This is an I-Heart podcast.

Guaranteed Human.

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories.

The ruling in the Supreme Court case Murphy v. New Jersey in 2018 is one of

those rare legal decisions handed down by our nation's highest court that has had immeasurable

and far-reaching impact on our day-to-day lives. Chances are, after all, that you've seen a

sports gambling ad or perhaps partaking in it

yourself. Here to share the story of the tumultuous rise of sports gambling in America is Danny

Funt, author of Everybody Loses. Take it away, Danny.

Thank you, Dany. I really wanted to get to the bottom of this fundamental question.

Why was it that the professional sports leagues abandoned a century of opposition

to legal gambling? And not just whether it should be legal, but they couldn't have spoken about it

in more extreme, almost biblical terms, calling it an evil that would be the deadliest possible

thing that would happen to sports. That's something

the commissioner of baseball said barely a decade ago. So to go from that level of staunch opposition

to now being the strongest evangelist for the spread of gambling across the country was

dizzying. And I just wanted to get to the bottom of it.

The surface-level thing that happened was the Supreme Court in 2018 struck down a federal

ban on bookmaking outside Nevada that had been the law since 1992 and the leagues used that as

cover to say well the justices have made their ruling we have to cope with this new

reality in fact well before that case they had been meeting with representatives of

the gambling industry quite secretively so much so that in the NFL's case,

...