Today, Explained - Go ahead. Legalize it.

Episode Date: May 17, 2018

This week, the Supreme Court of the United States fundamentally changed... sports. It struck down a 1992 law that prevented states from legalizing sports gambling. Now, New Jersey is at the head of a long line of states looking to allow their citizens to bet it all on the home team. New York Times Magazine writer Emily Bazelon takes us to Court and The Ringer’s Bryan Curtis explains how this might change professional sports. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today Explained turns three months old this week. We've been here for over 60 episodes and Mattress Firm has been here with us for like a lot of them. Head to mattressfirm.com slash podcast to learn how you can improve your sleep and use the discount code podcast10 to get 10% off your next mattress before June 5th. The Supreme Court heard a lot of big cases this term. There was gerrymandering, LGBT6, Christie versus NCAA, and the consolidated case 16477, the New Jersey Thoroughbred Horsemen's Association versus NCAA. Mr. Olson. But this little case out of New Jersey could totally change the country.

It allows any state to legalize sports gambling and bring in billions in revenue, which could mean a future where you can head to the ballgame, buy your beer, get your hot dog, and then bet everything you own on the home team. Any state can now turn itself into Nevada. In 1992, Congress told the states that they were not allowed to legalize sports gambling. Emily Bazelon writes about the law for The New York Times. And so the question here was whether Congress had the power to tell states that they were not allowed to allow sports gambling as opposed to Congress on its own banning sports gambling,

creating a federal ban on sports gambling. ASPA is a direct command to the states without any effort to regulate sports wagering. And the decision was 6-3 with Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor dissenting. Was it pretty cut and dry? You know, it was a pretty easy case, actually. The majority opinion is by Justice Alito, and he invokes this line of Supreme Court cases that's called the anti-commandeering doctrine. So the citizens of the state of New Jersey are bound to obey a law the state doesn't want, but the federal government compels the state to have. That seems commandeering. And that sounds kind of wonky, but it's really kind of basic. The idea is that Congress can't go around telling the states what

to do, like telling the states how to direct their resources. And so effectively here, if Congress wants to ban sports gambling in the United States, Congress has to do that. It has to say this is against the federal law, not, hey, states, you're not allowed to legislate about this. How does this work in states that have already legalized gambling versus those who haven't yet legalized gambling? In states that have already legalized gambling, specifically New Jersey, which was carrying the banner here, Sports gambling is going to be legal. I mean, they're just going to like get going. And we should also mention that the 1992 federal law had a like exception in it for Nevada. So the reason sports gambling is already legal in Las Vegas and there's already a big industry there is that they got kind of singled out and treated differently. Now, any state that wants to legalize sports gambling is going to be able to do that. And there are a

bunch of other states, including my home state of Connecticut, that have plans to move in that direction. But the states will have to do something first. It's going to move out of the black market and the gray market into like a legalized activity that states can tax and states can regulate. And does that mean it's soon to not be a hundred billion dollar industry anymore, but like a trillion dollar industry? I mean, right, maybe. Like, for example, sports gambling is legal in the UK and it is a huge industry there. Also, interestingly, the problems of messing with the integrity of the sport, like fixing and having, you know, matches that are not fair and not real competition anymore,

that has not actually happened in Britain. And so that's sort of a hopeful sign here about, you know, what this is actually going to mean, how it's going to play out. Obviously, this is going to have an immediate impact in New Jersey. You mentioned your home state of Connecticut wants to do something soon. Do you know what other states are just chomping at the bit to legalize gambling and have this increased revenue? Yeah. So Connecticut, Mississippi, New York, Pennsylvania and West Virginia recently passed sports betting laws. And there has been similar legislation introduced in

about a dozen other states. So I think we're going to see this spread really quickly. I mean, look, there's a lot of tax revenue, a lot of money that's at stake here, and there's really no reason for states to leave it lying on the table unless, you know, they have some notion that gambling is immoral, that they don't want their states associated with it. It's possible that there are states in which that argument will win. But, you know, once you have a lot of money at stake, it becomes a real incentive to legalize. Is immorality the only real argument against this, or are there other cons to having legal gambling? The traditional arguments against it are about the integrity of sports matches. You know, the problem of fixing matches, of people

throwing them instead of playing their hearts out. That's been a problem recently, like in professional tennis. The BBC and BuzzFeed News have obtained documents from Tennis Insiders. They identify a series of betting syndicates linked to players. It's not clear whether legalised gambling as opposed to illegal gambling makes that worse, but that's one argument against sports gambling generally. And the second argument usually is about corrupting the young, that we don't want the youth thinking that, you know, gambling is okay. We want to keep it kind of at an arm's length and treat it as a vice. When you talk about sort of the patchwork of states that it sounds like we're soon going to see with legalized gambling, it sort of reminds me of legalized marijuana and the states that sort of have endorsed that as a revenue stream.

Are these situations sort of analogous in some way? And might this gambling thing pave the way for something like legalized marijuana? Right, or vice versa, right? I mean, legalized marijuana is kind of ahead, although I think we're going to see legalized sports gambling catch up quickly. Yes. I mean, I think the arguments are very parallel, right? You have an activity that's traditionally treated as bad, as a vice. And then you have an argument that like, well, maybe if we make it legal, we can collect taxes on it and that's going to be good for state revenue. And also, continuing to treat it as illegal creates this black market, and that's a problem. Then, you know, you have

to prosecute people, you have to put people in jail. The arguments people make about morality, about the effect of legalization versus keeping something in the shadows, they're pretty parallel. Who wins and loses in New Jersey with legalized gambling now? Or across the country, really? Well, the winner, I would say, is Atlantic City. I grew up in Philadelphia, which is near Atlantic City. And when I was growing up, Atlantic City was like, you know, a kind of thriving place where people went to casinos.

It has since fallen on harder times. And something like legalized gambling could prop it up again. And I guess the losers in New Jersey are people who don't like sports gambling. Yeah. You going to place any bets? I'm not. I'm so averse to taking risks and losing money. But you know who's going to be doing some sports

gambling are my sons and I'm sure my dad. Wow, your sons? How old are they? Okay, so I'm not admitting to any illegal activity here. I'm not suggesting they will be placing illegal bets because I have a feeling you're going to have to be like an adult to do this. But I have a 15 year old and an 18 year old and they're just very interested. You know, gambling, as much as people criticize it for potentially harming the sport, gambling is also a way in which people like get interested in the sport too. And you'd be okay with that? Yeah, it doesn't bother me at all. I mean, if they started gambling large sums of money,

then I would be concerned. But small sums seems okay. So as long as they don't like bet your house on it, it's cool. Emily Bazelon hosts the Slate Political Gap Best. Up next on Today Explained, how this decision from the Supreme Court might change our favorite sports. A funny thing has been happening to me since we launched this show, Today Explained, three months ago. Check us out on Twitter at today underscore explain. Don't forget to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts or on Stitcher. Anyway, back to the thing. People

I've met in my life across the country, when they pass a mattress firm, they'll take a photo of it and send it to me. It happens about once a week and it's always a different store. If nothing else, this proves that there are a lot of mattress firms. They really might be America's neighborhood mattress store. I would highly recommend walking into a mattress firm and jumping on a bed. They seem to allow it. Check out mattressfirm.com if you can't make it to a store. Mattressfirm.com slash podcast is a great place to save 10% on your next mattress using the coupon codeAST10 before June 5th. Brian Curtis, editor-at-large of The Ringer, host of the PressBox podcast.

Have you now or have you ever been a person who bets on sports? Yes, infrequently and only on trips to Vegas because the Supreme Court hadn't cleared the way for me to do it from the convenience of my own home yet. So what's going to be different with sports? I know that's probably a really big, broad question, but for those who don't really care about sports, might they see something change? I think the interesting thing is the way we consume sports might change slightly. We've been seeding the ground for this too, right?

We've been playing fantasy football and baseball for 30 plus years. We've been doing daily fantasy more recently, which is the whole idea of that is that we're consuming sports in a way that isn't just about who won the game on the field

and which team am I rooting for. And I think now, you know, if you make gambling legal in a bunch of places around the United States, not just Nevada, you know, we could see that further change, right? It just, it becomes something that you, you know, whip out your phone and do very, very easily and very legally in a way you couldn't five years ago. And it's not like there's a limit on this. This isn't like petty cash. Oh, I've just placed a $5 bet. Like someone could bet their house on a game from the comfort of like the toilet at a office or something, right? They could literally bet the house. Yeah. And that's bad probably, right? You probably shouldn't do that. Right.

But I think that will happen. And that's something else we have to reckon with, right? I think we often in the media treat sports gambling as this kind of jolly pastime. It can also be really bad. And as anybody, as any resident of Las Vegas would tell you. And just to be sure, sports betting has been going on since sports, basically, right? It has been going on since sports. Westbrook Pegler, who was a columnist many, many years ago, once said that America's true national pastime was not baseball, it was craps. And I think that's probably true with sports gambling too. So how did this happen? I mean, I think we know how this happened legally,

but how did this maybe normalization of, I think we know how this happened legally, but how did this maybe normalization of sports betting happen to the point where the Supreme Court looked at it and said, of course, of course you can do this anywhere, not just Vegas. Well, it's funny, you know, so I think we basically had a century in which the media, in this case, newspapers and television basically had to, every time they talked about sports gambling they had to talk about it with a wink you know yeah we got 31 17 just a little bit under where some folks would like to see this one wind up you'd have a late touchdown in monday night football and al michaels would say geez you

know there are a lot of people who really care about that touchdown. And he caught it. And Quan Bolden. Well, that's overwhelming. And, you know, in newspapers, the gambling line was in tiny agate type in the back of the paper. But it was unheard of for the sports columnist to sit there and explicitly talk about, hey, I wagered 500 bucks this weekend on the Patriots. Just wouldn't happen. And it really wasn't allowed in a sense.

Then I think about 10 or 15 years ago, sort of around the dawn of the new century, that completely changed. My boss, Bill Simmons, starts devoting lots of space in his column to gambling and his podcast as well. They voided the first bet because they said it was a mistake. And then they didn't void the second bet. And then the second bet lost. And we lost all this money when they made the mistake, and then they wouldn't give us the money back. Now you've got Scott Van Pelt on SportsCenter, ESPN's flagship show, doing a whole segment called Bad Beats, where he explicitly says the line was seven points, the team wound up only winning by five, and gamblers all over the country were really pissed off. And I think the cumulative effect of that is it really just normalized sports gambling. It made it seem like this is something everybody's doing. This is something that's fun. This is something that's

cool. You know, it no longer had the stigma it had under so-called old media. That's really interesting. So when I think about what was changing 10 or 15 years ago i can't help but feel like the internet might have had something to do with this did it totally the old censors that would have prevented guys like me from writing about this stuff fell away right newspapers started to shrink tv networks didn't carry the weight they once did in american life and the conversation was happening on Twitter. It was happening on the internet. It was happening on ESPN.com. And what was verboten was no longer verboten.

And people said, why can't I talk about this, right? Van Pelt told me recently, like, he just started doing it and he was surprised at how little pushback he got. Nobody said, you know, you're corrupting the children. Yeah. That call wasn't made. But we are talking here about serious potential gambling addiction, right? I mean, people in Vegas sitting around, you know, screens watching sports intently,

they don't look very happy. They look kind of sick or something. Could I say that? Yeah, no, I think you can say that. I was in Australia for a couple of months this year where sports gambling is already legal and was already legal. And there was this national conversation going on in Australia about what are we doing? Have we now, are we processing sports completely through the lens of gambling? Uh, which in Australia, the answer is at least partially yes. You know, right. I mean, when I was there, like the NBA was a huge gambling thing because it was basketball is popular in Australia, but also there were 80 plus NBA games a year. Right.

Right. For every team. So they could, they could just gamble on that all the time and not have to wait for the next Australian rules football match to start. Right. And so that's another thing, right? It's like, how do we, how do we just think about sports at all? You know, is it football has been, you know,

the American game for a bunch of decades now, partly because it happens so infrequently, right? It happens once a week, but maybe that's bad in gambling world. Maybe we want things that happen all the time so we can have more hits and stuff like that. And how might it change the sports themselves, what we're watching on the field, on the court, or the diamond?

I mean, the obvious question feels like might teams start throwing games more now that there's going to be billions upon billions of dollars infused into the gambling that's going on? It's weird how game throwing has sort of not been a huge topic over this period we're talking about. Like, I think part of it is, you know, the Black Sox Field of Dreams thing is so far in memory. You know, it's almost like it's just from another time and it really is from another time. Then in 1919, his team, the Chicago White Sox, they threw the World Series.

What's through? It means they lost it on purpose. Gamblers paid them to. That hasn't been a big thing. I think the biggest thing that we've seen from the leagues is how do we make money on this? How do we capture this revenue stream that we're not capturing because it's illegal? Like Adam Silver, the NBA commissioner, wrote a New York Times op-ed a couple years ago saying we should legalize it, which was really shocking, right? Like his biggest fear wasn't that basketball players were going to start throwing games. His biggest fear was that the NBA wasn't going to get a cut of the money that was already being wagered. You work for a, you know, sports-forward organization. You're surrounded by people who live and breathe this stuff.

Sports-forward, I love that. Yeah, you can take that if you want. The Ringer, a sports-forward organization. The Ringer. The Ringer. A sports-forward organization. The Ringer. What was the general sentiment there when this happened earlier this week?

How did you feel? Is it exciting? Is it terrifying? Is it neither? Is it kind of like... I think if you listen to Simmons' podcast, it was somewhere between Mardi Gras and New Year's Day in terms of the celebration. Okay. Which is it to say we also read a piece about the effects of this thing and exactly what we're talking about, about thinking through the effects.

But no, I mean, I think I think for a lot of people, this has been something that they were doing already. And to see that, you know, it could be a much bigger part of the sports conversation than it already was. I think that's a happy thing. Sure. OK, so it's still Mardi Gras. And then in a few weeks we'll deal with The Hangover, maybe. That's right. We'll all be coping at the same time having hair of the dog after we've lost all our money and ruined society. Great. Looking forward to it.

Brian, thanks so much. Thanks for this, Sean. Really appreciate it. Brian Curtis is the editor-at-large of... The Ringer. The Ringer, a sports forward organization. The Ringer. I'm Sean Rammestrom. This is Today Explained.

Our executive producer, Irene Noguchi. She just had a birthday. Airhorn. Happy birthday, Irene. Our editor, Richard McCarthy. Afim Shapiro. He's our engineer.

Luke Vanderplug and Noam Hassenfeld produce Something Sports. The athletic Breakmaster Cylinder makes beats for us and Jillian Weinberger pinch hit for us

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