In 2013, Eddie Roberson and Talif Crowley, two Black New Jersey residents, made a bet on the outcome of the Super Bowl game between the San Francisco 49ers and the Baltimore Ravens. Roberson, 31, bet the 38-year-old Crowley $700 that the 49ers, who Las Vegas bookies had as 4.5-point favorites, would prevail. When the 49ers lost the game 34-31, Crowley tried to collect. But Roberson refused to pay up, believing his 49ers had been cheated. An unprecedented blackout had delayed the game, arguably shifting momentum toward the Ravens. So Crowley shot Roberson six times.
Roberson’s death, one of multiple instances of Black people in America killed in the aftermath of gambling, is a crystallization of the precarity of Black life — and of the violence that sports and unchecked corporatism often evoke off the field.
