When Sports Feels Just As Dirty As Politics — 10/27/25
Sports and politics have always both reflected our broader society. The former tennis star Billie Jean King famously said, “Sports are a microcosm of society,” suggesting that competitive athletics reflect not just our recreational interests, but our standards, our conflicts, and our social structures. Journalist Andrew Breitbart asserted that “politics is downstream from culture,” making the case that most political change occurs as a result of similar shifts in the broader values of a civilization.
King’s and Breitbart’s observations could just as easily be reversed. Politics is also a miniature version of society. It doesn’t happen in a vacuum but is often an intensified and exaggerated version of our public conduct and social interaction. The manner in which we invest in our favorite sports teams and players flows from our cultural habits and behavior: the concepts of fair competition and teamwork, abiding by pre-determined rules, and applauding effort, skill, and outcome are all attitudes that we apply to sports after developing them in the rest of our lives.
That’s why the current NBA gambling scandal is so disturbing, not just by what it says about the relationship between professional sports and organized crime in our country, but also by the lessons we can learn about the state of our culture and society and the polluting effect that our politics has on both. A social and cultural environment in which politicians and athletes feel empowered to cheat, assuming that an unfair victory is preferable to a legitimate competition, is one that tolerates intentional misconduct and rewards illicit behavior if it achieves a desirable outcome. This is a world in which the end can always justify the means.
The FBI’s probe into sports gambling and game-fixing that has resulted in the arrest of almost three dozen current and former NBA players and their accomplices is not unique. As sports betting has come to dominate the media and digital landscape in recent years, other athletes in several other professional and college sports have been accused of similar misconduct. The strategy employed by large-scale gamblers to pay large sums of money to athletes to expend less than full effort to affect the outcome of a competition is nothing new: the scandals of the Chicago “Black Sox” intentionally losing the 1919 World Series and the City College of New York basketball team shaving points in the 1951 NCAA basketball tournament roiled the Major League Baseball and college sports universes and resulted in harsh crackdowns and major reforms. Baseball star Pete Rose was suspended from baseball and barred from that sport’s Hall of Fame in 1989 for betting on games, including those that involved his own team.
But that was a more innocent century. Rose was reinstated by the baseball commissioner earlier this year after pressure from President Donald Trump. Ever since the Supreme Court overturned a law restricting sports gambling in 2018 (which had been sponsored by former senator and basketball star Bill Bradley), the ability to wager on athletic competition has never been easier. Most media platforms and sports leagues actively promote betting as a way to increase fan interest: it is now almost impossible to watch a major sporting event without being inundated by potential gambling opportunities.
It’s extremely unlikely that we’ll see the stronger crackdowns that resulted after the Black Sox, CCNY, or Rose scandals. There is far too much money at stake, and both the media outlets that cover sports and the leagues themselves have become overly dependent on those revenues. But the point of today’s discussion is not about necessary but unlikely legislative remedy or legal consequences, but rather how a society confronts, accepts, or embraces what once would have been considered intolerable behavior.
The same gradual slide toward accepting increasingly lower standards of comportment from our elected representatives has poisoned our politics. We have become so accustomed to politicians placing their partisan or personal goals above the needs of their constituents—or defending the inexcusable actions or statements of their colleagues, as we discussed last week—that we no longer bother with futile outrage.
One last quote to consider: conservative columnist and inveterate baseball fan George Will once wrote, “Sports serve society by providing vivid examples of excellence.”
The question now is the impact when sports provides equally vivid examples of the opposite. A society that no longer condemns evil ultimately falls victim to it. Let’s see if the disgrace of our athletes can evoke more of a reaction than that of our politicians.