At the end of February, I wrote about sports gambling. I wrote a lot of words about sports gambling. It’s an appealing topic to me, not because I particularly enjoy wagering on sporting events, but because the divide between the perception and the reality of the subject seems so vast.
Furthering my interest is the role that Major League Baseball, National Basketball Association, National Football League and National Hockey League (as well as the National Collegiate Athletic Association) have played in manipulating the public perception of sports betting away from the reality. North American professional sports leagues have collectively fought the legalization of sports gambling in the name of the integrity of their respective sports, willfully ignorant to the benefits that a regulated system would provide the sanctity they strategically want to be seen protecting. The reality is that the leagues are far more interested in protecting control over the data that their product creates.
It’s hypocrisy at its most blatant: Powerful organizations privately protecting their own interests by publicly decrying progress that would limit the very things over for they feign concern. Unfortunately, it’s taken the self-serving initiatives of another powerful authority to highlight the discrepancy between what’s said and done.
