Are we ignoring a gambling epidemic?
I’m torn when it comes to selecting a favourite. My shortlist consists of the commercial with two glamorous young people, a man and woman, who come into their kitchen and exchange meaningful gazes as a prelude not to passionate love-making, but steamy punting. The fridge opens up to provide plenty of betting opportunities, and then the two of them vault onto the couch to see what’s on television that they can throw a few bob on.
The other entry looks like it was created from spare chunks of Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels: in this commercial a few likely lads — geezahs, to give them the Latin designation — are having a laugh, or ‘avin’ a laff, together while they’re identified in freeze-frame as per their betting tendencies: the Sorrowful Philosopher, the Ruth Amid The Alien Corn, all that kind of thing.
If you don’t take a strong interest in gambling, these are mere obstacles to your enjoyment of Brigitte Nyborg’s latest travails as Prime Minister of Denmark, but there seems to be a whiff of desperation about the attempts to normalise the activity.
Those familiar with the hostelries of Dublin will be able to name the pub which has a collection of vintage GAA All-Star teams from the 70s on the walls of its upstairs lounge. What’s far more eye-catching than the players’ Serpico hairstyles and moustaches is the product sponsor. Carrolls cigarettes. We’d laugh now at that yoking together of sport and nicotine — we’d laugh at prime-time TV advertising for cigarettes, come to that — but I wonder if the glammed-up gambling commercials are the current equivalent of those hilarious old newspaper ads, with two surgeons relaxing with a cigarette after an operation (“For a smooth smoke, I recommend Lung-Away...”).
Last week I referred to the new book by Brett Forrest about match-fixing in soccer, and the potential for trouble with final games in the World Cup group stages. That’s not the kind of misery I’m talking about when it comes to the damage gambling does, though if the results of sports events are prearranged anyway before you put your money down it wouldn’t do much for your humour.
I’m referring to the kind of misery outlined by former Armagh footballer Óisin McConville in his autobiography, The Gambler, or by ex-Northern Ireland international Keith Gillespie: the rock-bottom you can hit if gambling takes over. Naturally you don’t hear as much about this in commercials. Are they something we’ll laugh about in 20 years as evidence of our nonchalant attitude towards a problem responsible for vast misery in the population at large? Or is it just part of the normalisation of gambling, something we must get used to?
Commercial news just in: over in the States the NBA has decided to move its league logo to the back of team jerseys.
A small and inconsequential detail? Perhaps. The NBA itself simply referred to the change as a “stylistic move” without elaborating further, but observers in the States think differently.
“The move is sure to fuel speculation that the NBA is preparing to move ahead with its long-planned programme of jersey advertising,” said ESPN over the weekend, adding: “Removing the league logo from the front of the jersey will clear more space for an ad patch and remove what would otherwise be a competing visual icon. Annual revenue from jersey ads has been estimated to be in the $100 million range.”
What strikes me as odd here is that we consider professional sports in America to be apex predators of sports marketing, ruthlessly sharking through the commercial sea, eyes switching left and right in the perpetual hunt the unprotected opportunity-fish (hook this metaphor and bring it in to land, please — ed.).
We’re right to have that attitude a lot of the time, particularly when the likes of the Glazers and John Henry fit that particular bill pretty well.
It just seems strange that this ground-breaking move was anticipated decades ago over here, with teams in all the major field sports signing off on rewarding main sponsor access to the chest areas of their shirts.
Even allowing for the empire-line cut of the typical NBA team singlet, it’s odd that nobody decided that team sponsors would far prefer to be on the front of the star player’s top — or that it would be more lucrative for the team to accommodate those sponsors in that area. Strange, that.
As a small aside, if anyone wants to win a very small prize, feel free to email me at michael.moynihan@examiner.ie if you know which player is immortalised in the NBA logo, introduced in 1969.
A mate of mine who goes to a lot of hurling games has come up with a modest proposal which might — just might — solve some of the issues afflicting the great old game at present, and one which involves no eating of little children (obligatory Swift reference).
Those issues are the frees, the penalties, the apparent near-certainty of decapitation. He suggested softening the sliotar slightly.
This is the kind of counter-intuitive move which would make the game both safer and harder.
Safer in that the impact from a slightly more yielding ball wouldn’t hurt as much; harder in that players would be challenged to upskill across the board in terms of judging the flight of the sliotar, in cushioning passes and in terms of tactics.
A softer ball doesn’t travel as far, which means, for instance, that midfield play would cease to be a matter of supplementing your half-back and -forward lines as the middle of the field would become a discrete zone of endeavour for players.
Granted, the assumption is always that technology improves a game’s equipment by making it faster in every way, but given the complaints we’ve been listening to for the last 12 months, here’s another angle on how to address those concerns.
Interesting to enter the Cork dressing room after Saturday night’s Munster SFC semi-final to interview Brian Cuthbert
This was interesting because nowadays most of the post-game chats are conducted in a spare room, and not in a humid space where underpants, torn match programmes, bloodied bandages and steaming, half-naked protagonists are all around.
Frankly, it was fantastic.
If you had the freedom to choose, you’d prefer to be able to talk to players and managers in an environment where you’re not in danger of slipping on someone’s gumshield. And you can hear what’s being said.
But it was nice for once to have the option.
