If you're not a nut about professional American football, you might not know who sportswriter and Pro Football Talk founder Mike Florio is. That's okay. I mention him only because, according to sports website AwfulAnnouncing.com, he has written a new novel, Big Shield, with a premise that might sound somewhat familiar to those of us who know Booster Gold's origin story:

Carson is a former college star just trying to hang on in a league where the bodies are disposable. It's easy to see how the lure of easy money from [gangster] Johnny would be too much to turn down. While Carson has limited value to teams, he is immensely valuable to Johnny. Inside information in America's most popular sport is hard-to-obtain currency. The person who would know a lot about the details before the game, such as injuries, and during the game, such as play-calling, would be someone like a third-string QB.

In the real world, some of the circumstances might seem hard to believe. However, according to Florio, this book is set in the not-too-distant future. What is very easy to believe is that someday someone will successfully offer an NFL player a bag of cash for inside information, to fake an injury, or worse.

Given that the dam has now burst, professional sports leagues and media companies are in business with the gamblers, and there is no such thing as amateur football anymore, I'm starting to think that the most far-fetched aspect of Booster Gold's origin story as a disgraced point-shaving quarterback is that future American society would feel he's done anything disgraceful.

Booster Gold Volume 1 #18

If you make people enough money, you're already a hero to them.

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For most of the history of the human race, mankind could only dream what it would be like to fly above the clouds or have the contents of the world's libraries available to be read to us by artificial intelligence on instantaneous demand. Those achievements have changed the course of civilization. However, one thing we still cannot do is predict the outcome of a basketball tournament.

We are now in the second week of the annual NCAA "March Madness" basketball tournament, and already all of this year's 34 million brackets, 1 for every 10 people in the United States, tracked by NCAA, ESPN, CBS, Yahoo, USA Today, or X.com now have errors in their predictions. That's a lot of bad guesses.

You may have heard reporting that the odds of flipping a coin to determine all winners in the field of 64 basketball teams would result in a perfectly selected bracket 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 tries. Assuming that 34 million distinct brackets are submitted each year, that should produce a winner approximately once every 271,275,648,143 years. That's 20 times longer than the universe is old.

Of course, the outcome of NCAA tournament games is not truly random, and NCAA.com reports that the real odds of picking a perfect bracket are the much more feasible 1 in 120,200,000,000. (That's 3 fewer commas!) They then go on to calculate that if every American knew enough about college basketball to complete a competent bracket that was completely unlike everyone else's bracket, we should expect to get one perfect bracket in 366 years. By comparison, that seems almost reasonable.

It's incredibly unlikely anyone reading this will live to the year 2385, so we'll likely never know what it is like to live in a post-perfect bracket world. However, Michael Jon "Booster" Carter won't even be born until 2442, fifty-seven years after the perfect NCAA March Madness bracket. For a smart, athletic, good-looking kid living in a world like that, the sky's the limit. Even time travel will be possible!

As for the rest of us, like the cavemen of yesteryear, we can only look at the stars and imagine.

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With the arrival of the annual NCAA March Madness basketball contest and its ubiquitous brackets, it's worth reconsidering the ethics of sports gambling. This subject is particularly relevant to Booster Gold, who as we all know, after being run out of college athletics because of a points-shaving scandal, traveled back to the past to become idolized and wealthy using stolen goods and knowledge.

At its core, gambling is a business transaction in which the "winner" takes the money of the "loser." So long as 1) both sides have access to the same information about the event they are gambling on, 2) neither side has any unequal influence on the event itself, and 3) both sides can afford to lose their stake without causing hardship, there are no ethical concerns.

That's all pretty straightforward. So long as they are aware of the rules, the self-sufficient outsider with a rooting interest should be allowed to gamble freely against like competition with no ethical qualms. But what if one or more of those conditions are violated, knowingly or otherwise?

With his future origins, Booster Gold has access to knowledge that is out of reach of the temporally locked gambler, so any bet he makes with that knowledge would be inherently unethical. As an active time traveler, Booster might — intentionally or otherwise — create rippling changes in time that could unethically alter any event. And while Booster would be willing to lose anything he bets, if he takes in winnings through a service that hasn’t properly vetted the gamblers who took the losing position, can he be sure that his actions aren't contributing to someone else's hardship?

Certainly, there are situations in which Booster Gold can gamble without tarnishing his Justice League bona fides. But, as they say, with great power comes greater responsibility.

Booster Gold #8

Please gamble responsibly, ladies and gentlemen.

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We know that Booster was gambling as recently as 52. But surely our hero has turned over a new leaf in the New 52, right?

Last week's poll question: Does Booster Gold still gamble on football? (46 votes)

After Comic-Con, Dan DiDio said he was working on a new Booster Gold comic. Maybe we could help him out by telling him what we want to read.

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As Mel Brooks once said, "hope for the best, expect the worst."

Last week's poll question: Do you think we will see Booster Gold reappear in the DCnU before 2014? (47 votes)

With the American football season less than a month away, those who enjoy to gamble on the sport are already sharpening their skills with around the clock media coverage. Do you think that includes Booster Gold?

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