The sports betting craze isn’t going back in the bottle.
Ottawa Senators star Brady Tkachuk is just the latest to speak out about how it impacts athletes.
Tkachuk shared with ESPN’s Greg Wyshynski that he previously had an easily accessible Venmo account under his name. For the uninitiated, that’s an app that allows users to send and receive money from others, like PayPal.
But when Tkachuk would fail to do something on the ice, he’d be bombarded with payment requests from sports bettors.
“People think I’m really going to send them money?” Tkachuk said. “… You really think I care about your parlay?”
Tkachuk told Wyshynski that he changed his profile to avoid the obnoxious requests.
It’s certainly an odd dynamic that people who lose bets would then search out an athlete on Venmo to request money from them, as if they had any intention of performing a certain way on the ice that missed with someone’s ability to win money on a wager.
It’s also an ironically timed anecdote from Tkachuk, because Venmo and betting are in the news thanks to a controversy involving Oklahoma quarterback John Mateer and old Venmo payments listed as being for sports bets.
Mostly, it’s just sad.
Tkachuk and professional athletes all around the NHL and the other major sports leagues have worked their entire lives to be on those stages. And while there are always going to be bad eggs, the vast, vast majority of the athletes aren’t worried at all about the sports bets on their game. They want to perform well, and they want to win.
Getting Venmo requests after a game for something they didn’t do just isn’t the way to go.
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