Can There Be Too Much?

By: Chicago Sports Review

Man has been in pursuit of the answer to the question for a long time. And it’s a noble one to ask: can there be an overload of sports?

God bless them, ESPN seems hell-bent on finding out. Yet, perhaps they’ve reached that point where the consumer finally has had enough, or at least recognized a true barrier. They’ve begun to fumble with the bra strap and what was smooth has progressed to awkward. The masses have shown their reservations.

Well, at least this once.

ESPN Mobile, which came on to the scene introduced by a stalker-based advertising campaign, which has since given way to simple plugs from anchors, is essentially at the proverbial plug-pulling point.

And somehow it feels somehow symbolic. It’s a peculiar thing when the nexus of the sports world reaches an expansion point that really is a true barrier. To quote an old country tune, it’s even the most devoted of sports fans telling Bristol that my bedroom ain’t your bus stop. You’re too close. It’s too much.

And yet it’s hard to say whether it was some kind of an infringement, or just a bad product.

Say it was the former. Perhaps sports have always been our option, and even when we call them a necessity, they are still an addiction we could always withhold if necessary. They are our possession, carried by our dollars, not the other way around. Fans infiltrated the game with their passion, and thus sports could infiltrate right back, if allowed. But when sports become inextricably linked with our most basic necessities, like the need to communicate, perhaps it’s less escapism, and more reality, and that’s where it ends.

Give ESPN credit for trying. That’s what they do. It was their button to push, because it’s a button they largely created.

They were the network created to go where nobody had gone before, a satellite feed in a lonely corner of Connecticut that has become the center of a sporting solar system. And because first doesn’t always imply best, their enterprise is perhaps the most impressive. Their coverage is assumed, their cultural predominance long ago placed. They’ve created household names out of whim. The X Games, the ESPY’s, Sunday Night Football; all are products now taken for granted that were once just ideas.

They had hoped that sports infiltration into our phones would be similarly accepted. It hasn’t been, with an almost deafeningly muted response. Disney is said to have lost up to 135 million on the venture in 2006.

And as we witness a shifting media landscape, ESPN might best be suited to spend more time mimicking the best of the rest, instead of looking to spawn the next best thing. Maybe we all should. Hard to say.

Maybe there are limits. Even for them.

When you have it all, the notion that necessity is the mother of invention becomes a foreign possibility. In the case of ESPN Mobile, there was neither the necessity nor a true invention, and the outcome has been listless.

Whether it was a bad idea, bad marketing, or just the true identification of a barrier is hard to say. And then there’s always the price…

So which is it?

The Right to “Sin”

From what I can tell, David Carruthers is sitting in a cell somewhere in the middle of Texas right about now.

He is British, lives in Costa Rica, and presides over BetonSports.com, a site that allows people to gamble or play poker with their own money.

Last year I got to meet Carruthers here in Chicago, and in a forum on the future of online gambling, he naturally defended his industry and told me that he would love nothing more than to have his company be fully regulated by the U.S. Government, just as they are in Great Britain, and have all the people that conduct transactions with them completely visible. It would transparent. It would be taxable.

And so as the U.S. Government keeps Carruthers over here, indicted on a number of charges, the one that you should find especially laughable is one stating that BoS has failed to pay some taxes.

Governments that attempt to protect people from themselves have never succeeded. Best to stop trying now, and do what you do best: tax.

 Perhaps they haven’t based on the rules and regulations laid out in the 1961 Wire Act, but in the current world — psst! The internet wasn’t terribly prevalent in 1961! — Carruthers and his associates would be popping the champagne if they were allowed to pay taxes like most companies.Carruthers is right.

His company is one some people might see as objectionable, just as they see cigarettes or alcohol that way. Or even downloading music. (The government and music industry finally wised up in that case, deciding that if you can’t beat it, and can make money off it, get on board.)

In the case of smokes and booze, while the government says that they’re killers, Uncle Sam and his states are also terribly dependent on them. When they need some extra change, they take cigarettes, they of the relatively inelastic demand, and add a tax.

If everybody quit smoking, our government would be up a creek. Why do you think they don’t just put a ten dollar tax on Marlboro’s, instead of a quarter here or half dollar there?

In many ways, they need you to keep smoking.

Gambling online should be the same. The government has the opportunity to make the entire industry transparent, track all the transactions, and supplement their income with billions of dollars in taxes, just as they do with countless other industries.

If the House wants to grandstand on issues of morality, good for them. For one, the Senate doesn’t appear to be quite as dumb, or short-sighted, and will likely let the bill fade.

On morality issues, they’d be doing society a favor by opening up the industry and keeping local bookies and thugs out of business. Two thousand years ago, at the first Olympics, gambling dominated the scene. Right from trackside.

In some ways, I’d find find it humorous to watch the government try to enforce this law. For one, I don’t gamble. However, it’d be my wasted tax money going towards bone-headed enforcement.

And yet ultimaetly, the argument is mostly theoretical. One truth pre-dates all of this mess. It says that governments which attempt to protect people from themselves have never truly succeeded. Some see a government as an entity determined to protect rights. In this case, and with the non-nuisance that is online gabling, ours should.

Get together, set a few ground rules, gain access to piles of information, and do what you do best: tax.

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