The Negative Portrayal of Sports Gambling in "Back to the Future 2"
A Film Example of How Quickly Values Change
I’ll get to the main subject of this Substack, the movies, in a few paragraphs. But first.
I have a minor reputation among my colleagues—deserved or not is hard for me to say—for predicting big things. It’s not that I know anything about the future; it’s just when I see something developing that has obvious historical patterns — such as super-contagious viruses in China that are sending 20% of people to the hospital — then I can say something like “I think a serious epidemic is coming” in January/February of 2020.
Or when I play with AI writing programs in spring 2022, and that leads me to think, “this tool is really going to mess with reading/writing education and the creation of writing in general.” And then ChatGPT explodes sometime in the fall of 2022, and off we go.
When predicting things, I try only to pick what I think is the “no duh” prediction. It happens rarely, very rarely. I really don’t like would-be prophets; we have too many of them spouting off on all social-media platforms, like a million too many.
With those strong cautions, here comes your once-in-a-few-years prediction from me, the All-Seeing Oracle, or something.
I say with almost complete confidence that the recent, incredible explosion of sports gambling and gambling in general in the United States is going to lead a terribly great number of people having personal financial problems, including too many innocent lives ruined to handle by any smaller government or fleet of charity organizations.
And also, there will be one or many major sports-gambling controversies, such as the 1919 Black Sox Scandal or the CCNY points-shaving scandal of the early 1950s.
Oh wait … maybe that major scandal is already happening?
Well, if the Shohei Ohtani situation really is a major sports-gambling scandal — it sure looks fishy to me — I still think there will be more of these.
It seems too easy to predict. Too much money and too many opportunities for gambling crimes in major sports to *not* happen — that’s my view. When you can bet on over/unders for individual assist totals in women’s college basketball, or pick your favorite absurd prop bet in random small-time game nobody is watching, somebody somewhere is going to throw games just to make the over or the under happen.
My guess is that it already *has* happened — many athletes have publicly discussed how they are routinely harassed for not meeting some stupid prop bet — and we just don’t know about that major crime publicly yet.
What does this have to do with movies?
First, my favorite baseball movie ever is John Sayles’ Eight Men Out, which is about the 1919 gambling scandal involving the Chicago White Sox and the choice of some of their players to throw the World Series, allegedly and supposedly.
It’s a fantastic movie because it’s well-crafted period piece about a host of labor issues: how bosses treat employees; what powers such employees have or don’t have; what policies are good or bad for a business; and how much good employees deserve to be paid.
“Eight Men Out” is a total middle-aged business-person movie. Please go watch it.
Sports gambling is why I really dislike The Natural, a more beloved baseball movie than “Eight Men Out.” That film obliterates the darker textures of Bernard Malamud’s great novel on which it is based, a book that predicted our sports gambling-craze problems because it was well within living memory of massive social problems caused by public gambling. “The Natural,” like too many of those big adult 1980s movies, sentimentalizes everything in all the wrong ways.
Yet to the point: I was struck recently by the way sports gambling was depicted in, of all movies, “Back to the Future, Part 2.” That I just rewatched, showing it to my kids for the first time for them.
To me, the best part of the first two “Back to the Future” (BTTF) films is that they compare the moral culture of five different time periods, resulting in firm, moral depictions based on what-if scenarios. Those five time periods are:
1985, if Biff the high-school bully dominated the sci-fi nerd George McFly
1955 as it was
1985, if the sci-fi loving nerd beats Biff (i.e., this is the end of BTTF 1)
2015, if Marty McFly doesn’t become a rock musician (the beginning of BTTF 2)
1985, if Biff become a sports gambler extraordinaire
You’ll remember that the first “Back to the Future” film’s goal was to change #1 into #3, via alterations in #2. It’s a happier vision created at the end of the film, where science-fictional nerd-dom wins out. That gets George McFly and family their best possible lives.
Arguably, BTTF 1’s preference is for the rise of tech-geek culture, which by the mid-1980s seemed plausible thanks to the rise of PCs and other devices ubiquitously.
So one of the first BTTF’s points is that George McFly’s nerdy interests *make life better.* Frankly, they make life more electrically alive, which is the good goal of teenage creativity in 1985, when Marty plays electric guitar, exploring its creative possibilities. (The harnessing of lightning in BTTF 1 is also the path to an electrically alive future.)
Of all five of these visions of Hill Valley in BTTF 1 and 2, the suburb featured in the films, the last vision (#5) is so ridiculously dark as to be disturbingly disgusting.
In #5, the suburb of Hill Valley transforms into a post-apocalyptic wasteland. There’s nothing but casinos and crime everywhere. Schools are closed, and drive-by shootings are expected nightly. Why?
Sports gambling!
That’s the apocalypse that cause the post-apocalyptic nightmare world: 1955 Biff gets a sports almanac from 2015 that gives him perfect knowledge of all sporting events. He amasses massive wealth over the decades by gambling.
As a result, the science-fictional nerd vision celebrated in the first film is dead — George McFly is killed by Biff sometime in the 1970s.
That all results in Biff polluting the Earth by buying into and owning all nuclear power. His casino-palace to himself skies above a dark wasteland of drugs, whores, and biker gangs.
Both my wife and I — we are now in our early 40s — remembered this movie from our 1989 childhoods’ as being exceedingly bleak, so much so that we debated on whether our children should watch it. Was it as psychologically disturbing as we remembered?
No, and yet the effect of the extremely negative vision of Biff’s sports-gambling-created wasteland lasted for us. As kids, we saw that twisted 1985 universe of Biff the Gambler as the worst possible world. Even now, I might rather live in “Escape from New York” or “Mad Max 3” than in Biff’s 1985 Hill-Valley kingdom. At least in those cruel worlds, I’d have a fighting chance.
Strangely, as it would likely seem to many today, the BTTF franchise is quite harsh on gambling. In BTTF 2, Doc Brown is given a speechifying moment, wherein he upbraids Marty for even considering taking a 2015 sports almanac to the past.
Why? Because Marty will change everything for the worse. For Doc Brown, gambling with knowledge is principally wrong. Advanced technology is not to be used for personal gain, but instead for the great humanistic and philosophical questions, such as, as Doc says, the great question of “Why?”
In fact, gambling at all — taking risky chances that could lead to devastating payoffs, hyperbolically stated as “destroying the the fabric of space and time — is wrong.
Here, the contours of a moral system are clearly articulated by BTTF 2: sports gambling leads to all manner of sociocultural degeneracy, as well as personal degeneracy. The Doc sees Marty’s gambling hopes as against the fundamental principles of the universe. In BTTF, you can change the future for a greater sociological good, but you’d better not do it to enrich yourself.
But today, Biff the gambler would be the real hero. He beat all those point-spreads, and he played the parlays perfectly.
I’m old enough to remember *why* Doc Brown’s upbraiding of Marty’s gambling hopes was so stern. Real people had their lives ruined by parents or family members who gambled away the weekly paycheck, hoping to win the big one. This happened to my own grandmother when she was a child in the 1920s. Her stories about having absolutely nothing because her father took his paycheck straight to the racetrack always came forth, as a strong lesson to her grandchildren. All my life, it seemed as if gambling on events was verboten.
And somehow in the last few years, that completely changed.
Today, the strong historical lessons of gambling’s consequences are not only totally ignored by the public, sports gambling is encouraged by every major institution and organization that stands to “benefit” from gambling, including all the major sports leagues themselves. No sports broadcast now goes without mentioning spreads and prop bets. Some even encourage viewers to get in on the action while watching — actually, all the NBA games I watch do exactly this.
That means that seemingly everybody in real life has chosen the absolute worst possible scenario, according to the BTTF films — Biff’s 1985 hellscape.
Back then, in the late 1980s, BTTF could’ve been seen easily as crass or dumb entertainment. Who knew they would become so prudish?
Anyway, if you want to make a bet, put your money on gambling-therapy businesses. That’s one sector that’s sure to start booming.