruling did not automatically legalize sports gambling nationwide; the decision merely made it possible for state legislatures to enact laws permitting and regulating sports gaming in their jurisdictions.

Reaction to the Murphy Ruling

PASPA’s original sponsor, Bill Bradley, disagreed with the Supreme Court’s decision, in large part because of his concern about the case’s potential impact on high school and youth sports. In a May 16, 2018, interview with NPR, Bradley stated, “I regret the ruling. I think the Court ignored the impact that the ruling will have on sports in America and the values you learn from sports. I mean, they’ve turned every basketball player, football player and baseball player into a roulette chip. And that doesn’t mean pros only. Because now you can bet on college. You could even bet on high school. You could even bet on AAU, 14-year-olds playing in the finals of the AAU. And the only winners here are casinos, in my opinion.”

Bradley continued, “I think the game will be corrupted. Do you really want to go to your son’s high school basketball or football game and see people in the crowd who are betting, who are not rooting for your child to win or lose, but are betting on a spread?”

Bradley’s concerns were echoed by Bob Gardner, NFHS executive director at the time the Supreme Court issued the Murphy decision in May, who in a statement issued by the NFHS stated, “I am concerned with this Court decision and where it may lead. Our past contains instances of wagering on high school games illegally. If that now becomes legal, does the pressure on our coaches and student- athletes grow? Maintaining the integrity of all sports is critical to the system at every level. If we think the high schools are immune to this, we are not seeing clearly. We ask that states do not include wagering on high school athletic contests in any sport as part of any legislation going forward.”

Going Forward

With nearly 20,000 high schools and tens of thousands of youth sports teams in the United States at scale, there could be a wide range of betting taking place on scholastic and youth athletics if state legislatures fail to carefully craft gaming regulations to exclude all amateur athletic events below the college level. Just as with professional and collegiate sports, state laws permitting betting on school and youth athletic events would open the door to attempted corruption or game-fixing.

Sports Stars With Gambling Problems Solving

In fact, high school and youth sports athletes might be at the highest risk because there are no paychecks or scholarships – if a gambler offers even small inducements of a few thousand dollars to an athlete (or to an athlete’s parents) with the proviso that the athlete doesn’t need to lose the game, but rather just avoid covering the point spread, some albeit small percentage of athletes (or parents) will likely engage in the illegal and unethical behavior. Or the payment by the gambler may be simply for inside information regarding the eligibility or health status of other players on a team, information that in most cases cannot be revealed by schools or sports organizations because of privacy restrictions imposed by federal laws such as FERPA or HIPAA, or equivalent pieces of state privacy legislation.

Furthermore, another of the challenges facing high school and youth sports is that, because of the decentralized governance currently in place – state associations over interscholastic athletics and hundreds of governing bodies overseeing youth sports nationwide – there is no logistically practical means of developing integrity and corruption monitoring strategies like those which professional sports leagues and the NCAA will have the resources and centralized control to implement.

In addition, legalized gambling on high school and youth sports might increase the exposure of young athletes and young people in general to other dangers of gambling, including addiction and financial ruin. A 2016 NCAA study of 23,000 college student-athletes revealed 55 percent of men reported gambling for money; 24 percent reported violating NCAA rules by wagering on sports for money; and 11 percent of Division I football players and five percent of Division I basketball players reported betting on a game not involving their team. If similar percentages of high school and youth sports participants were incentivized by the legalization of betting on scholastic and youth athletics to attempt to bypass minimum age requirements for gambling, American society might be confronted by an unprecedented health-care crisis with regard to gambling addiction among young people.

Reliance on State Legislatures

The key, therefore, in the shadow of the Murphy ruling, to safeguarding high school and youth sports programs and athletes, will be reliance on state legislators in those jurisdictions intending to legalize sports gambling on professional and college sports to craft laws that will clearly and explicitly exclude interscholastic and youth athletics.

Nevada, with sports gambling laws grandfathered-in under PASPA that long pre-dated the Murphy decision, through its state Gaming Regulation 22.120, explicitly allows betting on professional sports and collegiate contests, and explicitly prohibits wagers on “any amateur non-collegiate sport or athletic event” – an exclusion intended by the Nevada legislature to prevent gambling on high school sports and on the entire range of youth athletics.

Sports Stars With Gambling Problems Involving

New Jersey, the plaintiff in the Murphy case, had sports gambling legislation enacted conditionally pending the outcome of the case and in Gaming Law A4111, as part of its definition of “Prohibited Sports Event” prohibits wagering on “all high school sports events, electronic sports, and competitive video games, but not international sports events in which persons under age 18 make up a minority of the participants.” No mention is made of sub-high-school, youth sports in the New Jersey law.

Sports Stars With Gambling Problems Today

On June 14, 2018, at the sports book located in the Monmouth Park racetrack, Governor Phil Murphy commemorated the legalization of sports gambling in the state by placing the first bets, two futures wagers – $20 on the New Jersey Devils to win the Stanley Cup and $20 on Germany to win the World Cup. A state auditor’s report issued on August 15, 2018, disclosed that in its first two months, with sports books operational at only three casinos and two racetracks, $57 million had been wagered statewide, with that amount expected to increase exponentially as more betting sites become available and the NFL and college football seasons get underway.

Sports Stars With Gambling Problems Since

Connecticut, Delaware, Mississippi, Oregon, Pennsylvania and West Virginia also had sports gambling legislation introduced conditionally pending the outcome of the Murphy case, with widely differing levels of clarity in the language of the bills with regard to their applicability to scholastic and youth sports. And post-Murphy bills have been introduced in California, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, New York, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Missouri, Oklahoma, Rhode Island and South Carolina, all with vague language not clearly and explicitly addressing their applicability to high school and youth athletics.