In the final hours before the Nov. 1 UFC bout between featherweights Isaac Dulgarian and Yadier Del Valle, the betting odds on Dulgarian, the favorite, abruptly dropped from -250, meaning a bettor would have to bet $250 to make $100 on a wager that Dulgarian would win, to around -150 at most sportsbooks. This reflected the sportsbooks reacting to a sudden influx of millions of dollars worth of bets on Del Valle, and was instantly suspicious. UFC head honcho Dana White, as he later told TMZ, called Dulgarian's people before the fight to ask them about it:
We didn't [know anything], so what we did was we called the fighter and his lawyer and said, "What's going on? There's some weird action going on in your [fight.] Are you injured? Do you owe anybody money? Has anybody approached you to, you know," and the kid said, "No, absolutely not. I'm going to kill this guy."
The fight itself confirmed anybody's suspicions. Dulgarian, a grappler by trade, quickly surrendered an advantage, to the audible bafflement of the broadcast crew, and then allowed Del Valle to get into a dominant position. After a few visibly feeble efforts at extricating himself, he tapped out with over a minute remaining in the first round. If Dulgarian was not openly throwing the fight, it's hard to imagine what he would have done differently if he had been. White said he contacted the FBI after the fight ended; the investigation, according to reports, is ongoing.
On Sunday, the Department of Justice released a 23-page indictment against pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortiz of the Cleveland Guardians for their alleged participation in a scheme to manipulate prop bets on the outcomes of specific pitches thrown by the two pitchers within official MLB games. The DOJ alleges that Clase and Ortiz conspired with some number of unnamed bettors to win at least $400,000 by intentionally throwing balls in situations when they'd been alerted of prop bets that they would do so. The claims still have to be proven in court; if they are, then Clase's and Ortiz's careers may very well be over.
On Friday, under the headline "Is Gambling Really Threatening The Integrity Of Sports?" the writer Jay Caspian Kang and the New Yorker published, for my money, just about the most embarrassing and shabbily argued blog you're likely to read in any prominent publication this year. Here are some snippets.
Legal sports betting generates a considerable amount of tax revenue. To operate in New York, for example, licensed betting apps have to pay fifty-one per cent of their revenue to the state. The value of this should be considered when weighing any downsides of legalized betting.
This comes in at No. 2 in a list of "reminders to consider before passing judgment on whatever the latest [sports betting] scandal might be." It arrives shortly after Kang's declaration that gambling "isn’t the healthiest activity; like alcohol, drug use, and stock trading, it can lead people to ruin," a simultaneously hilarious and despicable elision as it pertains to the specific form sports gambling now takes. Unlike alcohol and drug use, online sports wagering as done on apps like DraftKings and FanDuel transforms a bettor's smartphone into an instantly and constantly available addiction-inflaming device, a pocket casino at which a person can place innumerable bets without so much as getting out of bed. Kang's comparison might begin to hold water when somebody develops an app that prompts your phone to inject heroin into your thigh through your pants pocket at regular intervals, and periodically refreshes your supply whenever you try to kick. Until then, though, it's horseshit, and the idea that any plausible volume of tax revenue (a rough estimate of which Kang doesn't bother supplying) could offset the clear and obvious harm app-based gambling does to people is obscene.
But Kang's blog isn't really about the danger that gambling poses to bettors or communities. It's a blog about whether gambling threatens the integrity of sports; gambling's capacity to "lead people to ruin" is only invoked for the sake of sweeping it aside, so that Kang can playact as though the question "Is the sky blue sometimes?" demands further discussion. The year 1919 called; it wants its settled debates back.
To be frank, the entire blog can be binned at this point; it's already an argumentative crap-pile that wouldn't make it past a reasonably engaged editor at a high school newspaper. But it goes on, and it gets worse.
The people who write and talk about sports for a living are inclined to freak out about sports betting, in part because they, much more than the average sports fan, like to wax rhapsodic about American innocence and the integrity of the game.
Here is a disclosure: I am even now an admirer of Kang's, and have been since I first encountered his byline on Grantland what feels like 10,000 years ago. In fact I admire in him a lot of the same stuff has made him one of the digital media era's most divisive writers. I like that he is pugnacious, and iconoclastic, and that there is no hill on Earth so modest or unworthy that he will not die on it. But the above passage is cheap, smarmy, fake-populist nonsense, akin to Will Leitch defending institutional MLB against criticism by characterizing a preference for compelling baseball games that end earlier than 1:30 a.m. as the concern of pointy-headed coastal elites. Moreover, in the year 2025, Kang's assertion is a simple factual error; either he does not follow sports coverage closely enough to weigh in on it or is pretending not to, and either possibility is as bad as the other.
Someone who does follow sports coverage at this moment would have noticed that, overwhelmingly and with increasing frequency, "the people who write and talk about sports for a living" in 2025 are getting paid by sports betting companies to do it. Watch a sports broadcast, for God's sake. Listen to a sports talk radio segment. Listen to any popular sports podcast. Visit the website of virtually any publication that runs writing about sports other than literally this one. All of them—all of them—are festooned with advertising for sports betting concerns. The broadcasters, pundits, and podcasters read DraftKings and FanDuel ad copy; the websites publish betting lines and wagering advice. The loudest voices by far in the discussion of sports and its relationship to the gambling industry are either compromised by their association with gambling companies or out-and-out gambling enthusiasts themselves.
The people who own and populate the sports discourse have every professional incentive not to "freak out about sports betting," because the vast majority of them are for all practical purposes employees of sports betting concerns. That, not to put too fine a point on it, is the precise reason why a question like "Is gambling really threatening the integrity of sports?" is still being treated as though it is up for discussion at a time when there are simultaneous active federal bet-fixing investigations against active players in three different highly visible professional sports.
"They, much more than the average sports fan, like to wax rhapsodic about American innocence and the integrity of the game" is just some noise to make, phony wised-up bullshit, the defensive bleating of someone who knows he has no case whatsoever without tricks of forced perspective. Show me a professional sports journalist in 2025 waxing rhapsodic about American innocence and I will show you a figment of Jay Kang's fevered imagination.
Here is his very next sentence:
Most fans, in my experience, either assume the games have always been fixed or don't really care either way.
Ah. OK. Over here you've got your real people, populistly assuming the sports they're watching are a sham and not caring about that, and over there you've got your blinkered, out-of-touch elites, pretentiously demanding assurance that pitchers are not selecting their pitches on the basis of what will make some money for their gambler friend. You don't have to take my soft-handed media elite word for it, either—I sourced that observation from the New Yorker column of Jay Kang, Tribune Of The Masses.
What you're not meant to think about here is the particular corrupting effect of prop bets, in which bettors wager on specific in-game events in real time—a form of gambling that the apps have made infinitely easier, and which is the basis of the charges against Clase and Ortiz. Sure, yes, OK: There is very little evidence of some huge increase in out-and-out match fixing since the widespread legalization and proliferation of sports betting. There is plenty of evidence, on the other hand, that in-game events are more suspect than before, due to forms of corruption that were virtually impossible prior to the advent of app-based gambling.
More to the point, Kang is substituting the question of whether gambling is threatening the integrity of sports with the entirely different questions of whether it's newly doing that and whether anybody cares or should care. He is doing this because he knows the answer to the first question, and knows it is not the answer he wants to give—moreover, he knows that the purpose of his blog is less to answer or clarify or even sincerely grapple with the question than it is to build an argument around some (unnamed) guys who annoy him online. Were he sincerely engaging with his nominal question, he would not offer the possibility that gambling has been corrupting sports for a long time, and that the gambling apps have only made it more detectable, as evidence for anything but the obvious conclusion that, yes, gambling is indeed a threat to the integrity of sports.
Here's more:
Given the ubiquity of online gambling, the sensitivity of the detection programs, and the very real information these players could capitalize on, the list of players known to have bet on themselves or their own teams remains short.
This is Kang treating "the integrity of sports" as though it is a nebulous concept, or a generalized public impression of sports, like a green-to-red Integrity Of Sports meter with a needle drifting up and down, instead of as the relatively simple binary question that it is. That question is at bottom about whether a viewer can feel confident that the events they're watching in a given sporting event are on the up-and-up. There needn't be some critical mass of proven game-fixing for gambling to have compromised the integrity of sports; viewers of at least a few Cleveland Guardians games over the past couple of years were unwittingly watching an event whose competitive sports outcome, in real time, drew on the players' efforts downstream of where they serviced the guys paying them to manipulate bets. The integrity of those sporting events wasn't a nebulous ideal, and it wasn't just threatened; for discrete periods of time they were not sporting events at all, but clandestine wager-rigging operations that happened to look like baseball.
This paragraph is spectacularly gross (emphasis mine):
Perhaps there’s a lot we don’t know happening in the dark; additional revelations could change my perspective. But, given the fanfare with which the F.B.I. presented the cases against [Chauncey] Billups and [Terry] Rozier, it’s hard to imagine that some epidemic of point shaving is going on. The most likely scenario might be that, yes, a few more athletes than before, perhaps especially those who are in financial trouble, are turning to sports betting as a way to generate a modest amount of extra income—or, in some instances, to work off their own gambling debt. Looking over the landscape now, I find I am less concerned than I was eighteen months ago, not more.
Here Kang accidentally invokes the exact reason for the total taboo on sports betting among professional athletes. Gambling debt is how players get lured into genuine corruption; when NFL quarterback Art Schlichter famously ratted out his bookies to the FBI in 1983, it was because he feared they'd force him to throw games to pay off his hundreds of thousands of dollars in gambling debt. Thanks to the frictionless prop betting made possible by apps, a problem gambler can rack up life-wrecking losses across the span of just a few sports broadcasts; when that problem gambler is also an athlete, whose games are themselves major betting events, that debt becomes a uniquely powerful lever for those looking to manipulate their own wagers.
There is absolutely zero chance that Jay Kang, himself a longtime gambler who has written compellingly about his own struggles with problem gambling and used to have a column titled "NBA Betting Lines" at Grantland, needs this explained to him. What's remarkable is his choice to blithely ignore it here. Then again he never mentions his own gambling history in this column, except to acknowledge he plays fantasy sports sometimes.
From here Kang shifts into deriding what he sees as overheated what-about-the-children moralizing, exemplified by an unbylined Washington Post editorial that frets over the possible consequences of younger viewers never having known sports except during its almost total capture by the gambling industry. The Post editorial is somewhat silly—app-based gambling is poisonous enough without anybody needing to go Helen Lovejoy Mode—but no more so than Kang's choice to make it the only specifically cited or linked work in a column dedicated to invoking and pooh-poohing a supposed media fixation. Leave aside for the moment that the Post's editorial board is the same addled body that referred to New York City's new mayor as "Generalissimo Zohran Mamdani" a few days ago; these emphatically are not the "people who write and talk about sports for a living" he characterized as moralists and mythmakers earlier, nor are they representative of that class. Moreover: Nobody takes the Washington Post's editorial board seriously.
In any event, Kang's rejoinder to this concern arrives in the form of his eight-year-old daughter: She, he reports, never asks him to explain what DraftKings is or what money lines are. Well then! That might strike you as screamingly, insultingly irrelevant—a given eight-year-old might not ask their dad about lots of stimuli they are passively absorbing, and which might nonetheless shape the attitudes they'll have when, for example, they even begin to approach an age at which their sense that gambling is an intrinsic aspect of sports enthusiasm might reveal itself in their choice to participate in it. Presumably "Do they ever ask about it?" is not the litmus test a parent would apply to determine whether they thought drinking a bunch of shots of tequila might be inadvisable for a little kid. But, you see, Kang is an expert on this subject, as he has at least one (1) child and some number of others might not:
I have begun to suspect that much of the moralizing about children must come from people who don’t have any—or who, at the very least, do not take them to many sporting events.
It takes some doing to make me want to fisk a take—like "LOL shut up Washington Post editorial board"—that I broadly share. But this is just some dogmeat argumentation.
The column ends at its nadir. Kang invokes the NFL's chronic traumatic encephalopathy plague and the NBA's partnership with the repressive United Arab Emirates regime—but not, he assures readers, as "an attempt at cheap whataboutism." In fact:
It certainly doesn’t mean that gambling isn’t a problem. Nor does it mean that harsh punishments shouldn’t be doled out to players who bet on their own games.
So one might say that, a couple of sentences up from the bottom, Jay Kang has in fact fully agreed with the proposition—gambling threatens the integrity of sports—that he has otherwise been at pains to characterize as silly breathless moralizing. One might even say that all of this has been sweaty contrarian bullshit from a writer whose opening premise seems to have been On the social landscape of takes, some people I resent are over there.
What Kang wants, rather than "cheap whataboutism" or the more luxuriously upholstered whataboutism he serves elsewhere in his story, is simply for everybody to switch off their brains altogether:
Rather, what it means, to me, is that we abandon moralizing mythmaking around professional and collegiate sports altogether. We shouldn’t lie to preserve abstract ideas such as fandom and integrity, nor should we pretend that the first bet on a football game happened on an iPhone. Professional sports are rapacious for-profit enterprises that produce wildly entertaining, sometimes violent, and sometimes inspiring athletic competition. Isn’t that enough?
I don't think this quartet of sentences contains a single honest phrase. Not even "to me." Concern that gambling threatens the integrity of sports is not a matter of "moralizing mythmaking" and never has been; it is a simple preference on the part of viewers and fans for the sports they watch to be broadly legitimate competitions, because they are more compelling when you understand what is being contested and on what terms. "Integrity" in this instance is not some fuzzy abstract idea or ideal; it is the question of what is happening in the game, and why, and whether it's happening for some secret reason that undermines the terms on which it was sold to you. Nobody anywhere pretends that the first bet on a football game happened on an iPhone—for fuck's sake, get it together, man—just as anybody not engaged in ostentatiously wised-up posturing should acknowledge that gambling's relationship to sports has undergone profound changes over the past decade, specifically related to its frictionless availability on people's phones.
This is, in fact, the very cheapest of whataboutism: On the basis that the sports industry sucks in myriad other ways, Kang would have you join him in rolling your eyes at the idea that widespread gambling might be corrosive to something you enjoy. As though it's impossible to also want, say, the NBA to stop doing business with despots—or, for that matter, impossible for a person who has made a tenuous peace with other forms of ugliness to find that arrangement that much harder to tolerate when they also have abundant reason to suspect the games they're watching are being manipulated to service gamblers.
This is "Yet you participate in society! Curious!" trolling blown out into a New Yorker essay. It's embarrassing. Everyone involved in putting it online wasted their time and insulted their readers. This blog is over.
