Dan was 45 years old when I first met him, a handsome, suntanned guy in a high-end shirt, someone who was made for the pages of a golf apparel catalog. Never married, he lived with his widowed mother, both to care for her as she aged and to save his modest wages from his job at an insurance audit company. June was an engaged member of the church, which gave me the opportunity to meet her son while making a house call one day. She worried about Dan’s meager friendship circle consisting of only a few acquaintances from high school. Watching sports on TV was his passion. Given the chance to talk about the latest game, his personality leapt to life.
Aside from a few brief encounters, I lost track of Dan until his mother died. He was 64 then and the heir of the tiny ranch house he’d grown up in. Though I found him still dressed to the nines, he’d lost weight and didn’t appear particularly healthy. Life was collapsing in on him, it turns out, which became fully evident a year later when his closest friend encouraged me to drive by Dan’s house. There on the curb sat every piece of furniture that once graced his home. The bank had foreclosed on the property, and Dan was officially homeless, a tragic casualty of sports betting.
Betting on sports stayed out of the public eye for much of the 20th century. Notable exceptions involved allegations of the cardinal sin of American sports: players themselves involved in betting on games, as in the Black Sox scandal at the 1919 World Series and Pete Rose’s ban from baseball in 1989. Only with the arrival of online sports betting companies like FanDuel and DraftKings in the early 2010s, and the development of phone apps for placing bets, did sports betting become mainstream. One no longer had to get dressed and drive to a windowless casino along the interstate to gamble. Now you could gamble your life away 24/7 from your own recliner, betting on virtually every element of any game, from the color of a team’s Gatorade to the odds of their quarterback getting injured.
