These guys have taken all of the best tips from drug dealers, right down to offering us their own version of "the first one's free, kid!"
Check out how many different ways you can risk your paycheck in a game: if you're a football fan, you can bet on which team wins (yeah, thanks Grampa!) but also on which team scores the first points, how those points are scored, yards gained on the ground and air - yeah, no chance that any of this bleeds into the game itself and creates a massive scandal five or six minutes from now. After all, it's XFL season. Even the saddest addicts aren't betting on XFL games, are they?
Baseball's even better. You can be a "winner" in one inning, and a "try again" player (we don't use the word "loser" here. Like in scratch-off games, everyone's a winner!) in the next. And you don't have to wait till the next inning to experience that rush of adrenalin that can only come from risking next month's mortgage payment; you can bet on the result of each at-bat. Again, no way this impacts the actual game. It's all in fun, kids. Except for that Pete Rose guy. He's pure evil because he did something bad. Something no player would do today. Of course not.
I'm not at all sure I won't live long enough to see Jamie Foxx and Kevin Hart pitching the Joys of Heroin use on my tv; after all, I've lived to see "The Official Beer of Falling Asleep in the Bathtub" and "You haven't lived until you've risked your kids' college funds" ads. And I'm really healthy, dammit.
Pete Rose's crime was being honest about his motivation.
ReplyDelete