On betting’s biggest day, a new scandal puts the sports world on edge
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As millions of Americans raced to fill out brackets and place wagers on teenage basketball players Thursday, another scandal amplified calls for the country’s booming sports-betting industry to be restrained – and reformed.
The Los Angeles Dodgers fired Shohei Ohtani’s interpreter Wednesday night, after the translator told ESPN that Ohtani paid off the interpreter’s offshore gambling debts and as Ohtani’s lawyer told another story, accusing the translator of stealing roughly $4.5 million.
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While fans sorted through the ramifications and Ohtani played on in the Dodgers’ season-opening series in Seoul, experts and amateurs alike joined office pools and placed wagers on the first round of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament, the country’s closest thing to an official sports betting holiday.
Players, leagues and fans have been reckoning with the still-unfolding effects of sports gambling since a Supreme Court ruling handed the question of legalization to states in 2018. Each constituency may be arriving at the realization those impacts have mushroomed beyond anyone’s control.
“The amount of money is so enormous that it is almost impossible to attack the problem,” former MLB commissioner Fay Vincent said in a phone interview Thursday. “Theoretically, there’s nothing wrong with an adult who has control of his brain and control of his financial situation betting on sports. The problem is, the sport itself gets so caught up in the amount of money that I don’t know how a professional sport or the NCAA or anybody – how do you draw up a code of conduct for an individual? What’s the line? When do we start admitting this is a really big problem?”
