What is the Game Today? By Al Sikes

The much-honored sportswriter, Roger Angel, writing in 1972 about baseball, while reflecting on sports, said, “Sports are too much with us. Late and soon sitting and watching—mostly watching on television—we lay waste our powers of identification and enthusiasm and, in time, attention as more and more closing rallies and crucial putts and late field goals and final playoffs and sudden deaths and world records and world championships unreel themselves ceaselessly before our half-lidded eyes. Professional leagues expand like bubble gum, ever larger and thinner, and the extended sporting seasons, now bunching and overlapping at the ends, conclude in exhaustion and the wrong weather.”

Fifty years later, Angel’s 1972 lament is especially biting.  I recall it for the millions who play inside rather than outside. As Angel’s “time thinned product” invites boredom, today’s owners have spent billions on their boyhood fantasy, cynically pushing their captive audiences to buy more, pay more, and now bet more. It is said the all-in cost of an NFL game is $350-$600 for two persons, for example. The all-in cost of gambling is unknowable.

Bob Costas, a 29-time Emmy Award winner, and recognized as the National Sportscaster of the Year eight times, in a recent interview on sports gambling by his father said there was “a lot of trauma in our family life because he had a volatile temper and the mortgage was often riding on how his bets went….. he didn’t bet on, you know, cards or poker games or crap games or go to the racetrack. He bet on baseball, football, and basketball games.”

There was a time in the early 1970s when I played poker with five or six guys. During football season, we would meet at a friend’s business, and he would give us the Sunday football betting card. It was done quietly—betting on sports was illegal.

And there were the bets with my Dad. We would always bet on the Army-Navy game—he had been in the Army, so I always had Navy. The numbers were digestible; as I recall $10 tops (1950s dollars). I come to this topic initiated, but boy, how times have changed. Too often, stimulation has become the game.

Now my loyal ChatGPT assistant reports that “Online gambling is undergoing rapid, double-digit annual growth—driven by expansion in the U.S., mobile-first strategies, and immersive technology adoption.”

I suspect some of the growth momentum is caused by the micro-bet. Major League Baseball is investigating two specific pitches that Cleveland Guardian pitcher Luis Ortiz threw. Both pitches had a higher-than-usual number of bets placed on them — action that was flagged by a betting integrity firm.

Yes, there are essentially an infinite number of ways you can bet on sports these days. One of them is a micro-bet about what the first pitch of a given inning might be: ball, strike, swinging strike—well use your imagination.

As we “lay waste our powers of identification and enthusiasm,” our ultimate animal spirit object, money, has become the stimulus. The game becomes ours. We either win or lose; who cares who wins the game on the field or in the gym? We get to play regardless of how inanimate we choose to be.

Oh well, the cynical win. The new owners with their billions on the roulette wheel of life. They are the games rights holders; the networks ultimately deal with them. The rights holders mostly own monopolies. Viewers might find an off-brand football league, but of course want to watch their NFL team.

And then there are the middlemen who handle the transactions and the State agencies that provide the gambling licenses—they get a cut too. Maybe we should throw in that part of the health care community that intercedes with the addicted. Maybe that is the final cut.

Al Sikes is the former Chair of the Federal Communications Commission under George H.W. Bush. Al writes on themes from his book, Culture Leads Leaders Follow published by Koehler Books.