Friday, October 06, 2006

The Canadian Hockey League has asked its lawyers to look at an off-shore
internet gambling website where bets can be placed on major junior hockey
games and the Memorial Cup. The CHL includes the Ontario, Western and Quebec
major junior leagues that total 59 teams of players aged 16 to 20. The
Austrian website bwin.com invites bets on OHL, WHL and QMJHL games and the
Memorial Cup, which is troubling to a league in which its players are part
of a teenage demographic that spends a lot of time online. "Surprised would
be a fair term and disappointed more than anything," CHL commissioner David
Branch said Wednesday from Toronto. "We're looking at options. Gambling is
an issue we cannot choose to ignore." Betting on sports is a grey and in
many ways unregulated area. Office hockey and football pools are common.
Anyone over the age of 18 can buy a Pro-Line ticket, or its Sports Select
equivalent in Quebec and B.C., at the corner store and put money down on an
array of pro sports including the NHL, NFL, Major League Baseball, college
sports and NASCAR. But when those playing the sport place bets, it becomes a
moral and often legal issue. The long-running controversy over whether Pete
Rose gambled on baseball has dogged him for years and kept him out of the
Hall of Fame. Italian soccer was rocked this year by a match-fixing scandal.
Phoenix Coyotes assistant coach Rick Tocchet was charged last year along
with two other men for running an illegal gambling ring.

Teenage hockey players could be approached and influenced by people placing
bets or be tempted to place bets themselves.

"I think we'd be naive to think that couldn't happen," Kitchener Rangers
head coach and GM Peter DeBoer said. "Circumstances set it up that it's more
of a possibility at our level with them being teenagers and not having a lot
money than at the pro level where they are mature and they do have money.

"I think we're a lot more susceptible to that than even the pros would be.
We're dealing with teenage kids and it would just be ignorance to how bad a
position they could be put in if they got onto one of these sites."

An option the CHL will consider is including a seminar on gambling as it
does on drugs and alcohol at the start of every season.

"With young people, education is paramount," Branch said, adding that the
NHL and Players' Association have resources on the subject that the junior
leagues could use to inform players on the dangers of gambling.

DeBoer feels a gambling seminar will be necessary.

"We run seminars honestly from training camp right to the first regular
season game: drugs and alcohol and concussions and the new rules and hits
from behind and we'll add this," he said. "You are dealing with kids as
young as 16. It's important we educate them on all those things."