Brant James

Brant James is a veteran writer/journalist with more than seven years of experience in the legal sports betting, casino and lottery industries in the United States. A former big-league beat writer who covered motorsports and the National Hockey League at outlets including USA Today, ESPN.com and SI.com, he was perfectly positioned when the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act was nullified in 2018, sending pro sports and the gambling industry on a head-long path toward each other. He’s seen the rise of this app, the fall of that one, and wrote about the implications when that other one was bought by DraftKings. With legal sports betting quickly filling in the national map, he took on issues that logically came with it, including responsible gambling concerns, corruption in sports, and how sports would survive as data points for all these new bettors fretting over parlays. Brant has also explored the possible and possibly nebulous future of online gambling, including crypto-currency powered, avatar-wielding casinos in the Metaverse. But on a beat that is very much about numbers - votes in the Legislature to legalize, tax rates, handle, revenue - he remains uniquely committed to finding and featuring the humans behind them. When not in the journalism factory, Brant enjoys travel, concerts, yelling at his sports teams either on television or in person, and trying to get the perfect video without crashing the drone. His Australian Shepherd has other ideas.