New book by Danny Funt documents the meteoric — and questionable — rise of sports gambling

LAS VEGAS — After Virginia legalized sports betting in 2021, Georgetown student Rob Minnick would put on a track suit and sneakers, leading friends to believe he was heading out for a jog.

He’d lope less than a mile across the Key Bridge, into the Old Dominion state, enabling his cell phone to collect new-customer promotions from a sportsbook.

Danny Funt recalls making that same trek, with classmates only a few years earlier, but for fast-food runs. Funt remembers zero on-campus sports-betting chatter.

Minnick bottomed out on Nov. 12, 2022, during a 12-hour casino binge in which he maxed out several credit cards.

A family that once enjoyed comic Kevin Hart now despises him.

“He’s constantly in those ads,” Jennie Minnick, Rob’s mother, told Funt. “So now we hate [Hart].”

It’s all in Funt’s new book, “Everybody Loses,” in which he shines a spotlight on the many ills of a legal industry that might have moved way too fast in blanketing the country since being given a green light in 2018.

Every time I see Hart, LeBron James, Wayne Gretzky, Shaquille O’Neal, Jamie Foxx, Jon Hamm and others promoting a sportsbook, I ponder their liability in leading people like Minnick astray.

Funt gave that cloudy issue clarity because those personalities have normalized this business, made it mainstream.

“Especially for young people,” Funt said, “seeing their heroes tell them, not just that this is OK but a way to win money when that obviously is so far from the truth.”

Key issues

Danny’s surname should ring a comedic bell or two. Allen, his grandfather, began a hidden microphone radio show in 1947 that transferred well to television, as ‘‘Candid Camera,’’ a year later.

His son Peter, Danny’s father, continued it. In some form, ‘‘Candid Camera’’ aired on the small screen through 2014. A revival, Danny says, is in the works.

Danny, 34, explored plenty of tragedy, sorrow and duplicity in his 312-page maiden effort as an author.

After Georgetown, he graduated from Columbia with a master’s degree in journalism in 2015. Since 2021, he has contributed sports-betting features to the Washington Post.

The more he dug, the more questions he compiled.

Two were most compelling. First, how, when and why did leagues change their tune on gambling? Not so long ago, the NFL barred Las Vegas from advertising during its precious Super Bowl broadcast.

Today, there’s a spiffy domed stadium, not far from the Strip, that houses the Raiders and already has staged a Super Bowl. NFL-themed slot machines occupy casino floors.

“From saying it was such an evil to embracing it as enthusiastically as possible, I felt like we hadn’t gotten to the bottom of what exactly persuaded them to do a 180,” Funt said. “They weren’t offering answers that were satisfying.”

Second, he says, industry leaders Draft-Kings and FanDuel are rather closed-off entities. “I wanted to take time to cultivate sources at those companies,” he said. “I wanted to learn what it’s like to work at one of those places, how the online business operates and to hear how they think of customers.”

I will spoil nothing. Funt delivers with a deep excavation that demands attention.

Shameful

Thirty-nine states, plus Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico, have legal sports betting. In four jurisdictions, the minimum age is only 18.

Funt pressed a lobbyist, part of a law firm that has been influential in the national legalization movement, for details of how those moving parts work.

In seeking all you wanted in Virginia, Funt asked her, what was one area that received the most pushback, the stickiest request?

“She thought for a minute,” Funt said, “then finally said, ‘Uh, yeah, nothing comes to mind. We really got everything we wanted.’ When [regulators] don’t understand [sports gambling], it gives the industry so much leverage.”

Such astounding ignorance and lack of guardrails allow a tout to charge customers for game picks and earn a percentage of their losses, via deals with affiliated companies.

“So slimy,” Funt said. “Naive and gullible clientele being preyed on by those guys is just sad, just so wrong and shameful.”

Those are his views, too, on the voracious Euro “ban or bankrupt” model that has so effectively crossed the pond to pollute the United States.

Funt includes a profound episode in the late NFLer Junior Seau’s life, which he called a sports horror story.

“We just forget about them so quickly,” Funt said. “Hopefully, people can learn from what he went through, and the fact that CTE [chronic traumatic encephalopathy] and gambling problems have some overlap.

“That’s pretty scary.”

Meager resistance

In 1971, cigarette ads were banned from TV. In the last 90 seconds before it began, ad wiz Jack Landry concocted a Marlboro ad featuring four cowboys riding into the sunset.

When, I ask Funt, might commercials for sports-betting companies meet a similar fate, Hamm, Foxx, Shaq (on a Clydesdale) and Hart (atop a Shetland pony) galloping away into a dusky desert?

“It would take something really tragic to get there,” Funt said. “A major match-fixing scandal or a clear surge in suicides due to gambling issues or an enraged gambler tries to kill an athlete because he cost him a bet.

“Any of that would be so scandalous, but the money pushing what the industry wants is so lopsided. And the resistance to that is pretty meager. I’m skeptical.”