There’s something sad about the effect that increased legal access to gambling has had on the wide world of spectator sports. Opinion by Rick Salutin
There’s something sad about the effect that increased legal access to gambling has had on the wide world of spectator sports.
It infects everything, including the sports talk shows. The journos and ex-jocks can’t resist strutting their savvy about gambling, odds, the over-under. They sound like Damon Runyon characters in “Guys and Dolls.” I’ll die happy if I never have to hear the words, Al’s Brother, on TSN’s Overdrive again.
I’ve always believed — based, I grant, on the family album — that people gamble most destructively when they’ve lost all hope of legitimately rising through merit or effort. In other words, when the game’s clearly rigged. In my teens, when I argued with my dad that moral wrongs must be fought at any cost, he countered, “Even when they’re wrong, they’re right.”
Now, with gambling possible even during games — you can bet on individual moments, not just wins and loses — the ugly elements of reality that drove fansgames hoping that worthier values might prevail in life — have wormed their way back in, to mock those hopes in the act.The government has paused the expansion of justifications for Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying Act , which has already resulted in far more deaths here than comparable places like California.
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