Someone asked me the other day whether I still enjoy watching sports.
The background context to this being that I am now eight years into recovery from an intense gambling addiction which was almost entirely based around betting on sports.
It was a good question, as it gave me a reason to objectively explore my feelings towards an area where, like many in recovery, I would normally shy away from thinking too much about.
Not because it might trigger me to want to bet, but because it would require me remembering back to a phase in my life where I didn’t particularly like being me.
Nowadays, like many in recovery, I am far more analytical of my behaviours. I am more aware of how external stimuli affect how I am feeling internally, and more conscious of the reasons underlying why I find myself reacting or emoting to the world around me.
With that ‘perspective’, I can now see that my enjoyment of watching sports was based on two factors of engagement:
#1 Outcome Engagement – Having a reason to root for one side to win. So, your ‘own’ club, your national team, those facing your local rivals, or, being British, an obvious underdog.
#2 Entertainment Engagement – the ‘purity’ of sheer entertainment and spectacle. So, the ‘fun’ element of watching a senior doubles Wimbledon match, or the atmosphere of an FA Cup final or Grand National.
The first of these is probably familiar to any person who associates with a team or country. Yes, you want your side to play well, but a good result trumps a good performance.
Watching a game in those circumstances can be ‘pleasurable’, but it can also be a long emotional slog – like watching Andy Murray in his prime over a torturous 5 sets at a tennis Grand Slam.
Sadly, it is also the reason why people can be drawn to sports gambling.
Many people blame the ubiquitous (all surrounding) nature of sports betting apps and websites as being the main instigator of an increase in addiction and harm caused through engagement with sports betting.
And those people have good and valid reason to say so.
But, as with many predatory adaptations of human behaviour, sports betting also grew in popularity and pervasiveness on the back of another product innovation – an explosion of unprecedented availability of live sports brought about by the commoditisation of alternative TV broadcast technologies.
Sky’s arrival on the broadcasting landscape in the UK, and the other non-terrestrial providers who then followed, brought a massive increase in live sports being shown on TV.
Live sports were an ideal ‘product’ to base the previously alien concept of paying for TV programming around. They were ‘drama’ without the need for inventing stages, plots, or hiring actors – so, ready made ‘entertainment’.
Sky transformed the concept of live armchair viewing from feeling like a ‘special’ event which happened two or three times a year, into being an activity which people could engage in at any time.
And what started out as two, sometimes three, live games each weekend kept expanding until people could effectively switch on their TVs or computers and watch unbroken live sports from 9am (Australian A-League) until after midnight (MLS, NFL, etc).
Human nature then played a major role in ensuring that people did watch far more sports events than they ever did previously. People who had found themselves paying for subscriptions to mainly watch games, or even sports, which they had a pre-existing Outcome Engagement in – such as their own chosen ‘team’ – then found themselves rationalising that if they were paying X per month to watch just one or two games of particular interest to them then they might as well get their money’s worth by watching other sports events, even though the participants and outcomes didn’t particularly matter to them.
In effect people started watching live sports because they were available rather than because they wanted to see them.
Now, for some events, the entertainment factor would be enough to make this seem worthwhile. But for other events people would find themselves struggling to keep engagement through the whole event. A rollicking end-to-end game where the outcome was in the balance would often satisfy reason #2 above – the Entertainment Engagement – but if the game was less exciting, or less competitive, then they would find their interest challenged.
In effect they found themselves watching sporting events which satisfied neither of the two engagement reasons – outcome bias, and entertainment. And, while it is impossible as an armchair viewer to make a sports event more exciting as a spectacle – there is no magic wand to transform a mediocre player into an on-field GOAT – it is possible to introduce an outcome based reason for increasing engagement.
Sometimes that reason would come naturally – a poor umpiring decision, or a piece of unsporting play by one side might give a reason to support the ‘wronged’ side in a ‘neutral’ encounter, but increasingly people were falling for the line which gambling operators – and sponsored pundits – were increasingly projecting…
“It matters more when there’s money on it.”
And, to be fair, it does matter more.
But ‘mattering more’ is not the same as making it more ‘enjoyable’ to watch.
Quite the opposite, really.
What many people, myself included, found was that putting a bet on a team winning did make a particular outcome more desirable. But, it also made the events leading up to that outcome less meaningful. And, importantly, less enjoyable.
Anyone who has been a sports ‘fan’ will understand the strong emotions which can overwhelm you if your chosen team is playing.
If they outplay and outscore the opposition early on then it can be an overwhelmingly ‘enjoyable’ and even ‘joyous’ occasion, allowing you to sit back and feel relaxed about individual incidents. If you really want to, you can engage in the old ‘ole’ baiting of the opposition as they run around like headless chickens trying to stop the effortless ball control and double-digit passing sequences which your team relax into.
If your team is on the other side of a drubbing then it can still become enjoyable in a stoic and resigned sort of way. Cheering ironically when the player who has scored twice against you trips over their own bootlaces when seemingly about to walk the ball into the net for their ‘hat-trick’. The point being that once the ‘outcome engagement’ is removed it presents space for the ‘entertainment engagement’ to shine through.
The other side of the emotional rollercoaster is the [distraught but hopeful] tension which comes with chasing an equaliser (or valuable winner) as time runs out, or the sheer [happy but fearful] nerve-wracking hell-on-earth of having something to cling on to with just minutes of normal time to survive during which your side’s players revert into panic mode as they lose all previous control and discipline and desperately adopt a backs-to-the-wall siege mentality.
We would probably all agree that what should make sports, or any ‘entertainment’, rewarding to watch is emotional engagement. But that engagement should not be at the expense of ‘enjoyment’.
There are many truisms linked to sports but perhaps one which stands out from others is…
“It’s the hope that kills you.”
As a Scotland football fan I know this to be oh, so true.
I have lost count of the number of times I have watched the national team out of a sense of duty rather than expectation, only to find a fluke score or unexpectedly good performance suddenly presents the glimmer of an outcome which seemed impossible to hope for… and thus builds emotional investment right up to that gut-wrenching injury-time 30 yard screamer by the opposition. Or, more usually, that penalty award where the pre-VAR replays show the opposition player hit an invisible brick-wall rather than any of the outstretched appendages of the desperately lunging defender.
Sometimes living with despair creates less emotional hurt than the pain of living, forlornly, in hope.
Which really is where Sports Betting took me to.
Every game became outcome critical.
Every game stopped being enjoyable as a spectacle.
As addiction took hold of me the nature of the emotional investment changed.
When I first started betting in sports there was a sense of hope.
I hoped that my bets would come in, and I saw the amount of money which this might bring me as being an outcome in its own right.
But, the longer I gambled, and the more it became a habit rather than a conscious choice, this started to switch around.
Winning, and indeed losing, stopped being an end-point.
As with most addictively engaged gamblers the outcome became irrelevant.
If I lost, then at first I would feel deflated, but later on it stopped even mattering.
If I won, then at first I would feel elated, but again, later on, this also stopped mattering.
Winning began to only matter in that it presented an immediate opportunity – a false-rational ‘need’ even – to then find the next event on which I could risk those winnings.
Winning simply perpetuated the cycle of gambling – and stopped bringing any ‘joy’. Because it couldn’t bring closure to my internal suffering it simply created a need to do it again.
Losing didn’t make me feel better about myself, either, but it did bring two maladapted ‘benefits’.
Firstly, it reinforced my sense of failure and non-worth. It seemed to give vindication to the gas-lighting of my coercive, addicted mind. “See, I told you I am worthless.”
Secondly, if it meant all my available money was gone it created an enforced break from that imperative to keep gambling.
I have always been a believer in the idea that “there is no point worrying about something which you cannot change.” An extreme example of which might be: Why worry about the possibility of an asteroid destroying all life on planet Earth when you don’t know that there is an asteroid out there, and even if you did know you couldn’t stop it.
Gambling addiction fits into that philosophy in an unexpected way.
Addiction tends to be a ‘coping’ response to experiencing hurt. That in order to ‘drown out’ one source of hurt which you feel unable to address or tackle – perhaps because it has a historical source – you then throw yourself into an activity which replaces that source of hurt with another source which you do have agency over. One where your own actions can increase the level of current hurt you are experiencing in order to drown out residual or legacy hurt from leeching through.
This is text-book self-harming – seeking to take control of your ability to feel pain.
But, if you find yourself locked in a place where there is no opportunity to continue self-harming then the voice telling you to self-harm can be ignored for a while.
Many people who recover from gambling addiction will relay that the only time they were able to find peace within themselves was when they literally could not gamble even if they ‘wanted’ to. It wasn’t that they suddenly found the strength to deny the addictive urges, but that without autonomy to act upon those urges it stopped being a ‘battle’ to influence how that autonomy was implemented. They had nothing left to give, so they had nothing left to lose, and no further consequence attached to losing.
Addiction is a ‘hungry child’. Show it a sweetshop and it will do everything in its power to make you buy it sweets, berating you until you give in and pacify it with sweets. But, take it away from any sweetshops and its demand for sweets loses immediacy. The best you can offer it is the promise that next time you are near a sweetshop you will buy it even more sweets than normal.
As the vehicle for my addiction, watching sports stopped being enjoyable. Even the knowledge that a live sports event was happening somewhere, whether watched or not, stopped being enjoyable.
In effect sports became the ‘sweetshop’, and even when it was impossible to avoid being near a sweetshop it did become possible to avoid being able to afford being able to but any sweets.
Gambling and losing became more ‘rewarding’ than gambling and winning. It created a sense of calm detachment. Losing acted to remove the pressure of outcome engagement.
It wasn’t without a downside, obviously. No money to gamble with also meant no money for anything else, either.
Many people look forward to waking up on Christmas day.
For most this is because they know there will be presents waiting for them, or children waiting to show excitement at getting presents. Plus, of course, there is the promise of a big “guilt-free” meal.
People addicted to sports betting also look forward to waking up on Christmas day, but for an entirely different (additional) reason.
They know that it is the one day in the year where they can be almost certain of there not being live sports events to bet on.
So, that is where Sports Betting took me. To a place where watching sports stopped being in any way enjoyable, or in any way relevant to the actions of the players. Outcome over process. If I had a fast-forward button on life then I would undoubtedly have pressed it every time I had placed a bet just to skip the emotional pain involved in waiting for the allotted 90 minutes to elapse, or the 6 furlongs to be run, and to jump straight to the result.
And, like the Jim Carrey character in the movie Click I would have opted to pass life by.
But what about now that I no longer gamble?
Can I, do I, enjoy watching sports?
Which is of course the question that I was being asked at the start of this article.
Well, the answer is yes, but not in the same way as I might have enjoyed it twenty years ago.
Nowadays while I do still enjoy watching football and sports I find it far easier to consume as highlights rather than live events.
I am probably still conscious that the ‘boring’ bits which are part and parcel of watching live sports events are where I might previously have been tempted into making them seem more meaningful through creating a gambling based reason to feel engaged.
I still enjoy the uncertainty of outcome, which is why I try to avoid knowing the results before watching highlights, but I would rather see ‘meaningful’ action than dull, boring non-action. In this regards the reprogramming of my brain’s chemical reward system probably is still a legacy ‘harm’ from my addiction – the need for short, intense rather than prolonged stimuli.
I do still enjoy live events but only tend to watch them if they have higher levels of outcome engagement, as per reason #1 above, but unrelated to manufactured interest. So, I will watch Scotland games, or a local derby, but am less likely to watch a full sports event where I don’t have an ‘innocent’ (a.k.a. non-gambling) reason to want one side to win.
And another major reason for watching less sport is being overly conscious of what others might think when observing me doing so.
I, and many other ex-gamblers, recognise that while we are able to know whether we are being ‘triggered’ by watching sports – tempted to have a bet or impacted by it bringing back unwanted bad memories – our partners and families cannot easily know if this is happening.
This makes watching sports almost more triggering for them than it is to us, meaning that recovering sports gamblers tend to minimise sports viewing time to prevent causing undue worry to those around them. But it also means that we/I are conscious of having to be more reserved and less outwardly emotional if watching sports with someone else present… which acts to suppress emotional engagement. If my ‘team’ scores I will likely show some enjoyment – sport still has that power of spontaneity – but if they miss, or the other team scores, then I am even more conscious that emoting or expressing a negative reaction could be potentially alarming to my loved ones as it might invoking unwanted memories of a badly tempered, or overly intense, earlier version of myself from an era where watching live sports was not an overall enjoyable experience – for anyone involved.
When you are conscious of having to control your natural emotions, and outward expressions, then that does act to dampen down the pure enjoyment of what should be a fully uninhibited experience.
Which has been a massively long-winded way of saying that, for me on a personal level, past involvement with gambling has sadly reduced the innocent joy of watching live sports today.
I want to be able to enjoy it… and, if on my own or in the company of strangers, I still can enjoy myself.
But that enjoyment is tempered when amongst my family and loved ones… and that is something which I do deeply regret, as it is something which should never have to be a ‘live’ consideration when being ‘entertained’.
So, to counter the bookies’ claims that “it matters more when there’s money on it” I would end this article by saying that the logical extrapolation of this dangerous thinking is that it risks becoming something that “ONLY matters when there’s money on it“.
And, trust me, there is nothing of true value in this life where that can ever be an acceptable outcome.
Mark Conway – Operations co-lead GLEN