The integrity of games appears increasingly compromised by betting scandals. That’s a big problem.
By MAX BOOT
Washington Post
November 17, 2025
Readers of this column may be surprised to learn that I don’t spend all of my time thinking about drones or diplomatic démarches. I’m also a huge — fanatical may not be inappropriate — sports fan. I devote a ridiculous amount of time to following my two favorite teams: the New York Knicks and the San Francisco 49ers. (Why New York and San Francisco? The former is my current home, and the latter is close to where I went to college.) I also follow, with lesser degrees of devotion, tennis (I never miss a U.S. Open), baseball, soccer, and college football and basketball (particularly the Cal Golden Bears).
I find that sports fandom provides a much-needed psychological salve when I’m encountering tough times either in my personal life or the nation’s life. I watched the Knicks particularly obsessively when my mother was dying, for example. Now it’s a relief to escape the dismal state of our politics by watching the dramas on the hardwood or gridiron. A sentiment attributed to Chief Justice Earl Warren, among others, runs something like this: “I always turn to the sports page first, which records people’s accomplishments. The front page has nothing but man’s failures.”
Integral to the spectacle is that the outcome must be unpredictable, with players on both sides competing as hard as humanly possible; I find nothing interesting or edifying about the scripted spectacle of professional wrestling. Thus, I am deeply pained by the possibility that the results we see on the field are corrupted by the prevalence of sports gambling. Yet that sobering concern is inescapable after the betting scandals in recent weeks.
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