A safe bet

The NFL doesn't have to worry about its games being fixed

Unfortunately, when you watch the Super Bowl this Sunday you will not be allowed to see a commercial touting the elegant vacation properties of Las Vegas. The National Football League has vetoed the spot, even though it doesn't mention gambling, because the NFL, whose popularity is bulwarked by gambling, wants to pretend that it will have nothing to do with gambling.

The decision is not hypocritical so much as it is, simply, childish. Really, it's time for the NFL and the National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball to grow up and deal with gambling maturely. Please, let's face it: if there are games, people will bet. It's idiotic to run away from that fact. Indeed, in many countries, national lotteries are based on soccer results. In an adult place like England, you can walk into any neighborhood betting shop and get a wager down on just about any event -- including, say, the British Open and Wimbledon.

And you know, I haven't heard a single suggestion that Phil Mickelson or Anna Kournikova haven't won championships because gamblers have gotten to them.

But the American sports leagues love to maintain this fiction that gamblers are a threat to their games. By making a big fuss about this, the leagues can then shout about the wonderful job they are doing in saving their games from fixes. It's like the guy sitting on the street corner waving his arms. What are you doing? I'm keeping the elephants away. I don't see any elephants. I know, I'm keeping them away. The NFL, the NBA and baseball are doing a great job of keeping the elephants away.

The last time there was any real evidence of even an attempted fix in one of our major pro sports was a half-century ago in the NBA by a rogue player named Jack Molinas. The last time there was an attempted fix in the NFL was in 1946. It has been more than 80 years since gamblers seriously tried to fix baseball games. The players in our professional leagues simply make too much money, which is why the few attempted fixes there have been invariably involved poor college kids with no pro future.

Yet, the leagues still use gambling as a whipping boy. The NFL denies the existence of Las Vegas. The NBA wouldn't put a franchise in Toronto until pro basketball was banned from legal sports books in Ontario. Baseball waves Pete Rose like a bloody shirt. Why don't we react to this the way we would to President Bush if he regularly talked about the threat to America from the Bolsheviks or the Barbary Pirates?

Rose mostly speaks nonsense, but the one topic on which he makes perfect sense is the double standard under which he is punished. Drug offenders in baseball and other sports get all sorts of second chances. Drugs -- not gambling -- threaten the integrity of all sports. But it's easier to scream about the imaginary dangers of gambling fixes than to deal with the real problem of drugs. And if the NFL was honestly concerned the commercials it would ban from its games would be food advertisements. More and more of its players are grotesque 300-pounders, walking coronaries, who are fattened up for games like geese for their liver paté. Hey, Commissioner Tagliabue: Vegas ain't the problem. Heal thyself.

So, may I say to all Americans: go to Las Vegas, that Xanadu in the desert. Enjoy its many splendors. And be sure to visit a friendly sports book and bet the Super Bowl.

Whoever you wager, you can be absolutely assured of an honest game. All of the Bucs and all of the Raiders will be playing their hardest to win.

Sports Illustrated senior contributing writer Frank Deford is a regular contributor to CNNSI.com and appears each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. He is a longtime correspondent for HBO's Real Sports and his new novel, An American Summer (Sourcebooks Trade), is available now at bookstores everywhere.

 

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