Bryce Harper has finally provided an answer to the question of how he ended up helping FanDuel convince a problem gambler to lose more money. You may not be surprised to learn that Harper got himself into this sticky situation partly due to an inability to assign meaning to words.
Last week, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that a FanDuel bettor and gambling addict named Terry Thompson received a personalized video message from Harper that was sent to him by his FanDuel VIP manager, Bryttanni Morgan. The video featured Harper wishing Thompson and his family a happy Thanksgiving, and had the FanDuel logo superimposed on it.
Harper released a statement on his Instagram account Monday, saying that he did not record the video in direct partnership with FanDuel, but to fulfill an order made by Morgan through his Cameo account. Harper said that Morgan did not place her order through the business video requests submission form provided by Cameo, and so therefore he could not have known that FanDuel would use it as a branded video message for one of its customers. "I did not know FanDuel would do this, I did not consent to it, and FanDuel had no right to do it," Harper said in his statement.
Morgan was certainly being underhanded by not explicitly flagging that her request was being made on behalf of FanDuel for commercial purposes, but Harper could have probably figured out what was going on the second he read the script Morgan had submitted for the video, which began, "Hey Terry, your host Bryttanni from FanDuel ..."
Then again, can we really expect Harper to think very hard about a short script he read into his phone camera in exchange for money? Harper's just living in the same world the rest of us are, in which sports gambling companies have branded practically everything in sight and spent the last decade totally removing the social stigma around sports betting. If a company like FanDuel has been legitimized to the point that it holds official partnerships with sports leagues and media companies, why should its invocation raise any red flags for a baseball player doing one of his more demeaning offseason tasks?
Maybe this will be a radicalizing moment for Harper, and will eventually lead to all professional athletes rebuking the malign influence of mobile sports gambling. I'll be rooting for that unlikely future, if only so that historians will one day be forced to write about the Bryttanni Morgan Affair.
