alt Hacker News"perversion of sports" is a particularly American viewpoint, I think! The latent streak of puritanism, maybe. Yet, somehow, the NCAA (which is wage theft on a truly industrial scale) is morally okay. It's weird.
(The intersection with US ad culture – for existence, drug ads on TV – is maybe also unique.)
Sport has, as a business, always been random number generation for gambling purposes. Some, like horseracing, have basically no other point. Gambling is going to happen, and like weed, it's probably better that it's regulated and taxed than entirely underground. There's no more gambling content now than there was fantasy football content before, and fantasy football was gambling too.
If we're looking for a perversion of sports, though, how about the NCAA's industrial-scale wage theft? US professional sports should have junior systems which pay the players like the rest of the world...
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Being compensated in kind with housing, food, and education (not to mention significant "grants" from boosters clubs and brand deals) is not the same as wage theft and it is verbal slight of hand to suggest otherwise.
> Sport has, as a business, always been random number generation for gambling purposes
I personally don't care about the business of sports. Most sports were just ways for children to get exercise and everything that came after it was a perversion. Fat men sitting on couches watching other grown men throw a football around isn't much better than those same men gambling on it.
> Yet, somehow, the NCAA (which is wage theft on a truly industrial scale) is morally okay. It's weird.
Outside of top men's basketball and football programs, there is no real wage theft occurring. These minor sports are avocations for student athletes, and not businesses for the universities.
> The latent streak of puritanism, maybe
The main problem is that addiction kind of goes around people's interests and their better judgement.
Normally I agree, we don't need to be making 'moral' decisions for people. If they want to do something 'sinful' - like gambling - have at it.
But the people who promote gambling have lots of money. And gambling is basically smoking. So, it gets hairy. They can lie, they can cheat, and they can manipulate people's minds, tricking them into doing something bad for them. And then the addiction does the rest.