A society’s century-long distrust of sports betting can be traced to the night of 21 September 1919, when the Black Sox went national

America’s century-long distrust of sports betting can be traced to the night of 21 September 1919. That’s when several members of baseball’s Chicago White Sox met with gambling boss Arnold Rothstein in a New York hotel room to throw the following month’s World Series.

The scandal that unraveled after the White Sox’s sluggish five-games-to-three loss to the Cincinnati Reds hurled into the fire the innocence of a nation and led to the appointment of baseball’s first commissioner: Kenesaw Mountain Landis. It also created a firm distaste for any implication that sports were somehow compromised. History forgets the eight players involved were found not guilty on charges of conspiracy to defraud, or that the whole scandal came to pass because the White Sox owner Charles Comiskey was a notorious cheapskate who treated his players poorly. The players were banned for life and the World Series fix forced US sports to send a strong message that gambling was not to be tolerated.

“Everything after that was summed up in one phrase: ‘for the integrity of the game’,” says Brett Smiley, the editor of sportshandle.com, a website that covers the American sports gambling industry.

While legal sports gambling has thrived in most countries, it’s long been considered taboo in the US, characterized as a murky industry operated by mobsters. Sports that permit gambling – such as horse- and greyhound-racing and jai alai – are often cast as enterprises surrounded by shady personalities. Sports leagues have vigilantly policed their members, squashing any attempts to associate their teams with betting. State and federal legislatures have passed laws banning sports gambling. For years, Nevada was the only state where gambling was legal, only furthering the image of betting as a sleazy business best left with the other sins found in Las Vegas.

By overturning the 1992 Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act (Pasa) on Monday, the US Supreme Court wiped out 99 years of anti-gambling sentiment, allowing each state to decide if they want to legalize sports gambling. Considering that the America Gaming Association estimates that at least $150bn is illegally wagered in the US each year, many states are eager to forget old edicts against sports gambling.

New Jersey, which brought the lawsuit challenging the Pasa, and West Virginia are among the states expected to quickly enact laws opening an industry most-often associated with Vegas casinos. Others will follow.

The legalization of sports gambling will be a significant culture change for many Americans. It’s not just the White Sox affair that hurt gambling’s cause. Occasional scandals in which college basketball players were caught point shaving (intentionally missing baskets to keep the score below a bookie’s desired total) were treated as high crimes. Pete Rose, who has more major league hits than any other baseball player, is nearly three decades into a lifetime ban for betting on games while he played for the Cincinnati Reds.

No league, however, has been as vigilant about eliminating connections to gambling as the NFL. In his book, America’s Game: The Epic Story Of How Pro Football Captured A Nation, Michael MacCambridge tells how NFL commissioner Bert Bell moved quickly in 1947 to suspend New York Giants players Merle Hapes and Frank Filchock when the two were suspected of fixing a playoff game – primarily to engender the impression that the league was serious about policing gambling.

“Professional football can’t continue to exist unless it is based on absolute honesty,” MacCambridge quotes Bell as saying at the time. “The players must not only be absolutely honest they must be above suspicion. In short, the game and its players must be kept free of corruption.”

The irony of the NFL’s stance is that the league was built on gambling. As MacCambridge points out, two of the NFL’s most powerful early owners, New York’s Tim Mara and Pittsburgh’s Art Rooney, had been involved in gambling enterprises (Mara as a onetime bookmaker and Rooney as a horse-track owner). Much of the league’s popularity comes from a weekly schedule that turns each Sunday’s games into big events, making it easy to bet on them. A boom of new fans in the 1990s coincided with the rise of fantasy leagues that gave people who might not have otherwise watched football a reason to watch the games.

Still, the NFL and other leagues continued to push the line that linked sports betting to mobsters.

President John F Kennedy and his brother Robert, the US attorney general, were fearful that organized crime was building too strong a grip on gambling, and they made controlling it an early priority. They urged Congress to pass several laws, most-importantly 1961’s Federal Wire Act, banning the use of phone lines for transmitting bets.

The anti-gambling facade remained until the last decade, when money challenged the need to maintain a veneer of purity. As states like Connecticut found a windfall in the rise of casinos on native tribal lands and others relaxed regulations against large casino chains, they realized they could be making even more from betting. New Jersey’s leaders felt particularly penalized by the Pasa as Atlantic City fell farther behind Las Vegas in prominence.

Sports leagues also realized they were losing millions by not embracing fantasy sports. When teams cut deals with daily fantasy companies like DraftKings, the old resistance to gambling began to wane. By the time New Jersey appealed an overturn of the Pasa to the Supreme Court, it seemed only a matter of time before the leagues who had fought gambling for decades were ready to cash in themselves.

The stigma of betting as a domain of the mob wore away.

That 1919 meeting at the Ansonia Hotel in New York started to seem like, well, 100 years ago.