Sports Gambling Is a Ticking Time Bomb

Some of the biggest scandals in sports history have revolved around players and gambling.

Pete Rose is barred for life from baseball, in an agreement stemming from admissions of gambling. The Black Sox scandal, about a thrown World Series, is perhaps the most notorious sports debacle of all time.

Yet in a rush to embrace the potential profits provided by new forms of legalized sports gambling, the professional sports leagues have put players, and the people close to them, under untenable pressure. I have represented professional athletes for 50 years and I have never seen a situation that’s more perilous to them and the integrity of sports.

There’s traditionally been an impregnable wall between professional sports and the world of gambling, but that wall is not just crumbling, it’s evaporating. Leagues must start by acknowledging that athletes are human. They have failings. They make missteps. The N.B.A., M.L.B. and other leagues have facilitated a situation that makes it all too easy for players to falter.

If more of those players do, they will bring down the edifice of professional sports.