A few days before the recent Tournament Players Championship began in early March, my son and I watched a senior PGA Tour official get interviewed on The Golf Channel one night, discussing how legalized sports wagering was going to elevate the PGA Tour into a whole new stratosphere, and all of the things they were actively doing to prepare for this gold mine that was being presented to them.
The thing that hit hardest, and for me hurt the most, was his explanation of how they plan on using their ShotLink system to partner with the big gaming companies so people will have the opportunity to wager - more than likely hundreds of millions of dollars annually - on every single shot each player takes.
If you Google ‘Shot link system’ you’ll discover this:
‘The PGA TOUR ShotLink System is a revolutionary technology that captures and reports vital information on every shot, by every player, real-time, during tournament competition. The uses for this real-time digital information are limited only by the imagination.’
After the tour official continued to speak for another 10 minutes on the many ways they plan to use technology to profit millions, I simply said to my son, “Excuse me while I go and throw up.”
What they were basically saying is that in the very near future, while watching a golf tournament on TV, or in-person, you’ll be able to make a bet on your phone, and probably get something like 8/1 odds on Justin Thomas making a 20 foot putt. Then, win or lose, when he’s standing on the next tee a few minutes later, you’ll probably get 4/1 that he drives the ball 300 yards or further and keeps it in the fairway.
In-event wagering… why didn’t we think of that?
In-race wagering on horses has been going on in Europe for many years. We’ve brought it up here in TROT, in this annual Horseplayer’s Issue, on multiple occasions for well over a decade. Between the Trakus digital system that many top North American tracks have used for years and the plethora of data that we have at our fingertips in this sport, there’s no excuse for our collective failure to evolve over time in this area.
In-race wagering, something that would surely attract a younger demographic to our sport, isn’t the only betting option we’re missing out on when it comes to joining the 21st century either. We’ve suggested dozens of different possibilities in this issue over the past 15 years. In fact, beginning on page 58 in this very issue you can read some good ideas that Eric Cherry suggests, that could very well work when it comes to appealing to both our current customer base as well as to a new generation of sports fans.
Then, to go along with the new legalized single-event sports wagering that begins in Ontario on April 4th, we present a Jim Lawson interview here that starts on page 36, where he explains that despite his best efforts, the current Ontario Provincial Government, at this point in time, has not made it possible for people to bet horse racing with any of the gaming giants that will be setting up shop here. For now, horse racing is being left out of this lucrative new venture completely. For decades you’ve been able to walk into any of tens of thousands of sports betting shops in Australia, Ireland and the United Kingdom and bet a horse race, but as of April 4th in Ontario, Canada, even with sports betting now legal, that option will sadly not be available.
There’s nothing like progress eh?
As we finished watching the interview on The Golf Channel, my son looked at me and said, “It’s almost like we were the first ones to discover gold in the Yukon in the late 1800s, but instead of hurrying to mine as much of it as we could, we just mined a little at a time. Then we had a few beers, mined a bit more, and just continued to take the gold for granted. We were complacent… and now everyone else has shown up, and we’re starting to realize that we should have mined a lot more of it before they all got here.”
Great analogy - unfortunately.
It’s funny that he used that analogy though, because it reminded me of Neil Young’s classic song, ‘After The Gold Rush’. Once again, it was back to my friend Google to confirm what that song was actually about. There I learned that the song takes listeners through time. The first verse is set in the Middle Ages, the second in the time it was written in, and the third in the future. In 1992, Young explained it: “[It’s] about three times in history: There’s a Robin Hood scene, there’s a fire scene in the present and there’s the future... the air is yellow and red, ships are leaving, certain people can go and certain people can’t... I think it’s going to happen.”
Then it came to me - maybe the North American horse racing industry can simply get Elon Musk to give us a spot in his first colony on Mars and we can get a second chance up there?
Guess what? Ontario Premier Doug Ford just let me know that apparently we’re in the group of certain people that can’t go. It figures.
Dan Fisher - [email protected]