COMMENTARY : Betting Doesn’t Help Sports -- High Schools or Professionals

I read the news today, oh boy!

--The state of Oregon has instituted weekly betting on National Football League games.

--The Kentucky Lottery Corp. has voted to offer betting on NFL games beginning in mid-October.

--New York City’s revenues from Off-Track Betting Corp. are expected to fall from $33 million in the current fiscal year to $9 million in 1993 due to the decline of horse racing’s share of the gambling market.

--The FBI confiscated $500,000 from an alleged gambling operation in Alabama that may have involved high school games fixed by coaches.

Did somebody say there’s no connection?

Did somebody say it can’t happen here?

Massachusetts, Illinois and Michigan are watching the action in Oregon with gold in their eyes.

If OTB is feeling a pinch because people aren’t betting the horses, is there any question OTB will look to shove its finger into the richest pot it can find? Once that happens, is there any reason to think the betting pool will stop at professional football? Why not basketball and baseball, too? People bet on them, anyhow, so why shouldn’t the state take a piece of the action and put it to good purposes?

We know people bet on college games, too, so why should the state let the illegal bookmakers have all the fun?

And we know that in Scranton, Pa., on a Friday there is all kinds of action on high school football games. And in the area around Florence, Ala. And Orange County (Calif.) police turned up a $150,000-a-week bookmaking operation involving high school students.

In this permissive society we acknowledge a lot of things go on that were once considered immoral, and some things go on that are still considered immoral. But because society can’t stop them, should they be condoned so the state can make money from them?

Make the distinction between the lottery and church bingo, and betting on sports contests. Lottery and bingo exist for no other reason; they are not gambling on the skills of vulnerable human beings. The issue is not whether gambling is immoral, but that the perversion of competition is.

We have sports and teams in high school because the process of education is enhanced by them. Young people are exposed to values of participation, discipline, teamwork and resilience through sports. Those values are present even in pickup baseball games and half-court basketball games. And now states eagerly begin to indoctrinate these kids that it isn’t winning the game that counts but winning the bet, that it isn’t playing the best you can that counts but whether you cover the point spread.

It is indoctrination. “We teach them how the game is played,” Bob Cousy, who played and coached, has said. “Why are we surprised when they play the game the way they were taught it?”

Each time one of those young players sees the state’s line saying Chicago is 7 1/2 over Atlanta, it’s telling him the bet is part of his game. We’re already doing it on radio and television shows that are nothing more than tout sheets with talking heads. We’re doing it in newspapers -- including Newsday -- that run the point spreads every day with the rationalization that people are gambling, and newspapers do have to meet the competition.

Why then, as Bob Knight argues, don’t we advertise the phone numbers of prostitutes and tell which ones are working which street corners? Even in Las Vegas, where nearly anything goes, sports books are not permitted to handle bets on Nevada teams. The fact that Oregon plans to use its winnings to finance state college athletic programs is a dreadful irony. Why shouldn’t Oregon also include wagering on Oregon vs. Washington?

You don’t have to buy the NFL’s self-righteous indignation. The league has reaped the benefits of the fact that a lot of people find watching a football game is enhanced by a bet on it. But it is self-deception to think the league makes public its injury list as a service to bettors; the list is announced so there’s no advantage in bribing a player for inside information.

The argument that the British have no problem with legal betting on sports events -- even by participants -- does not play here. There is nothing in Great Britain, with its system of class distinction, that is even close to the scholastic and collegiate athletic competition we have.

I have this enduring image from high school of a very good player named Hank Bockrath, who became a newspaper man, on the foul line for Lynbrook, which trailed Long Beach by two points with the clock already having run out. Bockrath made the first free throw and missed the second.

“I’ll never forget the look on his face,” said Assemblyman Harvey Weisenberg, who was on the court for Long Beach that afternoon. Weisenberg went on to coach basketball at East Meadow for six seasons, which puts him in a unique position among lawmakers in Albany.

“You definitely don’t want kids thinking of point spreads,” Weisenberg said. “You play for pride in yourself, pride in your team and love of playing the game; gambling is the furthest thing from your mind. I played because I wanted to play for the coach (Bob Gersten) and with those guys. I just wanted to practice with them.”

Sports gambling has been discussed in Albany recently and at other times. “If I thought a bill condoned gambling for athletes in school, I’d reject it,” he said.

Some of what we see tells us our children and our high school athletes are more sophisticated than ever. Television crams into their heads more information than the world knew 40 years ago. But then we hear the argument that induced players to shave points in the great scandal of 1950 was effective again in 1981. Joseph Serota, one of the early fixers, told players: You guys are so good. You don’t have to beat these people into the ground.

Nothing changed.

If while our young people become sophisticated, do we want them made cynical? The bitter line says anyone who can be paid to make a shot can be paid not to make one.

More chilling is the lament from the father of Sherman White, one of the greatest college players at Long Island University, who was caught in the gamblers’ web: “I had to send my son to college to learn to be a crook.”

Should we begin the lessons in the schoolyards?