NCAA lobbies for ban on sports betting

Thursday, Oct. 7, 1999 | 11:52 a.m.

The casino industry is mobilizing against an National Collegiate Athletic Association campaign to ban betting on college athletics.

Frank Fahrenkopf, president of the American Gaming Association, sent a confidential memo Wednesday to his board members informing them of the NCAA's efforts to persuade Congress to remove a federal exemption that allows Nevada sports books to accept wagers on college sports.

In the two-page memo, obtained by the Sun, Fahrenkopf said NCAA President Cedric Dempsey told him at a meeting Tuesday in Washington, D.C., that the association has talked to Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, about introducing the legislation.

Hatch, Dempsey told Fahrenkopf, expressed an interest in the measure.

"President Dempsey is concerned about the large number of college youth involved in illegal gambling and the role Nevada sports books might have in that gambling," Fahrenkopf wrote. "In his words, the existence of collegiate sports betting in Nevada has the potential to fundamentally 'bring down' collegiate sports."

The NCAA's push comes in the wake of a college athletics betting ban proposed in June by the National Gambling Impact Study Commission, a nine-member panel appointed by Congress that examined the spread of gambling in America.

At the time, Nevada political leaders, gaming regulators and sports book operators voiced strong opposition to the recommendation.

Gaming Control Board Chairman Steve DuCharme said legal wagering in Nevada, about $2.3 billion last year, amounts to only 2 percent to 3 percent of all sports betting in the country. The vast majority of wagers are placed with illegal bookmakers, he said.

A wagering ban, Fahrenkopf wrote, would drive sports betting on college athletics "entirely underground."

Bill Saum, the NCAA's director of agent and gambling activities, confirmed today that his organization is looking at the ban as a result of the Impact Study Commission's recommendation.

"It's a natural fallout that we need to sit down and evaluate that recommendation," he said. "We've spent a great deal of time over the last three years trying to re-sensitize our campuses to the ills of sports wagering."

But Fahrenkopf said he renewed the industry's concerns about the betting ban during his meeting with Dempsey and other NCAA officials

"I indicated to them that I believed the board of directors of the AGA would instruct us to vigorously oppose this legislation and reiterated the two primary grounds," Fahrenkopf wrote.

"First, illegal betting on college sports is the problem, not legal wagering. There are numerous examples where Nevada's sports books have been used as valuable tools of law enforcement.

"Second, making sports betting illegal in Nevada would not achieve the NCAA's goals of eliminating illegal youth gambling," Fahrenkopf said. "That will require a much larger public education effort involving the industry, educators, athletes and many others -- an effort in which we are prepared to join them."

Controversy, meanwhile, also has been raging here on the subject of betting on professional sports.

Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman recently returned from a meeting with NBA Commissioner David Stern on a possible NBA franchise for Las Vegas.

Stern told Goodman the NBA's current position is that Nevada would have to prohibit betting on all NBA games before the city could get a franchise.

Reaction to an NBA wagering ban has been mixed at the sports books.

In his memo, Fahrenkopf said: "The NCAA claims that other national organizations would join them, but that professional sports leagues would not seek to repeal the Nevada exemption for professional sports."

Fahrenkopf said Dempsey told him that he hoped the AGA might join the NCAA in its push on Capitol Hill.

"We have advised President Dempsey that we will provide the NCAA with a written response sometime in the next 10 days or so, after we have brought this issue to your attention," Fahrenkopf wrote his board members.

"We are also asking them for additional information on and in support of their proposal."