Sports betting debate rages on as New Jersey case heads to appeals court

The state of New Jersey has reignited a long-running national argument over legal betting on pro and college sports in the hope of overturning a 21-year-old federal law and collecting a jackpot in tax revenue.

With the U.S. Justice Department and just about every major sports organization in the country allied against it, New Jersey lost the first round late last month when a federal judge blocked a state law that legalized sports gambling at racetracks and Atlantic City casinos.

So Nevada and Delaware remain the only places in the United States to legally gamble on college and pro sports, which attract an estimated hundreds of billions of dollars in illegal wagers each year. And political leaders in other states will have to consider alternatives to address budget crunches, boost ailing economies and attract tourism dollars.

Backers of the New Jersey measure vow to continue pressing the state’s case in court and on Capitol Hill, with a projected $100 million in government revenue at stake in the first year alone.

But some gambling and legal experts say that, for the foreseeable future, success remains a long shot. The problem for New Jersey is a 1992 federal law that bans sports betting in all but four states.

“The odds are the final outcome will be the same as the outcome in the district court,” said Gabriel Feldman, director of the sports law program at Tulane University. “It was clear from the beginning this was an uphill battle for New Jersey and the courts would give great deference to federal law.”

Supporters expect the state’s appeal to the Philadelphia-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit to be filed this month. William J. Pascrell III, the lead lobbyist for sports betting interests in New Jersey, called the appeals court “the best arena to play this out” and said: “We’re not surprised by the [district court] decision. We’re frustrated. We’re disappointed. We think it’s wrong.”

A financial boon

Backers of the New Jersey law predict it would generate an estimated $1 billion in bets in its first year. That would produce an estimated $100 million in revenues for the state that year, primarily through New Jersey’s 8 percent tax on casinos’ gross revenues. Sports betting would take place at the dozen casinos in Atlantic City and at horse racing tracks statewide.

According to the American Gaming Association, legal sports betting represents less than 1 percent of all the wagering on sports nationwide. Last year in Nevada, a total of nearly $3.5 billion was bet on sports. In Delaware, where sports gambling is limited to NFL parlay bets involving three games or more, about $30.2 million was wagered last year.

That is a small fraction of the $380 billion that, according to a 1999 estimate by the National Gambling Impact Study Commission, is bet illegally on sports each year nationwide, a figure that probably has grown in the past 14 years.

“Who knows what that number is today,” said Frank J. Fahrenkopf Jr., president and chief executive officer of the American Gaming Association, a lobbying and advocacy group for the commercial casino industry.