Athletes like Pete Rose and Paul Hornung and Alex Karras have been suspended or banned from their sports over gambling, Mr Rose’s suspension lasting until after his death. The “Black Sox scandal” of 1919 occurred when eight members of the Chicago White Sox threw the World Series to the Cincinnati Reds, allegedly for a payment from gamblers betting on the outcome. Commissioners like Kenesaw Mountain Landis and Pete Rozelle were determined to keep their sports untainted by any connection with gambling.
But now we see all sorts of gambling information being put out by the major professional sports leagues. The NFL Network, owned by the National Football League, has plenty of sports gambling commercials, and I have also seen such in NBA and WNBA broadcasts. The NFL requires individual teams to publish injury reports and statuses during the week prior to the next game, and who needs that besides gamblers?
And so we get this:
Philly is now the No. 1 market for online gambling companies — and addiction helplines are ringing off the hook
Advertisers spent $37 million on the Philadelphia market in 2025. Online gambling help calls and texts have more than doubled in Pennsylvania and New Jersey since Mar 2021.
by Max Marin and Lizzie Mulvey | Wednesday, December 10, 2025 | 5:00 AM EST
One man, buried under $20,000 in online gambling debt, became homeless. A woman lost $13,000 and missed her last five mortgage payments. A mother gambled away her son’s college tuition, piling up over $100,000 in debt.
Such dire stories — shared with gambling helplines in Pennsylvania and New Jersey in recent years — are on the rise. And for the growing number of people, the problem isn’t the casino, but the apps on their phones that let them gamble anywhere, 24/7.
“My family is hosting fundraisers for my son who had a stroke, and here I am, gambling on my phone,” one caller said. “What’s wrong with me?”
The Philadelphia media market — which encompasses the city, southeastern Pa., central and southern New Jersey — has become an epicenter of online gambling in the United States. In 2024, internet gaming and sports wagering revenues alone topped $6 billion in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, up from about $3.6 billion in 2021.
The last play field goal by the Las Vegas Raiders, which changed their loss to the Denver Broncos from ten points to seven points, certainly looked like a play to do nothing but change winners and losers on the betting line.
As it happens, I finished Mario Puzo’s book The Godfather just a week or so ago. In it, Don Vito Corleone declined the opportunity to go into narcotics, saying that he’d lose his political friends and protection if he did, while the police pretty much looked the other way when it came to gambling, which they viewed as a harmless vice. But while gambling doesn’t leave junkies sleeping on the sidewalks and doorways of Kensington, the way narcotics do, there is damage nonetheless.
In the same period, the amount of calls and texts to 1-800-GAMBLER rose in both Pennsylvania and New Jersey, two of only six states in the U.S. where both sports betting and online casino games are legal. But calls about online gambling problems rose significantly more – 180% in Pennsylvania and 160% in New Jersey in that period. In 2019, only about one in ten Pa. callers said online gambling was their main issue. By 2024, it was every other caller.
My paternal grandparents, living in Antioch, California, would save their money, and occasionally take a trip to Reno, Nevada, to gamble. When they ran out of money, they were done. Now the casinos have ATMs all around, so that when gamblers run out of money, they can draw more out of their checking or savings accounts.
Unfortunately, the cited Philadelphia Inquirer article did not tell us whether there was evidence that gambling problems were greater in poorer areas than wealthy ones.
Having lived in the Keystone State, I sort of laughed at what had happened to the gambling ‘industry,’ Originally exclusive to Nevada, New Jersey saw the money that was being made, and legalized casino gambling in Atlantic City. Donald Trump and others built casinos, and flourished. Me? I thought that Atlantic City had wasted their greatest natural resource, their beaches, to promote gambling, and let the beaches go, if not completely to seed, to not very good.
Then Pennsylvania authorized casino gambling, and surprise, surprise, surprise, the Atlantic City casinos suffered, some going out of business, as Pennsylvanians stayed home to gamble. Now it seems as though every state has some form of legalized gambling, even if it’s only state-run lotteries.
I referred to the gambling ‘industry’ above, because this is an ‘industry’ which produces nothing; its sole purpose is to move money from some people to other people, with the state and the gambling ‘hosts’ getting their percentage, regardless of who wins.
The libertarian — not Libertarian! — in me says that if people want to gamble, it’s their business, not the state’s, but I know just as certainly as anyone can that out-of-control gambling destroys people and destroys families. Perhaps gambling shouldn’t be banned, but I cannot argue that we’re better off today than we were when only the Silver State had legalized gambling.