Gambling, Not Baseball, Is America's Real Pastime

David Bockino spent years in advertising at ESPN, watching the network's coverage shift from game highlights to point spreads. His new book, Over/Under: An Unexpected History of Sports Betting, argues that the shift was not a recent invention. Gambling has been woven into American sports since the first horse race was recorded in the colonies.

Bockino traces the line from 18th-century wagers on thoroughbreds to the modern legal sportsbook sitting next to the beer stand at an NBA arena. The through-line, he says, is that Americans have always bet on games. What changed is the legal framework and the scale.

The book opens with a simple claim: sports betting is older than baseball, older than the NFL, older than the NCAA tournament. The first organized sporting event in the American colonies – a horse race in 1665 – had betting slips before it had a winner. Bockino argues that the moral panic around gambling is a 20th-century invention, not a founding principle.

He points to the 1919 Black Sox scandal as the moment the establishment turned against betting. Eight Chicago White Sox players threw the World Series for cash. The backlash created the modern regulatory architecture – state bans, federal prohibitions, the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992. For most of the 20th century, legal sports betting existed only in Nevada.

PASPA fell in 2018. The Supreme Court ruled that states could legalize sports gambling if they wanted. Thirty-eight states have done so since. Bockino notes that the speed of legalization surprised even the industry. The old assumption that Americans would not embrace betting if it were legal turned out to be wrong.

One of the book's sharper observations is about the media's role. Bockino worked at ESPN during the transition. He watched the network go from refusing to mention point spreads to embedding betting odds into its flagship shows. The line between reporting on sports and promoting gambling blurred. Bockino does not moralize about it. He just reports the timeline.

The book also covers the rise of daily fantasy sports, which Bockino calls the Trojan horse for full-scale legalization. DraftKings and FanDuel spent millions arguing that their product was a game of skill, not gambling. Courts and regulators bought the argument, and the infrastructure they built – payment processing, customer acquisition, state-by-state compliance – became the backbone of the legal sportsbook industry.

Bockino's fifth insight is about the future. He argues that the next frontier is in-play betting – wagering on individual plays, not just final scores. The technology exists. The data feeds are real-time. The only constraint is regulatory. If in-play betting goes mainstream, the experience of watching a game will change again. Every pitch, every possession, every free throw becomes a potential payout.

The book does not predict a crash or a moral collapse. Bockino is a historian, not a prophet. He ends with a note that the cycle is old: Americans bet, regulators clamp down, the system adapts, and the cycle repeats. The current era of legal sportsbooks is just the latest turn of the wheel.