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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Noel King: And I'm Noel King.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today, the Supreme Court of the United States fundamentally changed sports. It struck down a 1992 law that prevented states from legalizing sports gambling. Now, New Jersey is at the head of a long line of states looking to allow their citizens to bet it all on the home team. We're going to talk about what this means for sports and for the country.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Emily Bazelon is a writer for The New York Times Magazine. She's been following this case closely. Emily, thanks for joining us.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: Thanks for having me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, let's start with the basics. What was the case about?
--:-- Emily Bazelon: The case was about whether Congress had the power to tell states that they were not allowed to allow sports gambling. And the decision was 6-3, with Ginsburg, Breyer, and Sotomayor dissenting.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That was a pretty easy case, actually. The majority opinion is by Justice Alito, and he invokes this line of Supreme Court cases that's called the Anti-Commandeering Doctrine.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: That's right. The idea is that Congress can't go around telling the states what to do, like telling the states how to direct their resources.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, how does this work in states that have already legalized gambling versus those who haven't yet legalized gambling?
--:-- Emily Bazelon: In states that have already legalized gambling, specifically in New Jersey, which was carrying the banner here, sports gambling is going to be legal. I mean, they're just going to get going. And we should also mention that the 1992 federal law had an exception in it for Nevada.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, any state that wants to legalize sports gambling is going to be able to do that.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: That's right. And there are a bunch of other states, including my home state of Connecticut, that have plans to move in that direction.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But the states will have to do something first. It's not like they just flipped a switch at the Supreme Court on Monday.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: Exactly. But essentially what's going to happen is this $100 billion industry of American sports gambling is going to become legal. It's going to move out of the black market and the gray market into a legalized activity that states can tax and states can regulate.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And does that mean it's soon to not be a hundred billion dollar industry anymore, but like a trillion dollar industry?
--:-- Emily Bazelon: Maybe. Like, for example, sports gambling is legal in the UK and it is a huge industry there.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, who wins and loses in New Jersey with legalized gambling now or across the country, really?
--:-- Emily Bazelon: Well, the winner, I would say, is Atlantic City. I grew up in Philadelphia, which is near Atlantic City. And when I was growing up, Atlantic City was like, you know, a kind of thriving place where people went to casinos. It has since fallen on harder times. And something like legalized gambling could prop it up again.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And the losers in New Jersey are people who don't like sports gambling.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: Yeah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Are you going to place any bets?
--:-- Emily Bazelon: I'm not. I'm so averse to taking risks and losing money.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But you know who's going to be doing some sports gambling are your sons.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: Yeah. I have a 15-year-old and an 18-year-old, and they're just very interested.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Gambling, as much as people criticize it for potentially harming the sport, gambling is also a way in which people get interested in the sport, too.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: Yeah, it doesn't bother me at all. I mean, if they started gambling large sums of money, then I would be concerned. But small sums, it seems okay.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So as long as they don't, like, bet your house on it, it's cool.
--:-- Emily Bazelon: Yeah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Emily Bazelon hosts the Slate Political Gap Fest.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Up next on Today Explained, how this decision from the Supreme Court might change our favorite sports.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Brian Curtis is the editor-at-large of The Ringer. Brian, thanks for joining us.
--:-- Brian Curtis: Thanks for having me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, how did this happen? I mean, I think we know how this happened legally, but how did this maybe normalization of sports betting happen to the point where the Supreme Court looked at it and said, of course, of course you can do this anywhere, not just Vegas?
--:-- Brian Curtis: Well, it's funny, you know, so I think we basically had a century in which the media, in this case, newspapers and television, basically had to, every time they talked about sports gambling, they had to talk about it with a wink.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You'd have a late touchdown in Monday Night Football, and Al Michaels would say, geez, you know, there are a lot of people who really care about that touchdown.
--:-- Brian Curtis: And in newspapers, the gambling line was in tiny agate type in the back of the paper. But it was unheard of for the sports columnist to sit there and explicitly talk about, hey, I wagered 500 bucks this weekend on the Patriots.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Just wouldn't happen.
--:-- Brian Curtis: Then I think about 10 or 15 years ago, sort of around the dawn of the new century, that completely changed.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: My boss Bill Simmons starts devoting lots of space in his column to gambling and his podcast as well.
--:-- Brian Curtis: They avoided the first bet because they said it was a mistake and then they didn't avoid the second bet and then the second bet lost and we lost all this money when they made the mistake and then they wouldn't give us the money back.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Now you've got Scott Van Pelt on SportsCenter, ESPN's flagship show, doing a whole segment called Bad Beats, where he explicitly says the line was seven points.
--:-- Brian Curtis: The team wound up only winning by five and gamblers all over the country were really pissed off.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I think the like cumulative effect of that is it really just normalized sports gambling.
--:-- Brian Curtis: It made it seem like this is something everybody's doing. This is something that's fun. This is something that's cool.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You think that's right?
--:-- Brian Curtis: Yeah.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So when I think about what was changing 10 or 15 years ago, I can't help but feel like the internet might have had something to do with this, did it?
--:-- Brian Curtis: Totally. The old censors that would have prevented guys like me from writing about this stuff fell away, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Newspapers started to shrink. TV networks didn't carry the weight they once did in American life.
--:-- Brian Curtis: And the conversation was happening on Twitter. It was happening on the internet. It was happening on ESPN.com.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And what was verboten was no longer verboten.
--:-- Brian Curtis: And people said, why can't I talk about this, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Van Pelt told me recently, like, he just started doing it and he was surprised at how little pushback he got.
--:-- Brian Curtis: Nobody said, you know, you're corrupting the children.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That call was made.
--:-- Brian Curtis: But we are talking here about serious potential gambling addiction, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, people in Vegas sitting around, you know, screens watching sports intently, they don't look very happy.
--:-- Brian Curtis: They look kind of sick or something.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Can I say that?
--:-- Brian Curtis: Yeah, no, I think you can say that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I was in Australia for a couple of months this year where sports gambling is already legal and was already legal.
--:-- Brian Curtis: And there was this national conversation going on in Australia about what are we doing? Have we now, are we processing sports completely through the lens of gambling?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Which in Australia, the answer is at least partially yes, you know, right?
--:-- Brian Curtis: I mean, when I was there, like the NBA was a huge gambling thing because it was basketball is popular in Australia, but also there were 80 plus NBA games a year, right?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Right.
--:-- Brian Curtis: For every team.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So they could just gamble on that all the time and not have to wait for the next Australian rules football match to start.
--:-- Brian Curtis: And so that's another thing, right? It's like, how do we just think about sports at all?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Is it football has been, you know, the American game for a bunch of decades now, partly because it happens so infrequently, right?
--:-- Brian Curtis: It happens once a week, but maybe that's bad in gambling world.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Maybe we want things that happen all the time so we can have more hits and stuff like that.
--:-- Brian Curtis: And how might it change the sports themselves, what we're watching on the field, on the court, or the diamond?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I mean, the obvious question feels like might teams start throwing games more now that there's going to be billions upon billions of dollars infused into the gambling that's going on?
--:-- Brian Curtis: It's weird how game throwing has sort of like not been a huge topic over this period we're talking about.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like, I think part of it is, you know, the Black Sox field of dreams thing is so far in memory.
--:-- Brian Curtis: You know, it's almost like it's just from another time and it really is from another time.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Then in 1919, his team, the Chicago White Sox, they threw the World Series.
--:-- Brian Curtis: What's through? It means they lost it on purpose. Gamblers paid them to.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That hasn't been a big thing.
--:-- Brian Curtis: I think the biggest thing that we've seen from the leagues is how do we make money on this? How do we capture this revenue stream that we're not capturing because it's illegal?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Like Adam Silver, the NBA commissioner, wrote a New York Times op-ed a couple years ago saying we should legalize it, which was really shocking, right?
--:-- Brian Curtis: Like his biggest fear wasn't that, you know, basketball players were going to start throwing games. His biggest fear was that the NBA wasn't going to get a cut of the money that was already being wagered.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You work for a sports forward organization.
--:-- Brian Curtis: The Ringer, a sports forward organization.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: What was the general sentiment there when this happened earlier this week?
--:-- Brian Curtis: I think if you listen to Simmons' podcast, it was somewhere between Mardi Gras and New Year's Day.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: In terms of the celebration.
--:-- Brian Curtis: Which isn't to say we also read a piece about the effects of this thing and exactly what we're talking about, about thinking through the effects.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But no, I think for a lot of people this has been something that they were doing already and to see that it could be a much bigger part of the sports conversation than it already was, I think that's a happy thing, sure.
--:-- Brian Curtis: Okay, so it's still Mardi Gras and then in a few weeks we'll deal with the hangover maybe.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, that's right. We'll all be coping at the same time having hair of the dog after we've lost all our money and ruined society.
--:-- Brian Curtis: Great. Looking forward to it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Brian, thanks so much.
--:-- Brian Curtis: Thanks for this, Sean. Really appreciate it.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Brian Curtis is the editor-at-large of The Ringer.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained is produced in association with Stitcher and we're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thanks again to Mattress Firm for supporting the show today.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If you want to learn more about Mattress Firm, I'd recommend their website as a place to start. It's mattressfirm.com. And if you add a slash and a podcast to that URL, you'll find a way to save 10% when you use the discount code podcast10 before June 5th.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained is Sean Rameswaram and Noel King.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thanks for listening.
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--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained is a production of Vox Media.
