As cold rain pelted the windows outside and the Wolverines battled the Spartans on the hardwood, basketball fans sipped beers and snacked on wings at Fricker’s in Maumee.

The game on TV that night ended up being a good one — Michigan couldn’t miss in the first half, but Michigan State players battle back in the second to beat their rivals in maize and blue. It was the sort of late-season contest that college basketball fans crave, especially when the calendar flips over from February and the NCAA’s March Madness tournament approaches.

"Sports is the culture here,” manager Brandon Bortel said. “It's what brings everybody in year-round.”

With the NCAA tournament slated to start Tuesday, businesses like Frickers can expect an influx of customers fired up for what has become one of the biggest events in the nation’s sports calendar. It’s no coincidence that the event’s popularity is also eagerly awaited each year in Las Vegas, where casinos’ sports books will bustle with rabid sports fans come the tournament’s first tip off.

But now that enthusiasm is leaving the Nevada desert and spreading across the nation after the U.S. Supreme Court 10 months ago threw open the door to legal sports betting at the state level. Already two of Ohio’s neighbors, Pennsylvania and West Virginia, have walked through it while Michigan is at the stoop.

Mike DeWine — then Ohio’s attorney general, now the state’s governor — at the time urged lawmakers to get ahead of an industry in which players might wager on outcomes of games, point spreads, foul shots, field goal attempts, and other elements of professional and college sports.

Senate Bill 111 was introduced last week to start that discussion, authorizing existing Ohio Casino Control Commission to regulate sports betting and to impose a tax on it. But that is just the beginning of the process.

Will Ohio limit such betting to existing casinos or racetrack slots parlors, or will it give corner taverns and restaurants a piece of the action as it did with Keno via the lottery?

Will it, as the casino industry urges, open the door for the first time for legal online betting reachable through smart phone apps?

Mr. Bortel, the manager at Frickers, said, bring it on.

“We're about to go into March Madness which is one of our busiest times of the year,” he said. “I'm not much of a gambler myself but I think legalizing might actually draw more people into it. We already bet on horses... so it might just draw more people into sports.”

Art Zielinski, 80, of Holland, caught the U of M vs. MSU game at the Maumee bar. He said sports gambling is no new fade, and he believes legalization is in the Ohio’s best interest.

"It would take a little edge off all of these illegal guys, I think." Mr. Zielinski said."You ain't going to ever wipe it out, so you might as well make it legal and have some control over it," he said.

But others feel differently. Some are worried about the integrity of the game. Other about the ill effects of gambling, period.

“March Madness brings April sadness,” said Rob Walgate, who 19 years ago sought help for a sports-betting addiction that he believes potentially cost him hundreds of thousands of dollars.

“They don’t build those big buildings in Las Vegas on losses from winners.”

Cash cow?

The American Gaming Association, the trade organization for the casino industry, has estimated that the NFL alone  could reap $2.5 billion annually from legal sports betting. Casinos are eager to add it to their existing offerings of slot machines and table games.

But lawmakers warn that it is unlikely to deliver the kind of money to the state that past expansions of gambling have promised — the Ohio Lottery in 1973, Keno in 2008, Las Vegas-style casinos in 2009, and racinos in 2011.

Senate Minority Leader Kenny Yuko (D., Richmond Heights) during at a recent Associated Press forum said Ohio might pick up some revenue, and maybe some jobs, but not anything substantive.

“There are a lot of people in Ohio who think that’s going to be a cash cow,” he said. “It’s not.”

Sara Slane, an Ottawa Hills native and AGA’s senior vice president of public affairs, said it’s too soon to know whether expanded sports betting is generating new revenue or simply siphoning off other forms of revenue from other forms of gambling or entertainment.

AGA represents the $261 billion commercial and tribal casino industry, including Penn National Gaming, operator of Toledo’s Hollywood Casino.

“You see [in Ohio] the fear of missing out among the states,” she said. “States hate more than anything else losing a revenue opportunity to neighboring states. We call it clustering. Where one state has it, you will see legislation in another.”

“It’s just another form of betting that is going to be made available…,” he said. “I think it’s an opportunity for Ohio to pick up some additional revenue, perhaps some additional jobs...We’re probably going to be doing it with a lot of other states at the same time.”

Senate President Larry Obhof (R., Medina) said passage in Ohio is not a sure thing, and he predicted that his caucus will be skeptical about any significant gambling expansion.

“I’m already skeptical as to whether we should do it at all…,” he said. “I think as far as having it on every street corner or in every tavern across the state, we already to some degree dealt with these issues when we had the Internet café issue pop up about five years ago.”

To date, eight states offer legal sports betting — Nevada, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Mississippi, Rhode Island, Delaware, and New Mexico. All but Rhode Island and Mississippi permit mobile, or online, betting.

As one of his final acts in office, then-Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder vetoed a bill in December that would have added the Wolverine State to the menu of places that, as a general rule, permit existing casinos to apply for licenses to operate internet betting operations.

Now “ibetting” proponents are rolling the dice with new Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

“It should be mobile,” Ms. Slane said. “A successful sports-betting mode is one that shuts down an illegal market and attracts consumers from an illegal one to a legal, regulated one. Most of this is taking place now on an offshore website.

“And there should be a reasonable tax rate, because this is a low-margin business,” she said. “Every dollar taken from operators hamstrings their ability to attract people back to the legal, regulated market.”

Ohio Sen. Bill Coley (R., West Chester) is president of the National Council of Legislators from Gaming States, a bipartisan organization that discusses best practices when it comes to legal gambling.

He said he believes that, if Ohio wanted to, it it could quickly set up a regulated sports-betting system via its existing lottery system. But he would prefer a well thought-out legislative plan. There is also the possibility that the decision could be taken out of lawmakers’ hands with a ballot initiative similar to one used in 2009 by the casino industry to write themselves into the Ohio Constitution.

Mr. Coley does not see Ohio rushing into ibetting.

“I think that’s hugely problematic under the [U.S.] Justice Department’s opinion at the end of last year,” he said. “You’d have to make it so it would be highly unlikely that a mobile application does not ping off a tower that is not located in your state, so that all of the communications stay in your state.”

‘It’s a free country’

While the challenge to the federal ban on state sports betting was before the Supreme Court last year, professional and amateur sports organizations had questioned whether it could undercut the integrity of their games.

The NFL recently reached a general partnership agreement with Caesars’ casinos, a deal that doesn’t address sports betting. The National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball are actively lobbying states for a piece of the sports-betting pie via an “integrity fee,” a 1 percent tax on wagers that could also benefit the NCAA financially.

"While I had hoped it would not become legal, I understand the support for it,” Ohio State University Athletic Director Gene Smith said. “I am hopeful as a state that we put in place the best regulatory body and system to mitigate the negative effects."

Mr. Coley said any legalized system must address consumer protection, money laundering, game fixing, gambling addiction, and tax collection.

Eddie Kraus, 58, of Solon, harbors similar concerns, but he ultimately is in favor of legalizing sports gambling — if  it, in fact, benefits governments in Ohio. He discussed the subject recently at Value City Arena while watching Ohio State University’s basketball team lose to Wisconsin in the Buckeyes’ bid to be invited to the March Madness dance.

“You obviously don't want to encourage people who already have a problem,” he said. “That's the one thing I'd be concerned about. But, hey, it's a free country."

Mr. Walgate became a gambling addict as a teenager the old-fashioned way, using bookies and even accepting delivery of money for bookies to help finance his habit. Today, as vice president of the American Policy Roundtable, he has fought efforts to expand gambling options.

Despite his opposition, he believes the Supreme Court, the Ohio constitution, and the actions of Pennsylvania and West Virginia have already colluded to legalize sports betting in casinos. He pointed to a provision of the voter-approved constitutional amendment legalizing casinos that allows them to offer the same games and slot machines offered in neighboring states.

“When you read that language, the way it defines slot machines, they can accept sportswagers now,” he said. “Neighboring states do it, so we don’t need the legislature.”

Should the General Assembly pursue a regulatory scheme, he urges lawmakers to do one thing.

“If we do this, it should be a cash-only business,” Mr. Walgate said. “A bookie will cut you off if you don’t pay your bills, but people can run up tens of thousands in credit card debt because they know they’ve got the winner that night.”

Tim Renn, 50, of Lucasville, was also at the Ohio State-Wisconsin game last week. He goes to Las Vegas once a year in December during college football’s conference championship matchups, but he said it is unlikely he would bet on sports in Ohio.

"I just don't want to get involved in something I might like too much…,” he said. “I go out to Las Vegas and gamble there, but not in Ohio. It's too easy and likely [I would] get in trouble and lose money."

House Speaker Larry Householder (R., Glenford) voiced confidence sports wagering will come to the Buckeye State.

“I think we’ve already got sports betting going on in every bar on every corner in Ohio anyway, but I don’t know what it’s going to look like,” he said.

Staff writer Bri’on Whiteside contributed.

This article is a reprint from ToledoBlade.com.   To view the original story and comment, click here.