Why I Can’t Write Gambling Content, Even Though I’m Jobless: Wrong Answers Only Wednesday
More answers to questions about why bigoted ballplayers draw more ire than the bigot-coddling politicians, and the media fogging after When Landlords Kill and climate change exacerbates wildfires.
Happy last day of May. Let’s open the mailbag.
One of your tens of longtime readers — first-time WAOWie writer-inner. I found your résumé on LinkedIn and it says you created sports betting-related content for several years. Why are you not leaning in, fully completely to rebranding as a sports betting writer when you need a job?
— K.N., Paradise, N.L.
Gambling is an addictive product alongside alcohol, tobacco, opioids, and hard drugs. None of those are getting carte blanche in both the advertising and editorial content in sports media anywhere near the extent that betting has become part of telecasts in Canada in the last year or so.
No one knows where this is headed, although the United Kingdom is nearly two decades into throwing the door open to advertising online gambling, and is now trying to impose some controls. We can only project the ramifications of people, particularly young and overly confident teenagers and young adults who might not be receiving education on the addictiveness, getting saturation-bombed through their smartphones about betting. Which, of course, they can then do with a few thumb-taps.
A bit of background: for around six years, from mid-2015 until near the end of the 2021 Major League Baseball season, I wrote sports information content for the Canadian-based company that oversees the OddsShark sports information database. The gig brought in around C$500 in a good month. It was nothing too deep, and there wasn’t necessarily pick-making involved.
Assignments tended to be along the lines of 400 words about the moneyline and over/under totals on an upcoming Toronto Maple Leafs game, or the Toronto Blue Jays next series. Or it could be a look at futures bets on who would win the Super Bowl or World Series. I would do my article after completing a copy editing shift at my regular job, email it off, and it would be published on a site on the FanSided network as ‘spon-con’ with the intent of generating traffic for OddsShark.
I made a point not to tip the intended audience either way. Write in a tone that said, ‘Hey, up to you how you use this info.’ They could decide if the Leafs being 10-2 in their last 12 home games as a ‘heavy’ favorite meant they were likely to win or overdue to stink out the rink.
There is no beef with sports gambling, or any vices, being above-board. I support safe supply and consumption and treatment services sites that support people who use drugs and have substance use disorder, for instance.
Cannabis legalization, which began in Canada in 2018, is also a convenient cross-reference. A cannabis store is required to ask for proof of age upon entry. A municipality can also harsh the local mellow by opting out of allowing stores.
There is no such constraint on sports telecasts that are intended for mass general consumption. Having constant advertising, discussion by TV talking heads, and on-screen graphics going out to whoever is watching, instead of the weirdos down at the bait store who form a blog’s community, is a dangerous lack of guardrails.
We are playing with fire. As noted, in 2005 the UK chose to allow gambling firms “to advertise sports betting, online casinos and poker on TV and radio.” The regulators failed to anticipate how easy the smartphone would make it to gamble, and the firms cashed in by “developing aggressive habit-forming games tailor-made for obsessive gambling, and cashing in while a significant subsection of their customers racked up huge losses.”
Is there evidence that provincial governments1 are investing in treatment for the surge in problem gamblers that they are going to have in the coming years?
Call it bleeding-heart Gliberal guilt. There is my moral and ethical line. No matter how lucrative it might be, I cannot put my name above that content. If it turns out the only way to be in sports media is to work with a betting firm, well, that might be a different story. There is no shade or slight intended against media workers who have crossed that Rubicon; we all have bills to pay.
That is the idealism, such as it is. The artsier-fartsier aspect2 is that what has sustained my sports fanaticism are the narrative and storytelling elements. The sporting life, although we must be sure never to conflict physical ability with character, helps us relate to people who are wired differently from us. You want to know what makes Big Bobby Clobber run, rather than having him be a robotic stats compiler.
The gambling content on sports telecasts takes time and space away from the storytelling. Some of that is out of necessity since media access is now so tightly controlled by CFL, MLB, MLS NBA, NFL, and NHL franchises. But spending 15 minutes running down the odds on the night’s slate of games is a cheap and lazy way to produce content instead of producing a feature story that humanizes the player you want to rage-tweet at since you took the OVER on his shots-on-goal or strikeout total. And how much skill is really required?
Of course, the feature story requires performing the 12 Labours of Hercules to get the sit-down interview, bringing a camera crew, and having researchers and editors for pre- and post-production. Those budgetary line items would send a bean-counter ass-over-teakettle over a fainting couch, and we cannot have that sort of thing.
Anecdotally, and related to that, have you ever eavesdropped on a conversation between sports bettors, especially Gen Z/millennial aged dudebros? A bit of memory burn left over from the Blue Jays’ 2022 home opener was the commuter-rail ride home to Hamilton, and four fellows who spent a good 40 minutes talking about nothing but their bets as they shared their phone screens. No mention of the sheer fun of being out at the ballyard for the club’s first home opener after the COVID-19 interruptions in ’20 and ’21, or what had happened in a game the Jays pulled out 11-10 after spotting the Texas Rangers an early seven-run lead.3 It was worse than hearing yourself tell someone about one of your fantasy teams.
Here is hoping that answers your question. I cannot have what has been unleashed on my guilty ginger-arsed conscience.
I bet someone can get you to bet by the end of this post.
— B.D., Terrebonne, Que.
OK, you’re on! But it ain’t happening.
What is an unintended downside of the Toronto media focusing on the anti-LGBTQ2S1A+ bigotry of Blue Jays relief pitcher Anthony Bass?
— M.S., Palmer Rapids, Ont.
It is all about the choice of targets, and who is normalizing casual bigotry by making an indispensable part of their base and brand.
There is some ugly revanchism making its way into public life these days, just past three years to the day after the police murder of George Floyd, and two removed from the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc becoming the initial First Nations government, among many, to confirm findings of the remains of dead residential school students. It extends into the refusals to apply any lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic. And then there are pressure tactics that a “very-online, anti-LGBTQ contingent” use against corporations in a cultural assault by proxy to deny the humanity of people who are gay, trans, and queer and push them into the margins.
It is gross. Treat people the way you would like to be treated, eh? I have led a fairly privileged life as a basic white dude from the working class. In early life, I was picked on for being different — having red hair, being shy, being a bookworm and a nerd; all things that are undeniably who I am. It helped impart that judging a book by its cover and being prejudiced, is just illogical and irrational. I grew up in a cranny of rural Ontario that was very homogenous, but that helped with learning to look at people as, well, people, and not by social-group labels.
That brings this around to some on-brand hypocrisy by Premier Doug Ford, the frontman for Ontario’s Government for the Property Developers, and incompetent Education Minister Stephen Lecce. It probably did not have anywhere near the signal-to-noise ratio of the furor du jour around Bass.
Briefly, a Catholic public school board4 within the vote-rich 905 region voted against raising a Pride flag in June. Every other bailiwick does it since, even if merely symbolic, it shows a group of students who are at higher risk for self-harm, suicide ideation, and suicide completion that they are seen and welcome in a publicly funded school within a society that treats universal education as a human right.5
Paraphrasing Brittlestar, though, the people who have the least control of their basic impulse to punch down always vote. They just as reliably vote for the party with “Conservative” in the handle, and they like the status quo where Ontario favouring one religion above all others in school funding is a third rail in electoral politics.
So, of course, Lecce wussed out of issuing any directive to all school boards to fly a Pride flag. And Ford had “no comment on that,” which comes off as what he does best: doing nothing useful. Politicians used to be expected to lead on social issues. Ford, who hews to the Play-Doh strongman playbook, only makes a declarative, leaderly statement when he is pandering to his base.
Which, of course, is exactly the opposite of how the premier and ed minister beelined for the bully pulpit about another local school decision. That was their coordinated overreaction to a shaggy-dog story about Ottawa schools’ policy about “whether police officers in uniform can address students in the classroom.”
Some middle ground was found by the Ottawa school board there, but that is not the point. Both of these bidders to the selfish and tyrannical went hard on kissing up to the police and trampling any respect for a school board’s decision.
It was similar in 2022 when the Hamilton public board wanted to keep a masking mandate, which was within its right to do so as a local authority. Lecce insisted they had to fall in line with the prevailing COVID denialism.
For those scoring at home: public Catholic school trustees in an electoral battleground area willfully harm students, province says, “Those wacky school boards. Whattya gonna do?” Public school boards in centre-left Hamilton and Ottawa that try to protect students get told they better fall into line. That is not governance. That is playing to the cheap seats, and it does actual damage.
And yet, it draws crickets compared to the reaction to Anthony Bass, a low-leverage relief pitcher, filling his life and many people’s social media feeds with foolishness. Why is that? Why are we encouraged to focus on him?
On that thread, my feelings are about 70/30. The larger share of that backs fans putting pressure on Toronto Blue Jays management to eschew promoting ballplayers who amplify organized bigotry. The public has that emotional equity. We wore the Jays logo long before anyone heard of Mark Shapiro, the club’s president (pictured).
To that, there was a terrific thread on Blue Jays Twitter by Garth Iorgy that plainly states why Bass is “a tourist in OUR space (who) doesn't get to define who is accepted in the Jays family.” Fans do outrank players, especially ones as fungible as a reliever who only gets during games that are likely already lost.
It sort of calls to mind one of the heated exchanges between Brian Clough (Michael Sheen) and his Derby County boss Sam Longson (Jim Broadbent) in the best postmodern sports movie ever made, The Damned United.
“The reality of footballing life is this: The chairman is the boss, then comes the directors, then the secretary, then the fans, then the players, and then finally, last of all, bottom of the heap, the lowest of the low, comes the one, who in the end, we can all do without...the fucking manager!”
No, I do not expect any Blue Jays executives to do any soul-searching about why they employ Anthony Bass. That is the other 30 percent of my folk wisdom. It is easier to leave the bar on the ground in regard to expecting worldliness from entertainers beyond their unique skills.
It is a form of self-protection. Remember, James Franco seemed like a progressive guy once.
I bet you won’t even answer my simple sports question: who do you like in the NBA Finals and the Stanley Cup Finals?
— D.B., Terrebonne, Que.
On the hardwood, the next NBA team that slows down the Denver Nuggets and big man nonpareil Nikola Jokic for multiple games will be the first. The Miami Heat have already done the important work: running a glorious burn on Boston by reminding them that on-court cohesion and coaching still matter in the NBA.
Some light reading on Tuesday afternoon pointed up that Denver, in running through the Western Conference, got more proficient offensively over the course of the playoffs. Having a big who sees the floor like any classic point guard likely gives Miami a problem that no amount of Erik Spoelstra sideline sorcery will counter for terribly long, but Jimmy Butler and the Heat have been hoisting experts by their own petard for three rounds and counting.
So, Kitchener-Waterloo should probably start planning a celebration for Jamal Murray this summer. Study how Toronto bottled it with the Raptors’ parade in 2019, and do the opposite.
The extreme caszh NHL watcher knows that playoff series predictions are a mug’s game. One simplification that seems as good as any is positing how either team handles a goaltending regression.
Having Sergei Bobrovsky in peak Vézina Bob form seems more paramount for the Florida Panthers’ arsenal than getting the best from Adin Hill does for the Vegas Golden Knights. So, sure, let’s ride with Vegas based on that. The Golden Knights already survived teams with elite goaltending — Dallas and Jake Oettinger; Winnipeg and Connor Hellebuyck weeks ago in Round 1 — and they have the extra home game. But yeah, don’t base your bets on that.
What aspect of a recent news story sent you to DEFCON-8 high dudgeon this time?
— B.C., Moose Jaw, Sask.
Little from Column A, little from Column B.
In Column A, people whom I care for are among the 14,000 or more people displaced due to the Tantallon, N.S., wildfires. In Column B, here in Hamilton, Ont., where I live as a renter, a now-deceased landlord murdered tenants Carissa MacDonald and Aaron Stone on May 27 — and there was a Team Landlord bandwagon online.
One lane I feel compelled to fill involves ‘media fogging’ with both stories. Media fogging is where exonerative language, i.e. both-siding, obscures the underlying causes of something horrific. You often see the passively worded headline or on-screen graphic that says, “(X number of people) dead after (car accident, shooting).”
It serves to mask the pain that we have voted, as a society, to bring upon ourselves. Apathy allows justice and laws to be weakened since, hey, there are capital gains to be realized. And, going Full Billy Jack here, when that happens there isn’t any law.
The denialism courses through some, not all, of the coverage, of both stories.
Reading and watching online coverage of the Nova Scotia wildfires, one seemingly has to look high and low to see any mention of how the climate emergency is a force multiplier in the inferno’s spread. Or how this is what can happen when municipal planners cut corners with infrastructure when they allow suburban sprawl instead of the more sustainable and cost-effective infill density.
I get it. No one wants to sound like a cross of Britta Perry and Lisa Simpson right after people escaped with just the clothes on their backs.
From my layperson’s understanding, though, a protracted increase in sea surface temperatures and humid air have fed the tinderbox conditions in the Canadian Maritimes. On Monday, I found only one mainstream article that mentioned the C-word. A Halifax deputy fire chief noted “climate change contributes to volatility. We’re seeing more severe storms than we’ve seen before. Winds are very important to us. We’re seeing wind action that exacerbates fires, and certainly long dry spells are becoming more common in many regions.”
Tim Bousquet of the Halifax Examiner also turned up the nugget that three of the evacuated subdivisions were built without “appropriate fire safety specifications.” How does that happen?
Sprawl just makes the climate emergency worse. It takes away massive amounts of forest canopy that is needed to absorb heat from the sun. As any fire chief will tell you, building materials and furniture also ignite much more quickly than those items did generations ago. It is wholly predictable. And yet “inadequate water sources to fight fires” were permitted.
Brutal, and let’s hope there are lawsuits against the municipality.
Regarding the murders of Carissa MacDonald and Aaron Stone, there were the usual, “Two tenants, landlord dead following dispute in Stoney Creek, SIU investigating,” and “Dispute between landlord and tenants in Hamilton ends in double homicide, police say,” framing.
Too Dumb For Democracy? author Davide Mastracci noted this indirectness about how “it was the landlord that killed the tenants” contributed to “landlords (assuming) non-payment was the issue … they were wrong, and it came as a result of the tenants bringing up safety concerns.” Never mind that Hamilton Police were upfront that the young couple were “totally innocent.” Some media portals still buried the lede.
When media fogging occurs, it creates space for bad-faith arguments. Case in point: the realtor and lawyer candidate who, however unintentionally, made a defence of murder because landlords are frustrated. Yep, he went there! He was not the only one, and he apologized about 24 hours later after his post.
No one denies the Ontario Landlord and Tenant Board tribunal is dysfunctional and slow-moving. That lack of a “functioning tribunal” — which by the way, sides with landlords the vast majority of the time! — does not seem like a smoking gun. You know what seems like a smoking gun? The gun that the dead double murder used when he ceased to become a law-abiding gun owner.
At least that realtor’s tweet used active language and correctly assigned blame to the killer. So there is that.
I know it’s hard to be a media worker in 2023. And I saw that as someone ejected from media work in 2023.
What was the best sports prediction — YOU CANNOT INCLUDE U SPORTS — you have ever made?
—V.I.G., Thompson, Man.
The year was nineteen hundred and ninety-eight. The Queen’s Journal needed a football knower to pick a winner and final score for Super Bowl XXXII between the defending champion Green Bay Packers, of Brett Favre and Reggie White, and the Denver Broncos of John Elway and Terrell Davis. And some second-year ginger knob put up his hand to take Denver.
The teams out of the NFC had won 13 Super Bowls in a row. The Packers were around a 12-point favourite. The AFC champion Broncos were a wild-card team wearing the stigma from a string of Super Bowl blowout defeats that The Simpsons once referenced in an episode-ending payoff.
At least I had paid attention when someone imparted that, “lines win championships.” There seemed like a reasonable theory that the Broncos, with future hall of famers Shannon Sharpe and Gary Zimmerman leading the blocking group that opened rushing lanes for Davis, could be a problem for Green Bay. It also seemed like no opponent had asked Green Bay to answer whether 35-year-old White at the power end and 340-pound interior linemate Gilbert Brown would hold up against that kind of ground-and-pound. Typically, the Packers would get out to a lead to put the opponent in pass-happy mode, and they could rotate their D-linemen.
Denver seemed capable of keeping the heavies on the field for second-and-4 scenarios instead of second-and-10. Also, I’d seen what kind of quarterback an NFL team needed to run it back to repeat — Joe Montana in San Francisco, Troy Aikman in Dallas — to know that Brett Favre was not the same interception-proof immutable behind centre.6
So I wrote up a prediction for a 27-24 Broncos win.
Lo and behold, Denver and Green Bay were tied 24-24 deep into the fourth quarter when the Broncos began driving toward the winning points. “What score did you pick again?” other Super Bowl party attendees began asking.
Of course, Denver won 31-24. The final margin owed to Green Bay conceding a walk-over touchdown by Davis in a vain attempt to leave time for Favre and his offence to answer with a TD. I did not get anything for being right around the final score of what is considered a historical upset. C’est la vie.
That is more than enough for now. Please stay safe, and stay kind.
In Canada, the federal government makes the calls about legalization. Provinces and territories control the regulation, basically.
Shurely this could be less artsy, more fartsy! — Ed.
Why yes, it was a José Berríos start.
Ontario has four publicly funded school systems: English non-denominational, English Catholic, French non-denominational, French Catholic.
Allegedly, but just wait.
Still not ready to talk about the 2009 NFC Championship Game.