Sporting News, The: Keep gaming away from games

Bless her slots-lovin' heart, my wife thinks the Mohegan Sun casino out there in the Connecticut woods is a fabulous place. She loves the waterfall in the casino's Earth section. Loves the Sky's stars. Laughs at the sculpture with the boy's arrow in the bears' hindquarters. A quarter at a time, my wife feeds the Sun's slot machines, certain beyond certainty that the next quarter is the magic quarter that will trigger an avalanche of quarters, quarters by the pounds, quarters rattling loudly, so many quarters that she can declare, proudly, "Almost broke even."

Fine.

It's entertainment.

It cost me more last week to replace my lost 9-iron than my wife spent on her annual communion with one-armed bandits.

So I have no complaint about the Mohegan Sun and no complaint about gambling.

Yet when the Mohegan Sun casino became the owner of a WNBA team that will play in the casino's arena, my reaction was "Uh-oh."

Next, Las Vegas?

Soon enough, Atlantic City?

A visionary named Jim Cook, an entrepreneur in auto racing and golf, once told me, "You think auto racing is popular now? Just wait. When they get parimutuel betting on cars, you'll really see."

Not "if."

He said "when."

The WNBA working in a casino is one step nearer to that "when." Moribund now, the WNBA soon will be dead. But it matters in this argument because it is not some wild thing born of an eccentric's mad desire to find a quicker way to get rid of money than by burning it. The WNBA is part of the elite sports establishment. It's the NBA's little sister.

Big brother created the WNBA on the chance women's professional basketball had an audience. Now that the WNBA, even dying, has driven the rival ABL out of business, the record shows there is not enough of an audience to sustain any women's pro league worth the name. The record is in franchise closures and relocations, the inevitable death throes of any league.

In that sense, the move of the Orlando Miracle is no surprise. The surprise, and discomfiture, comes because the Miracle, now the Connecticut Sun, moved to a gambling casino--a move certainly approved of by the big boys at NBA headquarters who not that long ago screamed bloody murder at the idea of New Jersey politicians creating legal sports gambling in their state.

One need not be a cynic to think the NBA's rationale--there's no sports betting at the Mohegan Sun--is a convenient cover for a test of public opinion on professional basketball getting into bed with professional gambling.

One man's public opinion: It's wrong for three reasons.

First, there's the Arnie Wexler reason. Clean for 35 years now, he once was a gambler so far gone he used his daughter's birth weight--"7 pounds, 1 ounce"--as a signal to play a 7-1 daily double at the track. Wexler now works as a consultant on gambling issues and as an advocate for treatment of compulsive gambling disease.

"I'm OK with grown-ups in a casino for a basketball game," he said. "My complaint is you've got kids there. Casino execs say, `Gambling is not a game for kids. It's a game for grown-ups.' But you've got kids in that environment, watching basketball on casino property, waiting for their parents to come out. The casinos and the NBA are being hypocritical about it."

Second, there's the Black Sox reason. It's foolish to say the prospect of fixed games is passe now that players make millions of dollars; as recently as the late 20th century, remember, there was a hustler named Pete Rose who bet voraciously on baseball games and was, by more than one account, threatened by organized crime wise guys to whom he owed money. Anyone who thinks great wealth and status are inoculations against temptation must have slept through Enron, WorldCom and Monica Lewinsky.

"I have gotten calls asking for help from a major league baseball player making $800,000 a year," Wexler said. "Also from a No. 1 draft pick in baseball, from an NFL kicker who stole money from his brother to gamble and from three other NFL players, one a big-timer in the '50s. Thing is, you don't hear about these men--they're not treated for a disease, they're treated as crooks--because they're just blackballed out of their games."

The football, baseball and basketball leagues have profited in attention from the gambling culture that has swept over this country even as they denounce real connections to that culture. (Great quote from Wexler: "How hypocritical of the NFL not to allow a Las Vegas tourist ad on the Super Bowl telecast. Without gambling, legal and illegal, the NFL is soccer.")

But no major league executive believes it's a good thing to have customers wondering whether the games are honest. And if the participants are allowed, even encouraged, to bet on games, human nature makes certain the results of those games are suspect.

The third reason is so light it all but floats off this paper and yet, to me, it is the most important. Gamblers want the games to be about who covers. I want the games to be about who's best.

DAVE KINDRED

dkindred@sportingnews.com