Gambling has been a social activity that people have been taking part in since before the days of Christ. Placing bets on sports dates back to the first Olympic Games in 776 BC when only one event took place, a sprint that covered the distance of roughly two football fields. However, it was not until the mid 1800s, when horse racing began to develop that gambling on sports really became organized and popular. As other sports such as football and baseball grew into money making businesses, so did gambling.
A problem with this was that gamblers had a potential to make more money than the players, so it was a possibility that a star player could be bribed to purposely lose a game. Such has been the case in almost every sport. Just before the 1946 NFL Championship game New York Giants fullback Merle Hapes admitted to accepting a $2,500 bribe to lose the game, shortly after the game the quarterback of the Giants, Frank Filchock, also admitted to accepting a bribe to lose the game. The most famous cases of gambling among athletes come from baseball. One of the first cases of players involved in gambling was the Black Sox Scandal in 1919 when members of the Chicago White Sox accepted bribes from the mob to purposely lose the 1919 World Series. This scandal is most famous for the saying, “Say it ain’t so, Joe. Say it ain’t so.” Another famous scandal involved Cincinnati Reds manager Pete Rose; he was banned from baseball in 1989 after being found guilty of placing bets on his own team in 1987.
Sources: http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=merron/060207
http://history1900s.about.com/od/fadsfashion/a/olympicshistory.htm
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