Super Bowl renews debate on sports betting

Super Bowl renews debate on sports betting
Home News Tribune Online 01/26/08
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By RICK MALWITZ
STAFF WRITER
rmalwitz@thnt.com
Super Bowl Sunday has become the biggest nonholiday holiday in American culture, combining a football game with buffet tables, $2.7 million 30-second commercials and wagering — friendly, and not-so-friendly.



Betting is so much a part of major sporting events that mayors and governors cannot resist making cheesy wagers. Before the Giants played the Green Bay Packers last week, Wisconsin's governor had separate bets with the governors of New Jersey and New York — putting Wisconsin bratwurst up against New York pastrami and New Jersey tomatoes.

In Nevada, the only state where sports betting is legal, there is talk of the first $100 million game, eclipsing the record of $94.5 million bet two years ago when the Pittsburgh Steelers played the Seattle Seahawks.

What has boosted interest in Nevada and elsewhere are the two opponents in this year's Super Bowl, scheduled for Feb. 3. The Giants are representing the nation's population center and the New England Patriots are seeking to become the first team in National Football League history to finish with a 19-0 record.

New England opened as a 14-point favorite, which means they would have to defeat the Giants by more than a 14-point margin to "cover the spread." The spread fell to 12 points, owing to bets from Giants' supporters.

What will be hard to measure is the amount of money wagered in office pools — that are legal as long as all money goes to winners and no one takes a cut to operate the pool.

Estimates of how much money will be bet in legal office pools — or illegally on the Internet or with bookmakers — range as high as $4 billion, according to the Council on Compulsive Gambling of New Jersey.

Allowing how wagering on sports is so prevalent, the notion of making sports betting legal in New Jersey has been revived this week.

Members of the state Assembly are promoting a move to allow sports wagering in the Atlantic City casinos as a means of increasing traffic to Atlantic City and raising additional state revenue.

"New Jersey must take every step to control illegal sports betting rings," said Assemblyman Lou Greenwald (D-Camden), chairman of the assembly budget committee. "Those efforts should include the establishment of a legal, regulated mechanism for law-abiding people to place wagers on professional sporting competitions. Atlantic City is the right atmosphere for such an enterprise."

Making sports betting legal would replicate what New Jersey did in the 1960s when it began a lottery, patterning its game of chance after the so-called numbers racket.

The scope of illegal betting was highlighted last March when Monmouth County Prosecutor Luis Valentin and New Jersey State Police Superintendent Rick Fuentes announced the arrest of 47 individuals in a betting ring that did business in New Jersey, New York and Pennsylvania.

In announcing the arrests, Valenti termed the scope of the gambling ring "staggering." He estimated that between August 2005 and February 2007 the ring took in about $500 million in bets — more than five times the amount wagered legally in Nevada on recent Super Bowls.

"Illegal gambling is a quality of life crime that may seem harmless, but is often perpetrated by organized and sometimes violent criminal enterprises," said Gayle Cameron, deputy superintendent of investigations for the state police.

To make sports betting legal in New Jersey would require a change in federal law that barred states from adding sports betting after Dec. 31, 1993. That legislation was introduced by then-U.S. Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J., a former professional basketball player.

Senate President Richard J. Codey, D-Essex, does not think the federal law could be successfully challenged.

"I think Appalachian State would have to beat the Giants before the federal government would allow us to change the law to permit sports betting in casinos," Codey said this week.

His reference reminds bettors that Appalachian State was a 31-point underdog when it defeated the University of Michigan in September.

Contributing:

The Associated Press