America’s distrust of sports betting can be traced to the night of 21 September 1919. That’s when several members of baseball’s Chicago White Sox met with gambling boss Arnold Rothstein in a New York hotel room to throw the following month’s World Series.

The scandal that unraveled after the White Sox’s sluggish five-games-to-three loss to the Cincinnati Reds hurled into the fire the innocence of a nation and led to the appointment of baseball’s first commissioner: Kenesaw Mountain Landis. It also created a firm distaste for any implication that sports were somehow compromised.

History forgets the eight players involved were found not guilty on charges of conspiracy to defraud, or that the whole scandal came to pass because the White Sox owner Charles Comiskey was a notorious cheapskate who treated his players poorly. The players were banned for life and the World Series fix forced US sports to send a strong message that gambling was not to be tolerated.

“Everything after that was summed up in one phrase: ‘for the integrity of the game’,” says Brett Smiley, the editor of SportsHandle.com, a website that covers the American sports gambling industry.

More on the story of the Chicago White Sox and sports gambling in America at The Guardian.