NCAA's Bid to Outlaw Gambling
On College Sports Is a Long Shot
By TOM HAMBURGER and CHRISTINA BINKLEY
Staff Reporters of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
MINNEAPOLIS -- The unlikely captain of an underdog team stood outside the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome on Saturday afternoon, counting down the minutes before college basketball's Final Four championship round and wondering what had happened to her players.
Sen. Michael Enzi had arrived. So had Sen. Sam Brownback and Rep. Bart Stupak. But where was Rep. Donald Payne and that aide to Sen. John McCain?
The National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball championship might seem an odd place to push federal legislation. But for Doris Dixon, the NCAA's chief lobbyist, it provided that rare setting where she could enjoy an edge over her foe, the deep-pocketed gambling industry, in her two-year struggle to end gambling on college sports.
Most times the odds are stacked against her, thanks to the casino industry's clout in Washington. Gambling interests contributed $5.6 million to candidates and parties in the election cycle that ended with last November's voting, with $3.5 million of that going to the victorious Republicans.
By law, the NCAA, as a tax-exempt organization, can't make campaign donations. Ms. Dixon finds that has left her at a decided disadvantage in her quest to secure passage of a law that would end betting on college games, such as the NCAA final played here last night between Duke and Arizona.
Ms. Dixon has seen the congressional leaders of both parties snub her requests for meetings, even as they welcomed gambling-industry representatives into their offices. She has watched as prominent lawmakers backed away from her bill, sometimes shortly after receiving campaign contributions or other help from the industry. In need of support, she has tried to hire seven different Washington consulting and lobbying firms to help her push her case -- and has been turned down seven times, sometimes because the industry had already retained the firms itself.
'Unlimited Resources'
So Ms. Dixon has resorted to this: waiting at the door to the Final Four to give coveted tickets to a few lawmakers -- and hand them details of the NCAA's antigambling bill. (The lawmakers purchased the tickets for themselves, at face value.) Moments before tip-off, to her relief, the last straggler showed up. Ms. Dixon Monday lured some of them to a news conference on the proposal.
Participate in the Question of the Day: Did you bet on the NCAA Tournament this year?
* * *
NCAA Pushes for a Gambling Ban (March 31, 2000)
"We are taking our case nationally, getting discussion here and around the country that we have been unable to get on the floor of the House or Senate," she says. Overall, she says, "there is no comparison with any other issue I have worked on in Washington. We are up against unlimited resources -- financially, in terms of manpower and in terms of ability to blanket [Capitol] Hill."
The NCAA itself is hardly free from the influence of big money, thanks to its giant television contracts, which will yield $6 billion over the next 11 years. The association has also suffered a series of scandals through the years involving academic fraud, player recruitment and overzealous alumni providing perks to star players.
What's more, critics assert that the NCAA isn't always as committed to eradicating gambling as its statements suggest. They say the association should do more to prevent gambling magazines and Web sites from using the NCAA logo, for instance. "We can only go so far as an enterprise in telling media organizations what they can and cannot do," says an NCAA spokesman.
At the root of the struggle is a simple fact: Nevada, alone among the 50 states, allows betting on college games. And keeping things that way is a top priority for the Las Vegas-based gambling industry and its team of Washington lobbyists at the American Gaming Association, led by Frank Fahrenkopf, the former Republican National Committee chairman.
Sports betting represents just 0.5% of gambling-company revenues, and continues to lose ground to more-lucrative activities such as slot machines. But the industry considers it important to beat back the precedent of a federal incursion into the business. "We need to stop this," says Nevada Rep. Shelley Berkley, "because letting it through would be letting the nose of federal regulation under our tent."
In the industry's view, the NCAA is trying to make Nevada a scapegoat for its failure to shut down the vastly bigger network of illegal gambling, some of it happening right on college campuses. Nevada's legal sports books bring in about $2.3 billion in bets each year -- estimated to be a mere 1% of the total organized gambling on sports nationwide.
In the U.S., sports gambling has traditionally been governed by states and is widely illegal -- from office pools to bookies. Federal laws ban transferring bets across state lines, which precludes Internet betting. But the laws are rarely enforced unless there is an organized ring involved. And there can be exceptions, such as "friendly" betting where no third party takes a cut.
"The problem is not Nevada," says Mr. Fahrenkopf, who argues that closing down legal college sports gambling simply will drive more of the business underground. "The problem is college campuses and illegal bookies."
College officials reply that allowing college-sports betting to flourish legally in one place gives the practice an air of legitimacy nationwide. They note that many illegal bookies around the country feed off the Las Vegas industry, placing numerous bets there to spread their own risk. Bookies also use the all-important Las Vegas "point spread" that allows gamblers to bet not simply on which team will win, but whether the winner will do better or worse than expected.
Officials worry that betting threatens the integrity of college sports and puts enormous pressure on student athletes who are more vulnerable than well-paid professionals. "It's unacceptable having 18-, 19- and 20-year-old kids being bet on," says Jim Calhoun, the University of Connecticut's men's basketball coach.
In the scramble to get such arguments heard, Ms. Dixon once thought her ability to bring a stable of college presidents and star athletes into congressional offices would offset the gambling industry's obvious advantage in doling out campaign cash. Now, she thinks that was naïve.
She has allies on Capitol Hill: Sens. McCain of Arizona, Brownback of Kansas and Enzi of Wyoming, and Reps. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Tim Roemer of Indiana and Donald Payne of New Jersey all are pushing a college betting ban. But in general, this self-described soccer mom has found herself fighting a battle that has left her "discouraged and distressed" during setbacks over the past two years.
For Ms. Dixon, a former aide to Rep. Harold Ford and Sen. Thad Cochran, the struggle over gambling isn't exactly what she had in mind when she joined the NCAA as its first-ever full-time lobbyist in 1995. At first, much of her time was spent on such low-key issues as determining whether corporate sponsorships of big events such as the Cotton Bowl should be tax-deductible.
In the background, gambling was rising steadily as an NCAA headache in the late 1990s. A Northwestern University football player was suspended for gambling. A former Notre Dame football player was embroiled in a betting scandal. Football and basketball players at the University of Maryland were suspended for betting on college sports, and more than a dozen members of the Boston College football team were suspended for betting on college football games.
Collision Course
So in June 1999, Ms. Dixon and other NCAA officials decided to act. They seized on a recommendation by a bipartisan National Gambling Impact Study Commission appointed by President Clinton and Congress that gambling on amateur sports be banned nationwide as part of a larger program to combat the problem. The NCAA decided to take on gambling in Nevada.
As she took the idea to congressional offices late that summer, Ms. Dixon says she "received a very favorable response." Good news came early from the Senate, where the staff of Sen. Orrin Hatch, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, told Ms. Dixon he favored the idea and would be her primary sponsor. In the House, Rep. Roemer stepped forward as a sponsor and two Judiciary Committee members, Reps. Graham and John Conyers, expressed interest.
In September, the staffs of Sens. Hatch and Brownback drafted a Senate bill outlawing gambling on college sports nationwide, and Ms. Dixon's confidence rose.
But by the end of that month, those hopes were shaken. Once-cordial staffers told her their bosses had lost interest, turned away from the legislation by party leaders who said it would hurt fund raising in a critical election year. Mr. Graham recalled being warned about the legislation by Rep. Tom Davis, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, who said backing it could affect a key House race in Nevada. Mr. Davis declined repeated requests for comment.
Several Senate offices told Ms. Dixon that Sen. Mitch McConnell, the chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, had warned them away from the bill, saying it could damage fund-raising efforts and chances for victory in Nevada's Senate contest. Sen. McConnell says emphatically that he didn't urge members away from the bill. He called such statements "patently false" and said in fact that he supports the bill. Ms. Dixon finds that hard to believe. "We couldn't get him to even attend an event when the University of Kentucky president was in town," she says.
In any case, other would-be supporters similarly fell by the wayside. Ms. Dixon says she also was rebuffed, for example, by Michigan Sen. Spencer Abraham, who had previously expressed interest. Mr. Abraham was facing a tough re-election campaign, and records compiled by the Center for Responsive Politics, a watchdog group, indicate he received a series of campaign contributions from Las Vegas in late 1999 and early 2000. Mr. Abraham ultimately lost that race and now is the Bush administration's energy secretary. Mr. Abraham couldn't be reached for comment, but a spokesperson says he "never took a position on that legislation."
By February last year Ms. Dixon saw antigambling bills introduced in the House and the Senate, but the indicators weren't good: House leaders declared the bill dead, and Senate Republicans on the Judiciary Committee generally shied away. Troubled, Ms. Dixon sought help from former Sens. Howard Baker and Dan Coats, but says she was turned away because their firms represented gambling-related interests. Mr. Baker couldn't be reached for comment, and a spokesman for his law firm could find no record of an NCAA approach. An aide to Mr. Coats confirmed Ms. Dixon's account. Other firms similarly rebuffed her.
As last year wore on, though, the most worrisome sign was the unexplained withdrawal of support from Sen. Hatch, the powerful head of the Judiciary Committee. Ms. Dixon once thought he would be the lead sponsor of the bill, and his staff worked closely with her and other Senate allies through early fall. Then one day last October, Ms. Dixon received a terse e-mail from a Hatch aide informing her the senator was switching sides.
"I just freaked out when I saw that," she says. "This was a stunning blow." A spokesperson for Mr. Hatch says that, while he's against betting on college sports, he exempted Nevada from a 1992 bill banning such activity to help its passage and is "very concerned about going back on his word" in the current effort.
The second blow was the loss of expected support from Rep. Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, who had helped establish the National Gambling Impact Study Commission in 1996.
At a hearing last year, Mr. Conyers confirmed the commission's findings. "What did that study find?" Mr. Conyers asked rhetorically. "That sports gambling, in particular, has serious social costs. It threatens the integrity of amateur sports. It puts student athletes in potentially difficult positions when confronted with offers of gifts or large sums of money."
Yet when the Judiciary Committee voted on the bill last fall, Mr. Conyers opposed it. Mr. Graham says he was shocked. Aides to Mr. Conyers say he never endorsed the NCAA bill, and now he is co-sponsoring an industry-backed alternative bill which leaves Nevada's exemption for college sports betting intact while calling for a study of the problem of illegal gambling and increases the penalties for engaging in it. "I've been taking a look at that issue, and it seems that college gambling doesn't have anything to do with Nevada," Mr. Conyers now says. He also has made at least one trip to Las Vegas, and received $35,500 in contributions from the industry. He declined to comment on the contributions.
More troubling for the NCAA, Mr. Conyers' apparent shift coincided with a broader effort by the casino industry to woo the Congressional Black Caucus, once considered a center of support for the bill. Rep. Charles Rangel, the ranking member on the Ways and Means Committee, also came out in opposition, saying it "infringes on states' rights." He, too, had traveled to Nevada for a campaign fund-raiser. He said his decision was based on the merits.
A Dead Bill
By last fall, with the election fast approaching, the problems became too much for the NCAA's bill to surmount. It passed the House Judiciary Committee in September, despite Mr. Conyers' lack of support, but never made it to the House floor. And it was never scheduled for a Senate vote. As the year ended, the bill died.
Now, the battle is resuming again in the new Congress. On Wednesday, gaming association executive Walton Chalmers, a former top official at the Democratic National Committee, urged Senators to oppose the NCAA bill and back the industry's preferred legislation; on Thursday he helped host a lunch and coffee for moderate and conservative Democrats.
Meantime, Ms. Dixon says even the NCAA's well-known coaches and university presidents are having a hard time meeting with members of the leadership to argue their side of the case. University presidents from every state and the nation's most prominent coaches -- from South Carolina football coach Lou Holtz to Kentucky's Orlando "Tubby" Smith -- volunteered to come to Washington to push for the legislation. But Ms. Dixon says she was unable to secure appointments with top leaders of either party.
-- Jeffrey White in Washington contributed to this article.
Write to Tom Hamburger at tom.hamburger@wsj.com and Christina Binkley at christina.binkley@wsj.com |
