Copyright 2006 The Financial Times Limited
Financial Times (London, England)
July 24, 2006 Monday
London Edition 1
SECTION: COMPANIES INTERNATIONAL; Pg. 22

LENGTH: 639 words

HEADLINE: Ghost of Shoeless Joe still haunts US sport The fate that befell a baseball star helps explain attitudes to sports gambling, says Christopher Bowe

BYLINE: By CHRISTOPHER BOWE

DATELINE: NEW YORK

BODY:


"Say it ain't so, Joe . . . " There may be no sadder words in the American lexicon - and none that better explain the country's uneasiness with gambling on sports.

The phrase - probably apocryphal - was attributed nearly a century ago to a young boy. Standing outside a courthouse, he implored the baseball player "Shoeless" Joe Jackson to deny that he had conspired with seven of his Chicago White Sox teammates to throw the 1919 World Series.

Shoeless Joe uttered no such response, and despite being acquitted in court, he and his seven teammates were banned for life from baseball, becoming members of a team described ever since as the "Black Sox".

It is an image that is worth recalling for anyone, particularly anyone living in the UK, who is trying to make sense of last week's federal indictments ofLondon-listed BetonSports and the arrest of DavidCarruthers, its chief executive.

Experts say the spectre of gambling, and the possibility that games can be fixed, continues to haunt a country that sees sports as a morality play, in which hard work and perseverance are rewarded.

"We all want to say we are all on a level playing field and we do our jobs and get rewarded for it," said Richard Lapchick, an expert on sports ethics who teaches at the University of Central Florida.

Tim Otteman, sports gambling expert at Central Michigan University, adds: "Most of this country is founded on people who left somewhere else. . . taking a chance. Americans are gamblers; we're willing to take the shot. But the one thing we hold more dear than anything else is uncertainoutcome. . .anything ispossible."

The decision to ban Shoeless Joe and his teammates by Kenesaw Mountain Landis, a stern former federal judge who was given the task of cleaning up the national sport, set the stage for an explosion in popularity of baseball - a golden era, and the birth of sport as big business in the US.

But sports gambling remains a big business. One study estimates Dollars 80bn to Dollars 380bn is wagered illegally per year on sports in the US. Betting "lines" are ubiquitous in newspapers and frequently mentioned by commentators in other media.

As a result, the history of sport in the US has been marked by periodic crackdowns on gambling and match fixing.

Some of the biggest scandals involved college basketball, in which amateur players were accused of "shaving points" - purposefully holding down their team's score to help gamblers win bets.

In 1951, the City College of New York, then the collegiate basketball champion, became a symbol of corruption when its players were among 32 players from seven schools arrested for fixing 86 games.

A decade later, the federal government moved to prevent sports gambling by passing the Wire Act. Part of a war on organised crime launched by Robert Kennedy, attorney general and brother of President John Kennedy, the law aimed to stop the interstate flow of gambling information, and is now being used to challenge online gambling.

Nelson Rose, a gambling law expert from Whittier Law School, said: "The Wire Act was designed to cut 'the wire' which was the telegraph that every illegal bookie had to have to know who won a horse race before his patrons."

More recently, the Black Sox scandal was recalled as baseball's hit leader, Pete Rose, was banned in 1989 for gambling on his own sport.

In filing an indictment against BetonSports, federal prosecutors said they were trying to send a message that online gambling on sports would not be tolerated in the US. Based in Costa Rica, BetonSports's main market was the US. But some experts predict that sports gambling, particularly on the internet, will be hard to stop.

"I have great belief that supply meets demand," said Koleman Strumpf, an economist and gambling expert at University of Kansas. "Especially on this issue, the US really stands alone."

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