It?s a longstanding assumption among sport historians that gambling is an essential part of sport?s appeal. In all likelihood, bets have been placed ever since the first competition.

It is also generally conceded that if there were no gambling, there would be a marked decline of public interest in sports. The gambling industry in America is huge and largely illegal, while the gambling industry on other parts of the planet is huge and legal.

It should have come as no surprise, then, when golfer John Daly confessed to having lost some $50 to $60 million over the past 12 years of heavy gambling. Three days later, former NBA Star and pro-basketball television analyst Charles Barkley said he, too, had a gambling problem that has cost him somewhere in the neighborhood of $10 million.

A few weeks earlier, England and Manchester United football superstar Wayne Rooney, 21, revealed that he had amassed gambling debts of about $1.25 million. After his retirement, Michael Jordan admitted to a major gambling problem, long rumored to have been the case. High-stakes golf and high rolling at casinos were his weakness.

In addition to the stars, the fans themselves have considerable gambling habits, some of it on sports, but increasingly in other venues as well. Several developments in recent years have fueled gambling ? especially the internet and the personal computer, which can turn your home into a huge casino or a sports book venue.

Two weeks ago, I spent some time talking about this issue with Simon Kuper of the Financial Times, who subsequently produced an extended piece on gambling for his newspaper on April 22. Kuper says that Britain is now the epicenter of gambling, especially since its legalization in 1994.

Betting shops are as ubiquitous as Starbucks and McDonalds. The annual handle in Britain is some $95 billion, and legal gambling at William Hill — the largest chain of betting shops in England — grew more than 200 percent between 2002 and 2005. All of this was largely without the internet, which is just now coming into play and still accounts for a small fraction of British gambling.

In the United States, the amount of gambling is more difficult to track as most of it is illegal. Legal Super Bowl betting in 2005 in Nevada reached over $90 million. A similar amount was bet on March Madness in Nevada, while on the internet the betting levels reached $1.3 billion for March Madness ? compared to only $600 million for the Super Bowl. U.S. estimates are that $500 billion per year ? or $2,000 per person ? is legally wagered.

Online gambling is now a $10 billion industry, up from $3.1 billion in 2001, according to industry analyst Christiansen Capital Advisors. There are 2,000 gambling websites. Of these, 226 are poker sites that attract some one million players each month, much of this of course fueled by televised poker matches that have become a major television fad.

According to the Annenberg Public Policy Center of the University of Pennsylvania, 41.6 percent of young American men ages 14 to 22 said they gambled (.pdf) on cards once a month, up by 20 percent from 2004 to 2005. Of the 2.9 million young people who gamble every week, 80 percent are men.

A 1998 study conducted by the University of Michigan surveyed 3,000 NCAA male and female athletes. The research revealed that 35 percent of the athletes gambled on sports while attending college. Over 5 percent of the males wagered on a game in which they participated, provided inside information for gambling purposes, or accepted money for performing poorly in a contest. Furthermore, according to Dr. Howard Shaffer, director of Harvard University Medical School’s Division on Addiction, more young people are introduced to gambling through sports betting than through any other type of gambling.

Historically, the two most common problems this presents to intercollegiate sport have been point shaving in basketball and betting by college players. Gambling on campus continues to grow, and students are accumulating significant gambling debts. Forty-eight athletes on six campuses were caught in illegal gambling operations between 1989 and 1996. The growth in gambling, including on-campus gambling, has led to fears that point shaving and game fixing are heading into a potential growth mode. Point-shaving scandals hit at several colleges in the ?50s and ?60s, at Boston College in the ?70s, Tulane in the ?80s, and Arizona State and Northwestern in the ?90s.

Justin Wolfers, a forensic economist at the University of Pennsylvania, drew attention earlier this year after concluding that point shaving appears to be occuring in about 5 percent of all games with large point spreads. Looking at the results of nearly every college basketball game over the last 16 years, Wolfers noticed that the heavy favorites just missed covering the point spread in a surprisingly large number of games. Nothing else explained the pattern (read the full report here [.pdf]).

There are many things at stake here, but for sport the primary issue is the integrity of the competition. If the games are not legitimate they will lose their appeal to the fans and the players. Perhaps even more significantly, they will cease to be sport. If that happens, it will be a major loss for human endeavor and the human spirit, and it will be nearly impossible to retrieve once it is gone.

Whereas performance enhancement drugs alter the nature of competition, gambling ends it. To me, that makes gambling a much more serious issue than steroids as it strikes at the very essence of sport.