New Bill Bradley Doc: Father of Gambling Prohibition Claims People Are 'Betting on High School Games'
"Rolling Along" is the new documentary about legendary Knicks player-turned New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley. It is set to debut in select theaters Friday June 16.
For sports gamblers, Bradley may be best known as the man who got the activity banned back in 1992. Bill S. 474 was proposed to the Senate by New Jersey Democratic Senator Bill Bradley on February 22, 1991. It was the beginning of what would become PASPA – the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act of 1992.
And for the 26 years that followed, sports betting in the United States outside of the state of Nevada and a handful of other grandfathered in states like Oregon and Montana would essentially be deemed prohibited.
It wasn't until 2018 that the US Supreme Court would ultimately rule the law as unconstitutional.
Bradley sat down with the New York Daily News to discuss the upcoming documentary while proclaiming he was "100 percent against sports gambling" at the time he served in politics.
"It was my bill. Literally, I passed one law about sports in my 18 years, which was prohibiting sports betting. I think that the Supreme Court erred when they reversed the law. And I think that there will be problems.
"There’s stories now of people betting on high school games. It’s ridiculous. It’s just not what the game is about."
Joe Brennan, Jr., who helped push efforts to get PASPA overturned, balked at the idea that bookmakers are taking bets on high school sports.
"All due respect to the senator, but he’s full of it," Brennan Jr. tweeted out. "No one is taking bets on high school games, no one is substituting “love of the game” for betting. Should exercise some of the rigor his Rhodes scholarship provided."
Bradley continued to offer his case against legalizing sports gambling.
"The game should be about excellence, should be about team, should be about the collective expression of the community. If you turn it into point spreads and betting on this betting and on that — there always was betting but why would you have the Supreme Court legitimize this in the eyes of the public? And anytime people see money, they go towards where the money is."
PASPA is only a small portion of what is covered in the documentary. Rolling Along is described as the live theatrical recording of Bradley's monumental performance as a player to a politician.
Tribeca Film Festival Director & VP Programming, Cara Cusumano, writes of the doc:
"Interspersing archival footage with Bradley’s performance, the film honors a uniquely American life, paying tribute to the act of storytelling in a way that hasn’t been done in a very long time. In our times of division and uncertainty, perhaps we can all learn something from Bradley’s stories about perseverance, acceptance, and unity."
- Jordan Bach, Gambling911.com
