Wny do millionaire athletes get involved with gambling? Jay BusbeeOctober 23, 2025 at 11:10 PM 0 Terry Rozier has earned an estimated $160 million from three teams over his 10year NBA career. Chauncey Billups played for 17 years and earned $106.8 million.
- - Wny do millionaire athletes get involved with gambling?
Jay BusbeeOctober 23, 2025 at 11:10 PM
0
Terry Rozier has earned an estimated $160 million from three teams over his 10-year NBA career. Chauncey Billups played for 17 years and earned $106.8 million. As of Thursday afternoon, they and former Cleveland Cavalier Damon Jones were the top three trending athletes on Spotrac, a contract-tracking site, all for the same reason.
Rozier, Jones and Billups were named in two separate federal gambling indictments on Thursday, along with dozens of other individuals. The arrest of three high-profile — and, in theory, wealthy — players prompts an obvious question: Why would players who have earned nine figures of income get caught up in gambling allegations?
Billups and Rozier now join the ranks of players like the Raptors' Jontay Porter (career earnings: $2.3 million), the Pirates' Tucupita Marcano (career earnings: $1.9 million) and the Falcons' Calvin Ridley (one-year forfeited salary: $11.1 million), seven-plus-figure earners who saw seasons or entire careers evaporate because of gambling charges.
From the outside, it's easy to wonder how on earth athletes with massive paychecks rolling in could jeopardize their entire careers by gambling. But there's a key flaw in that reasoning: the assumption that money underlies a drive to gamble.
The truth is far more perilous: the same traits that make someone become a world-class athlete can make them vulnerable to a gambling addiction. Keith Whyte, president of Safer Gambling Strategies, has spent an entire career studying the perils of gambling, and he believes that athletes are particularly vulnerable to its temptations.
"When you look at things like competitiveness and perception of skill, there are traits specific to elite athletes that can be particularly dangerous when it comes to gambling, or particularly disadvantageous when it comes to gambling decisions," Whyte told Yahoo Sports recently. "Competitiveness. These people get where they are because they refuse to lose. They get to where they are because they believe that they can always beat the odds. They have beaten the odds all their lives."
Terry Rozier has earned $160 million in his 11-year NBA career, including a $26.6 million salary this season. (AP Photo/Terrance Williams, File) ()
Plus, athletes have a willingness to play through pain and obstacles that stop the rest of us. "If you've just lost $500, $1,000, $10,000, whatever that is, for most people, that's a signal to stop gambling," Whyte says. "But the elite athletes are able to push themselves harder and further and through more pain than others. And so they can blow past some of those warning signs."
Even the threat of losing one's career isn't enough of a deterrent when a player may have grown up gambling. "There are patterns of behavior that have perhaps existed for more than a decade," Whyte says. "And it doesn't just stop, you can't just turn it off, when they become pros."
"I'll put it this way," he adds. "I've never talked to a professional athlete that's had a gambling problem that started gambling once they became a professional. The majority were gambling in college, and a majority of those who gambled in college started in high school."
Athletes also possess an invaluable gambling asset, one that they develop and enhance every single day of their professional career. What's a gambler's most valuable weapon? Information. And what do studious athletes possess to a far greater degree than the people in the stands or the sports books? Information. Actionable, potentially profitable information.
"I can't imagine how hard it would be to not bet when you've just spent a week studying a game film on your opponent, and you think you know what they do on third downs, or you think you know when a particular pitcher is likely to throw a particular pitch at a particular inning," Whyte says. "That's literally what you've studied."
When an athlete can use the information they've gathered on prop bets — small-scale, tightly focused wagers that may not have an impact on the overall game, but can be easily influenced — that's when the real problems begin.
"When you start to be able to bet on an individual pitch or an individual player, an individual shot, or individual performance, whether it's you or a teammate, the level of inside knowledge and ability, the ability to influence the outcome," Whyte says, "it's got to be absolutely an overwhelming impulse that's almost an irresistible urge."
Prop bets are the key to several recent high-profile athlete gambling cases. Rozier is accused of, and Porter was banned for life for, manipulating "under" prop bets — withdrawing themselves from games in order to keep from reaching specific statistical targets. Bettors who had gambled they wouldn't hit those targets — bet the under, in other words — would then be winners.
NBA commissioner Adam Silver, recognizing the danger of such prop bets, told ESPN earlier this week, "We've asked some of our partners to pull back some of the prop bets, especially when they're on two-way players, guys who don't have the same stake in the competition, where it's too easy to manipulate something, which seems otherwise small and inconsequential to the overall score. We're trying to put in place — learning as we go and working with the betting companies — some additional control to prevent some of that manipulation."
The overarching challenge for regulating athletes' gambling is the exact same reason it's exploded in popularity these last few years: Gambling is just too easy to do. Even with restrictions and warnings in place to deter athletes from gambling, the omnipresence and ease of use of gambling apps makes the prospect of laying a few bets as simple as handing a phone to a friend … or, in the case of the current FBI indictment, sending an informational text.
"The thing with gambling is that the technology makes it so easy and so accessible," Whyte says. "You can test if someone's taking drugs, you can test if they drink. But it's almost impossible to find out if there's an athlete who's asked his girlfriend or roommate to set up an account on their behalf. Those wins and losses are real, that dopamine, the excitement, and the potential addiction is all carried by the individual, but someone else's name's on the account."
The punishment, though, falls on the athlete. The more that pro athletes gamble, the more they expose themselves to, at best, financial losses, and at worst, a knock on the door from the FBI.
"Unfortunately, the odds in gambling are always negative. The iron rule is, the longer you gamble, the more likely you are to lose," Whyte says. "But everything in their life has taught them that the more you practice, the harder you play, the more you refuse to quit — those are assets as a pro athlete, those are deficits as a gambler."
Source: "AOL Sports"
Source: VoXi MAG
Full Article on Source: VoXi MAG
#LALifestyle #USCelebrities