Baylor, the home team, had fought hard, sometimes uphill, but now it had the game in the proverbial bag. Five points ahead. Just kneel down, and it is over. Baylor had the ball on the opponent’s eight-yard line. Second and goal. Ten seconds remaining in the game. University of Nevada, Las Vegas, (UNLV) had no time outs. But wait, the Baylor quarterback takes the snap and hands it off, the runner swings to the outside, but he bobbles the ball. A UNLV linebacker somehow grabs the ball in the air, and ninety-five yards later, with no time left on the clock, the linebacker runs into the Baylor end zone. UNLV wins. This incident really happened in the fall of the 1999 season. It cannot be explained. Or could it be explained? Could a coach or quarterback be so foolish as to try to score points after the game is all wrapped up in their favor? Players take intelligence tests to assure that they are qualified to be students at the college they are attending. Could the coach or player that made the call have been able to pass a simple intelligence test? Should such tests be given to coaches? Perhaps the following could have happened. Could a point spread of nine or ten points with Baylor being favored represent a motivation to try to score not just a victory, but a victory of eleven or twelve points – not five points? Could a team risk victory in order to win by a big enough margin to satisfy all their fans that might have bet on the game?
That is precisely the kind of rationale that is used by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) as well as professional sports leagues when they urge that there be no legalized betting on their games. More worrisome to the leagues is the notion that players could try to manipulate the score (called shaving points) so that professional gamblers could be assured of winning their bets while at the same time the players’ team could still win the game.
Scandals have followed sports throughout the past century. The scandals are single episodes, but they are also ongoing; they date back to the first decade of the twentieth century, and they occurred in the last century of the twentieth century. The scandals have in almost all cases involved betting and wagering on contests – usually illegal wagering.
Early boxing matches of the twentieth century were held in Nevada towns such as Goldfield, as the contests were illegal in most states. The matches were used to draw players to casinos, but betting was also very heavy on the contests. Boxing promoters such as Tex Rickard had close ties with members of organized crime, and it was generally accepted that matches were often rigged in order to favor certain gamblers. At the end of the century, the reputation of the sport had not been fully cleansed, as promoters such as Don King and fighters such as Mike Tyson have records of legal problems.
Early baseball leagues also had problems with gambling. The National League began in 1876, and attempts to control bribery and gambling passed to team owners. The owners instituted the “reserve clause” that prohibited players from freely leaving one team and negotiating to play for another team. In turn, the owners lowered salaries for players and made many working conditions intolerable. Players responded by selling favors to gamblers – favors including fixing game results. There were attempts to fix the World Series games in 1903 and 1904, and rumors spread that the 1912 and 1914 series were “thrown” by the losing teams. The game was put into major disrepute when it was revealed in 1920 that eight members of the Chicago White Sox team had accepted bribes that were passed by professional gambler Arnold Rothstein (who controlled bookies in many major cities) through an intermediary and had purposely lost the championship to the Cincinnati Reds. Their purported motivation was a salary dispute with an owner reputed to be “one of baseball’s biggest skinflints,” Charles Comiskey.
As a reaction to the “Black Sox” scandal of 1919, the eight players implicated were banned for life from the sport, although no legal action was ever taken against Rothstein and his organized crime cohorts. A new commissioner of baseball was appointed and given extreme powers to clean up the image of baseball. He was a federal judge named Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Landis proclaimed that “no player that throws a game, no player that entertains proposals or promises to throw a game, no player that sits in a conference with a bunch of crooks where the ways and means of throwing games are discussed, and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball”.
Landis came down hard on players who were accused of fixing games, but he was not so strict with others who merely gambled on games. Gambling and baseball were never far apart. In the 1940s Brooklyn Dodger manager Leo Durocher was a close friend of gambling gangster Bugsy Seigel and was perhaps a compulsive gambler. Durocher was suspended from the game for the 1947 season for activities related to his gambling. As late as 1969, there were suggestions that he may have manipulated games, as he was the manager of the league leading the Chicago Cubs while they let an almost sure championship slip out of their hands with a end-of-the-season losing streak. The next year, a leading pitcher, Dennis McClain, who had led the Detroit Tigers to a championship in 1968, was suspended from the league for his own gambling activities and associations with mobsters. Contemporaneously, two of the most outstanding players of the century – Mickey Mantle and Willy Mays – were banned from having official associations with baseball for a period of time in the late 1970s because of their employment by Atlantic City casinos in public relations positions. The ban was lifted when the stars ended their casino employment.
One of the most notable sports gambling scandals became public in 1989 and its effects have carried over into the twenty-first century. Pete Rose, one of the greatest players of all time, was accused of betting on his own team while he served as the manager of the Cincinnati Reds. As a player, Rose had set the major league all-time hits record. He led the league in hitting three times, and he held the longest hitting streak in the National League history – forty-four games. He had been an All Star team member over a dozen times, and he wore a World Series championship ring. Rose admitted that he had been a relatively heavy gambler, but he also insisted that he had never bet on baseball games. The Rose episode was exposed when he and some compadres won a pick-six race ticket at Turfway track in northern Kentucky. His gambling habit was exposed, although the proof of his betting on baseball, especially betting on his own team, was not definitively revealed in a public way to the satisfaction of all observers—but certainly to some. Even his harshest critics have never in one single case accused him of betting against his team or in any specific way changing his coaching strategy in order to favor bets that he made. I noted earlier that baseball is bet on an odds bases and not on a handicapped runs (point spread) method. Rose acquiesced in a commissioner decision that he be banned from baseball for life, with the status of the ban open to review after one year. Because Rose had many of his winning bets recorded, but did not keep recorded proof of his losing, the Internal Revenue Bureau made a claim that he had not paid sufficient income taxes. He was without a defense, and because of his losses, he was without the funds necessary to pay the back taxes, penalties, and fines. He was sentenced to prison and served six months because of these tax problems. Rose’s lifetime suspension has not been fully reviewed by league officials. He has been banned from consideration for membership in the Hall of Fame, a body filled with many old-time players and managers who regularly gambled – even on their own teams.
Basketball scandals have touched college basketball and professional basketball; however, the latter cases have not received close public attention. Professional basketball did not have a widespread public following until race barriers were broken down and the tempo of the games increased to make them more exciting. Professional league expansion and television exposures have also increased support. Very high salaries have made the prospects of bribing players unlikely. On the other hand, many players have succumbed to temptations of illicit drug use. College players often have financial needs. Bribes are always available to key major teams if they leave themselves open to the possibility – if they do not purposely decide to avoid certain contacts. In 1951, everything “hit the fan” with revelations that thirty-three players on seven top national college teams had “shaved” points in exchange for money from gamblers. It was suggested that eighty-six games had been influenced – and that in some, players threw victories. Colleges such as Columbia, City College of New York, Manhattan, and Long Island University were never able to regain their reputations as nationally competitive teams. Kentucky fans did not give up, and that team has remained solid. In the 1980s, a hint that difficulties existed returned, as a former Boston College player admitted to taking bribes, and a Tulane player revealed that he had traded point-shaving activities for cocaine.
In December 1999, a former defensive back on Northwestern University’s football team pleaded guilty to lying to a grand jury about his role in betting on college games. Ten other players on both the football and basketball teams had already been charged, and all had pleaded guilty to offenses related to betting and point-shaving activities. The century was ending with a cloud over sports activity – much as the century had begun.
Early football games must have been important for someone beyond local supporters or campuses, as games became very violent, and quite often “ringers” (noneligible players) were put into lineups. The initial owners of professional football teams had ties to organized crime confidants. George Hallas, founder of the Chicago Bears, was backed by a “crony” of Al Capone. Art Rooney was a prominent Pittsburgh gambler before he was owner of the Steelers. So was Baltimore Colt (and later Los Angeles Rams) owner Carroll Rosenbloom, also a very high stakes gambler in the 1950s. In fact, he was close to Mob leader Meyer Lansky and others who owned Havana and later Bahamas casinos. In contemporary times, Philadelphia Eagles owner Leonard Tose lost the team because of his compulsive gambling activity.
Players were in a different situation. Two New York Giant players were approached by gamblers prior to the 1946 championship game and offered a bribe to shave points. They refused; however, because they did not disclose the bribe offer, they were suspended. They went to play in the Canadian Football League. One of the players, Frank Filchok, was later the head coach of the Denver Broncos. In 1963, Detroit Lions star Alex Karras and Green Bay Packer Paul Hornung were forced to sit out a year because they had bet on their own teams.
The famous 1958 championship game was celebrated for making football the number-one spectator sport in the United States, but the game was never officially investigated for obvious manipulations. Baltimore Colts owner Carroll Rosenbloom reportedly had made a very large wager on his own team – the Colts. In fact, his betting caused the original line (Colts favored by 3.5) to move up two points (Colts favored by 5.5 points). The game ended with a tie score of seventeen to seventeen and was decided in a sudden-death overtime period. After holding the Giants on their first series, the Colts marched eighty yards down the field toward the Giants’ goal line. They reached the eight-yard line with a second down. They did not try a “sure thing” field goal. Rather they passed the ball. They were lucky; the ball was caught and run to the one-yard line. On third down, they did not try a field goal. Instead, halfback Alan Ameche ran the ball over the goal line. It was a risky way to win the game, but then it was the best strategy to follow if you had to win by more than 3.5 or 5.5 points and cover the owner’s bets. Moldea reported that rumors circulated around the National Football League that the Colts were playing to make sure they covered the point spread.
There was a league investigation of Leonard Tose’s gambling problem. Officials found that as long as he had the money to make his wagers, there was no problem. The problem was that he was a compulsive gambler, and he did not have enough money to cover his losses. He supposedly would bet as much as $70,000 a hand at blackjack. The league had a rule against owners’ borrowing money from each other, but Tose was allowed to break the rule. The owner of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers loaned him $400,000 so he could pay off casino debts. Then Tose turned to William Clay Ford (of the Ford Motor Company family), who owned the Detroit Lions. Ford arranged for a bank he controlled to make more loans to Tose. The league’s commissioner Pete Rozelle, commented that he would be “a hell of a lot more concerned if he knew that a player had bet at the casinos …”.
There is a reason why the league had a rule against inside financial deals among owners. One of the consequences of the Ford-arranged loan to Tose was that Tose – who had a winning personality, a common trait among many compulsive gamblers – lobbied hard among all the owners to have the 1985 Superbowl game played in January 1985 in the frozen tundra of Pontiac, Michigan – albeit inside the Silverdome stadium.
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