Seven years ago today, the U.S. Supreme Court opened the floodgates for legalized gambling in any state that wants to embrace it. Most have.
It has changed attitudes. Removed the stigma. Made betting available to anyone and everyone with a smartphone.
It also helped lay the foundation for baseball’s abrupt about-face regarding Pete Rose, and other players whose gambling had resulted in banishments.
Now, the ultimate affront to the integrity of the game comes with a deadline. Once the player dies, it’s forgiven and forgotten. The player is unshunned. He’s no longer permanently ineligible. He can be voted into the Hall of Fame.
The thinking is that, since the player is no longer, you know, alive, he can no longer threaten the integrity of the game. Obviously, that doesn’t erase the behavior that resulted in the banishment.
The infraction apparently doesn’t matter. “Shoeless” Joe Jackson’s punishment came from the ultimate violation of competitive integrity — participating in the throwing of a championship. But he’s back in the fold now, too.
Football has yet to experience a scandal similar to the ones that brought down Rose and Jackson. When it does, what will happen? Will there be a truly permanent ban? Will that permanent ban expire when the player does?
Regardless of why MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred changed his mind (some think his thinking was significantly influenced by a recent meeting with the President), the outcome becomes one less brick in the firewall between rampant fan betting and a clear and bright line for players and coaches who become corrupted by gambling.
The biggest shift in thinking comes from the new reality that the expungement of a player who fixed games and/or bet on games in which he was involved ends when the player dies. It’s fair to wonder whether that will change, too.
If throwing games no longer warrants permanently ejecting the player from the sport because his death squares him with the house, the debt arguably can be paid before he dies. Maybe when he turns 80. Maybe when he’s 75. How about 70?
Maybe the ultimate punishment will have a maximum duration of, say, twenty years.
The point is this: Now that gambling is as accepted as other victimless vices (and now that all sports leagues are profiting handsomely from it), players and coaches ensnared by Lady Luck apparently won’t warrant the same lifetime-and-beyond consequences. While that hardly means there won’t be punishment or that the punishment won’t be severe, it’s suddenly no longer a sanction that lasts forever.
It only lasts until the player has gone to the hereafter. With further revisions that were heretofore inconceivable potentially coming as gambling becomes as engrained in the American experience as drinking and smoking.
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