Against Sports Betting: Resisting a Materialist Worldview
Pete Rose, after an acclaimed career as a baseball star, became the manager of the Cincinnati Reds in 1984. Infamously, as manager he began betting on his team to win on a regular basis. According to the New York Post, one investigation found that in 1987 Rose bet a minimum of $10,000 per game over at least 50 Reds games. In response to the investigation, in 1989 Major League Baseball banned Pete Rose from the sport, stripping him of his ability to work as a manager and rendering him ineligible for the Baseball Hall of Fame.
At that time, there was an understanding that even if you were betting for your team to win (as Rose was), there was something intrinsically wrong about the act. Though of course money has historically been tightly wed to sports, there has generally been an understanding that “sports” is a good in and of itself. To bet on a game you were playing in would render your victory in the game a means to an end, making it a kind of parody of a win. Such base commodification fails to grasp why millions love to cheer on their team, week after week, season after season, even for a team as wildly inconsistent as the Reds (or for my own beloved University of Kentucky football team).
Pete Rose, in betting on his own game, cheapened it, stripped away its intrinsic beauty and goodness; he failed to see that sports are appealing to the masses because they are beautiful, a joyful human discovery. In sports, humanity found a non-violent way to demonstrate and celebrate its God-given beauty and strength, a transfiguration of war, a pursuit just as noble yet without the horror. Because of this, when the world discovered Rose was betting on his own game, we grieved and sought justice, because something beautiful and human was stolen, not only from his victories and losses but from the game itself.
There are times when putting a price on something cheapens its value. G.K. Chesterton understood this well when he wrote, "Oscar Wilde said that sunsets were not valued because we could not pay for sunsets. But Oscar Wilde was wrong; we can pay for sunsets. We can pay for them by not being Oscar Wilde."
One could say the same thing about Pete Rose and sports: we can pay for them by not being Pete Rose. It is the things we value most that we refuse to commodify. In America, at least, you cannot buy yourself a spouse; you cannot sell your organs; you cannot buy a child. To put a price on such things would strike against the dignity and worth of the human person. I would argue that sports betting does the same thing to sports; we recognize their value by refusing to bet on them.
And yet, about thirty years later, I can't turn on my television, scroll through my social media news feed, or drive down the highway without seeing an advertisement for sports betting. The news reports about all of it are brimming with excitement. Soon you will be able to bet on every game you watch through our new app! Every NFL game is now a thrilling opportunity to make some cash for yourself! Think of all the taxable income that can go back into your communities! Governors are making flashy commercials, boasting of how they brought this new, exciting industry to their state. High-profile celebrities invite us to share in their lavish lifestyle. What happens in Las Vegas no longer has to stay there. We can carry it with us wherever we go—a rather sobering thought.
It's easy to see that the powers that be have made their choice, and sports betting will be here to stay. I look to its immediate practical effects and grieve. I can't help but think of the couple I know, where the wife said that if her husband could quit gambling and give up access to her bank account, she would be willing to work to save their marriage. He refused to seek help, and their marriage dissolved. I can't help but think of the families who will lose all their savings because of some father wanting to chase the next high. I can't help but think of the further corruption of sports organizations, as sports betting raises the stakes for everyone involved. For an overly addicted culture already, I can't see any good coming from bringing one more addiction to everyone's pocket.
But today I am grieving perhaps an even deeper, far-reaching loss. With the coming omnipresence of sports betting, one more facet of human life is being stripped of its transcendence. With every ten-dollar wager we place on our favorite team, the beauty of sports is reduced, becoming one more vulgar means to one more meaningless end. Sports betting is but one more sign of the triumph of materialism in the West, one more human good desacralized in our consumerist social imaginary.
Constantin Gutberlet writes that materialism is a belief system that "regards matter as the only reality in the world, which undertakes to explain every event in the universe as resulting from the conditions and activity of matter, and which thus denies the existence of God and the soul." A materialist denies with Oscar Wilde that a sunset could point to anything beyond itself, or that a newborn child could reveal the mystery of her Creator, or that a baseball game could point to a deeper truth and beauty beyond the physical atoms of a bat bumping against those of a ball.
As Christians, with all our strength, in every area of our life, we must resist the pull towards materialism. We are called, in all places, to celebrate how creation points to the Creator, even in the seemingly trivial world of sports. We believe, with Elizabeth Barrett Browning, that earth is "crammed with heaven, and every common bush afire with God"; this pertains to a baseball game (as David Bentley Hart so passionately argues) as much as it does to a range of mountains.
As a sacramental community, as the church, we live as a visible sign to the world of an invisible, spiritual reality. When we refuse to bet on sports as Christians, we do so not because we are fuddy-duddys or because we are against fun. It is rather a sign of resistance against the powers and principalities of this world, powers who want material motivations like greed and profit to be our guiding forces, rather than more transcendental, spiritual ideals like truth, beauty, and justice.
Growing up, my parents took my sister and me to every home football game at the University of Kentucky. I didn't know it then, but this was character formation, because every year we had high hopes for our team, and every year our hopes were dashed. But in the longing, the cheering, the rainy Saturday nights, the disappointments, the spare victories, I was, with others, learning and celebrating some of what it means to be human. I was learning that the thing itself, the game, the sport, was beautiful, because it pointed to a greater beauty.
One of my most cherished sports memories is from 2007. Five years earlier we had endured a brutal loss after thinking we had won. The team had already doused our head coach Guy Morriss with Gatorade, only to lose to LSU on the very last play—I've never experienced a group so suddenly shift from jubilation to sheer tragedy. But then, after years of losing, we finally beat a number-one-ranked LSU, an unimaginable feat at the time. The crowd could not contain itself. Alongside my mother and sister and thousands of others, I joined the crowd as we rushed onto the field as one, where we celebrated and danced and cheered, a moment of pure, unadulterated, collective joy. Ever since, I have kept a tuft of the AstroTurf in a Ziploc bag, a small token of what I discovered that day. It was the joy of communal victory, a joy that I believe points to a greater victory, one that all humanity is longing for but has yet to see and celebrate fully. Would that day in any way have been better if we had all gambled on its outcome? It's hard to imagine how.
I am not a materialist, and I don't think most people rushing onto that field with me were either. In my experience, most people believe that—and act as if—things like beauty, truth, and justice exist. Thoughtful people understand that if those ideals actually exist they require the existence of a transcendent God and with him a spiritual reality. Sports fans, when we sing our anthems and chants in a longing for victory, when we admire the beauty found in human competition, when we faithfully love a team in spite of its record of losing, we need to actively resist a materialist worldview. Sports are not everything, and they certainly cannot take the place of God in our spiritual life. But they can point us in a good direction. They can help us catch a glimpse of beauty breaking into our world, something that we cannot and should not put a price on.
When sports betting became legal in Ohio, the first person to make a bet at the Hard Rock Casino was Pete Rose, now in his eighties, and he bet on the Reds to win the world series. The journalists cheered; the businessmen laughed; the politicians smiled. But I wonder if anyone present, if any of the athletes or the fans, if any of us sensed that once again something precious was being stolen from us in the name of profit, and instead of weeping we were being asked to celebrate?
It is that deeper, transcendent beauty of sports that Pete Rose fails to grasp, and all who imitate him in betting on the teams they love. My hope, though feeble at the moment, is that true lovers of sports will understand this.
Friends, don't let them steal one more beautiful thing from you, from us. There is no good reason for a lover of God or a lover of sports ever to gamble. When we refuse to bet on the team we love, we are resisting a world of ugliness, greed, and death, and we are ushering in a world of life, joy, beauty, and playfulness, a world we believe will someday have the victory. And it is that victory, that of God's kingdom, which is the only one worth betting on.
Cambron Wright is a Global Methodist pastor serving at Asbury Methodist Church in northern Kentucky. He writes about Methodism, theology, and culture on Substack at cambron.substack.com.