![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/07\/8547d08a29d1ab27e193089dd20bef2f.jpeg\"\/)
<\/a><\/p>\nWatch his full \u201cMeet the Press\u201d interview below:<\/p>\n
There are 38 states in the United States that allow some degree of legal sports betting. Since the Supreme Court dismantled the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (PASPA) in 2018, nearly every state has attempted some form of legalization.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not fair enough to know exactly what the legislation would look like, but perhaps there should be more regulation. We\u2019re moving toward nearly all 50 states legalizing gambling at this point,\u201d Costas warned. \u201cAnd it\u2019s inevitable if in fact as a group and over time gamblers didn\u2019t lose more than they win, then no back alley crap game, no casino in Atlantic City or Vegas, no racetrack, and now Bet MGM, Draft Kings, whatever it is, would ever exist.\u201d<\/p>\n
The renowned broadcaster emphasized that sports gambling strikes a personal nerve. \u201cWell, my father was an inveterate gambler,\u201d he later said, \u201cand I looked at him as a sort of Runyon-esque character: colorful, humorous, high-spirited. But it would be untruthful to say that it was all smooth sailing.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was a lot of trauma in our family life because he had a volatile temper and the mortgage was often riding on how his bets went,\u201d Costas continued. \u201cAnd he didn\u2019t bet on, you know, cards or poker games or crap games or go to the racetrack. He bet on baseball, football, basketball games.\u201d<\/p>\n
He attempted to bond with his father through sports. \u201cI\u2019m sure I would have been a sports fan anyway like most of my fans, but I became even more knowledgeable. I became granularly knowledgeable because he was following all this so closely, and I was by his side,\u201d Costas said.<\/p>\n
Costas also discussed the intersection of sports and politics with Welker. \u201cI\u00a0think that politics inevitably has intersected with sports. Anyone who says that politics has no place in sports has to be abysmally unaware of the history here, a history that goes all the way back to Jack Johnson and Jesse Owens and Joe Louis and Jackie Robinson and Billie Jean King and Arthur Ashe and Curt Flood and Tommy Smith and John Carlos,\u201d he insisted.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow, of the names I\u2019ve mentioned, with the exception of Billie Jean, most of them are African American. But that\u2019s part of the story because until fairly recently in our nation\u2019s history sports and some aspects of entertainment have been the only avenues that were broadly \u2013 and even then there was a fight, Jackie Robinson didn\u2019t come until 1947\u2013 that were broadly accessible to people of color or where someone like Billie Jean King could make a larger statement about women\u2019s rights, not just within sports. And to turn your back on that is to wear a blindfold.\u201d<\/p>\n
Watch the interview with Bob Costas in the video above.<\/p>\n
The post Bob Costas Fears the Ease of Sports Gambling Will Lead to Addiction: \u2018It\u2019s Going to Ruin Some Lives, That\u2019s Inevitable\u2019 | Video<\/a> appeared first on TheWrap.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bob Costas issued a warning against legalized sports betting while speaking to \u201cMeet the Press\u201d host Kristen Welker…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":47057,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[36441,34688,1216,210,36440,3141,22289,517,8930,36442,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-50825","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mental-health","8":"tag-billie-jean-king","9":"tag-bob-costas","10":"tag-gambling-addiction","11":"tag-health","12":"tag-kristen-welker","13":"tag-los-angeles-lakers","14":"tag-meet-the-press","15":"tag-mental-health","16":"tag-sports-betting","17":"tag-sports-gambling","18":"tag-united-states","19":"tag-unitedstates","20":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114822124487528168","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=50825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/50825\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47057"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=50825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=50825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=50825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}