Losing Big

“Losing Big demonstrates how legalized sports betting became a gigantic business, a ceaselessly annoying marketing presence, and a genuine danger to thousands of people. But, even more importantly, it shows how its menacing presence in our lives is the product of the consciously dishonest manipulations of mendacious entrepreneurs and their sanctimonious and cynical partners, the professional sports leagues. It’s a revealing book, and one can only hope it’s not too late.” —Daniel Okrent, writer, author, and inventor of Rotisserie League Baseball “Before I was a journalist, I was the Executive Director of the first government Off Track Betting Corporation in the U.S. It was sold as virtuous. Millions would be earmarked for education. We would weaken illegal bookmakers and numbers runners. I woke up when I realized how a government entity was enslaving citizens to an addiction. In his powerful, carefully reported book on the spread of sports betting to 38 states, Jonathan Cohen introduces us to gambling addicts and demonstrates that legal gambling creates a public health crisis I only glimpsed in the seventies. The author would not ban sports gambling, though he shows how the fervid race by professional sports teams to grow its audience can compromise the games. Cohen offers clear-eyed ideas to build guardrails to better police what he accurately describes as a health crisis.” —Ken Auletta, author and writer for the New Yorker