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FOMO
The Leafs won a playoff round for the first time since Magellan found passage through Tierra del Fuego. The Bruins lost too. An expansion team defeated the Stanley Cup champs. It was a big weekend in the NHL playoffs. With the promise of more to come. So why, in this most joyous of weeks, am I increasingly uneasy about the reporting and coverage of hockey—sports more broadly?
I suspect Wayne Gretzky and Connor McDavid are doing okay financially (I don’t know their personal circumstances, of course, but I would be surprised if they are pressed for cash or uncertain about how far their net worth will carry them). So why are they peddling an online sports betting business?
Why is Ron McLean throwing to a young man named Cabbie between periods whose singular role is to present the current odds of Chandler Stephenson scoring the next goal or the mathematical likelihood of the Devils beating the spread? On behalf of a sports betting site?
Suddenly—or, at least, it feels this way— sports betting has insinuated itself into every corner of our sports consciousness. Or is it an algorithm that has brought Draftkings, Bet365 and Fanduel to my screen? Or FOMO? Am I truly experiencing a sporting event if I don’t have a wager on the outcome? In any event, we need to talk.
It is not so long ago that bookies were considered lesser beings—running numbers in the shadows, preying on weakness, threatening violence upon punters. But today, the bookie is out in the open—on our phones, on our screens, and marketed by our heroes. Wayne Gretzky and Connor McDavid are the new bookies. Everywhere all at once. Suddenly, a seedy vice has become a respectable activity.
Sports betting has crowded out truck and beer makers vying for eyeballs. But it is more insidious. The line between advertising and reporting is vanishing. Any story you will read about the Leafs in round two will also inform you of the odds of Toronto winning, of Samsonov starting in net and Bunting earning an assist—followed by an invitation to use this information to make a bet.
This morning, a front-page online headline on a national newspaper site offered to teach the reader how to bet on soccer with “a complete guide to understanding soccer odds, money lines, totals and futures.” It was presented as a news story in the same font and format as the stories before and after.
We seem in potentially unsafe territory.
This is not a rant against gambling—nor an expression of virtuousness. When I was young, our family celebrated special occasions at the harness racing track near Ottawa. We would place $2 bets on ten races, and we mostly lost. But the thrill of winning just one small purse magically eradicated all the sourness of previous failures. At that moment, I understood horseflesh as if I had moulded it with my own hands and could calculate in a flash all the variables that formed a winning trotter. I was unstoppable. Yet, each night I went home penniless.
Still, it was a fun and memorable evening. So, I get the punter’s appeal.
My brother Steve has worked for the past decade in a scattering of communities across the top of Hudson’s Bay, from Baker Lake to Iqaluit. He has witnessed firsthand the challenges posed by living in the dark and punishing cold for eight-month stretches—in communities that exist in government-manufactured economies. Of poverty, neglect and inertia. Lately, he has witnessed the rapid onset of online gambling and the addiction that follows in these communities. It is becoming a significant— though largely unreported—scourge afflicting many families. Across the socio-economic spectrum.
Everyone has a phone. A WiFi connection. Many communities are dry, and offer few other means of interacting socially. The appeal of online gambling is as apparent. Steve reports that a surprising number of his co-workers and neighbours are sinking under the weight of gambling debts incurred on these sites.
Of course, hard luck gambling stories have always been with us. And likely always will. But never has access been as pervasive as it is today. Nor has the marketing been as insistent and unrelenting. Or the opportunity to punt so accessible.
So much so that I find myself during games wondering if I am missing out on the full experience of the game. Without a wager on the outcome, is the thrill of victory muted? Diminished? Perhaps the thrill of the Panthers defeating the Bruins in overtime would have been amplified had money been on the line.
I worry that we won’t acknowledge the problem until it is massive and grotesque. It is an activity we do alone. In isolation. Behind closed doors. Perhaps fed by growing loneliness—a product of pandemicinduced detachment.
But northern communities bear watching—for a new reason. I suspect we will hear much more about gambling addiction in far-north communities in the coming years. They are the canaries in this dangerous new coal mine. I put the odds at something like 4/3.
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