I’m sitting in my Barcalounger, watching Clayton Kershaw throw the first pitch of the World Series, and it occurs to me that it’s been 98 years since baseball’s most notorious episode: the Black Sox scandal of 1919. My assumption is that Major League Baseball Incorporated will sponsor all manner of celebrations, including the now traditional militaristic displays of patriotism and authoritarianism, to honor baseball’s Centennial Year of Shame. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if Centennial Year of Shame has already been copyrighted by MLB Inc.
If I seem a bit overeager — two years is a long time in these uncertain days — there’s a reason. My twin passions are gambling and baseball, and the Black Sox scandal was the fortuitous marriage of both.
In case you didn’t catch Ken Burns’ indignant account of the event, there’s ample evidence that the 98-year-old clash between Charlie Comiskey’s highly-favored White Sox and the undermanned Cincinnati Reds was fixed by gamblers. Eight morally challenged athletes employed by the penurious Comiskey wound up going down for taking bribes. It was, we are told, baseball’s greatest shame, although I might confer that distinction on the owners themselves, who for 100 years amassed grotesque fortunes while colluding to prevent the athletes from the riches they could have brought in an open marketplace.
To learn more you might Google Curt Flood, reserve clause or cheap bastards.
Happily, you couldn’t fix an exhibition game in March these days, let alone the fall classic. Consider this: Eddie Cicotte, the White Sox ace, earned about $10,000 in 1919. Granted, there weren’t any lucrative TV contracts back then — or newsreel deals for that matter — but even then, ten grand was not a princely sum for a guy who won 29 games. Ty Cobb was making twice that much and in a year or two, Babe Ruth would be hauling down about fifty grand. So when Cicotte allegedly accepted the equivalent of his annual salary to tank a World Series game or two, the fixers, who apparently bribed eight players in all, were able to make a tidy profit by taking the generous price on the Reds with all the bookmakers they could find.
And there were lots of them in those somewhat lawless years.
But the happy point is — and this might be the real reason to celebrate the Black Sox scandal — Meyer Lansky himself couldn’t fix the World Series today, and it’s not because he’s dead. Let’s say we take Eddie’s ten grand and adjust it for inflation. In 2017 money, that would mean a salary of $176,000. But now we take Clayton Kershaw’s 2017 salary, and we find that he made $200,000…per inning. The larger point being that you just can’t bribe a guy who makes $33 million per annum.
What really makes me sad is the passing of the often quaint, sometimes charming and occasionally dangerous character known as the bookmaker
What really makes me sad is the passing of the often quaint, sometimes charming and occasionally dangerous character known as the bookmaker. Which is another reason games can’t be fixed. When there were lots of bookmakers, you might be able to at least get, say, a sharpshooter from Fordham to shave a point or two in a basketball game. The idea was that you give the kid $500, tell him to miss a few free throws, and then bet a little here, a little there, with a bunch of bookies.
Those were the days, my friend. In the 80s, with the Internet still nascent, bookmakers flourished. In some ways, more than ever, because the feds no longer had much interest in busting them. Taking bets didn’t seem very sinister anymore — not with the advent of terrorism, the free flow of coke and heroin, and a legal way to get down a wager within walking distance in many states. By the 90s, Indian casinos — big-ass, glitzy, Vegasian palaces of greed and despair — were mushrooming almost as fast as the unemployment rate and the national debt had in the 80s. As states looked desperately for ways to balance budgets, everything seemed upside down. Gambling was no longer the problem — it was the solution. The lottery — a scam invented by organized crime almost 100 years earlier — was now embraced by politicians who a few years would have sworn on their Bible that the numbers game was un-American and, besides, a sure way to piss off the churches and their bingo enterprise.
I was probably seven or eight when I first began to grasp the concept of bookmaker. I was at my cousin’s house and suggested we play ping pong in his basement. Seemed like a pleasant way to spend a few hours on Saturday afternoon. As it turned out, the ping pong table was covered with tiny squares of paper, and written on the paper were notes that I did not understand — like “MN – 6.5, Tenn plus-7” and…anyway, you get the idea even if I didn’t. I later learned that the writing on the paper disappeared when dunked in water, a pail of which was under the table. It took me another ten years before I figured out that my cousin’s dad was a bookie, and I remember the pride I felt in the revelation.
A few decades passed before I met the most colorful of all the local bookies: Max “Flowers” Weisman, whose nickname came from his day job of peddling anything (legal) that bloomed. He did all right selling flowers from the cart he pushed along Summit Avenue, but his real gift was for taking bets. I used to see Max at the old Scoreboard bar in Bloomington, where Cubs fans could watch their team play thanks to a new bit of technology known as cable TV.
Max was somewhat deficient intellectually, but he was a savant when it came to numbers. His appearance could best be described as slovenly. He would wear a sport coat that seemed to remember most of the meals he’d enjoyed in the past year or two. Inning-by-inning — sometimes pitch-by-pitch — Max could give you accurate odds on the outcome of the game, the inning or the at-bat. You got the impression that he could remember each one of the dozens of wagers he might book during a game, but he also wrote them down in a tiny notebook that was roughly the size of a playing card. That was the easy part. The tough part was keeping all the cash he’d taken in from spilling out of the soiled and sticky pockets of the sport coat.
I know I always slept better knowing that Max wasn’t around to destroy the American way of life
Nor did Max do a good job of spending, or hiding, his filthy lucre. It wasn’t hard for the authorities to find the huge piles of cash that he stashed around his house, which got him sent to the joint a couple of times. I know I always slept better knowing that Max wasn’t around to destroy the American way of life. By the late 90s, judges had wearied of sending him up the river and the cops stopped arresting him.
A few years later, he died of cancer.
If Max was the most harmless bookie around, Lenny was the kind of guy who gave bookies a bad name. Most bookies were in the business despite the fact that it was illegal. Lenny took bets precisely because it was a crime. I started betting Lenny after my local bookie, Bones, retired from the business in the early 80s. At the time, I was working with a couple of friends in a very small business specializing in writing and producing radio commercials. Business was slow and we needed diversions.
Boy, did we need them.
We had rented the second floor of an Uptown duplex. The landlord was a pediatric dentist, and, as we soon learned, not a very good one. We spend our days trying to write funny commercials to the tune of the shrieking children and angry mothers who were a floor below us. Eventually, the dentist lost his license — he had prescribed several thousand hits of Valium to one of my colleagues — but before that, Lenny would show up every Tuesday to settle up.
Lenny’s first visit was his most memorable. I’d had a pretty good week, winning about $200. The phone rang at 10 a.m. on Tuesday. Lenny sounded friendly enough. “Hey, Mikey, I’m just down the street. Meet me outside in a couple of minutes.” I walked outside as Lenny was easing his Cadillac in front of the duplex. He motioned for me to get in the car.
I could see a Colt .45 Peacemaker, just like the one John Wayne made famous. I got the message
“Nice going,” Lenny said, as he flashed what was either a smile or a sneer. “You’re on fire.” Then he opened the glove compartment to remove an envelope holding my cash. Lenny lingered for just a moment after opening the glove compartment — nothing too obvious, just a couple of beats so I could see that, nestled next to the money, was a Colt .45 Peacemaker, just like the one John Wayne made famous. I got the message. I always paid Lenny promptly, and he always paid me. But one weekend I kind of went off the grid and gambled over my head, which usually doesn’t pay. Except on this occasion I hit a ridiculous four-team parlay and a couple of two-teamers, and wound up winning almost a dime — the term we reprobates use for a thousand bucks.
Lenny didn’t bother to show me the gun. He just tossed the envelope at me and said, “Lose my number, kid. You’re no good to me.”
Lots of other bookies came and went. A few got busted, but were usually taking bets again the next day. By the mid-90s, Internet wagering was well on its way to replacing the bookie. The off-shore casinos eliminated the need to meet up with your man every week, and you didn’t have to worry about busy signals. Instead of being able to bet the NFL only between 11 a.m. and noon on Sunday, you had all week to shop for betting lines and make your play. It had been convenient — too convenient — to bet on credit with your bookie. With the Internet, you deposited money first, which meant you never got tapped out or had to worry about getting knee-capped.
I never actually heard of it happening, although desiccated bodies did turn up in the Nevada desert from time to time.
My final bookie was a guy everyone called “Coach.” It took me a year or so to learn that he actually was a coach. And, it turned out, he was a good one. He was also a good bookie — a guy willing to go the extra mile to service his customers. Just before he retired from coaching — and bookmaking — his high school football team made it to the finals of the state tournament. Coach dutifully made his team a three-point favorite. I know it sounds bad, but in his defense he didn’t let anyone bet more than $20 on the game. And, as a show of integrity, he refused to take over-under bets on the contest.
Sadly, that personal touch is gone from sports betting today, and betting online just isn’t as much fun. In fact, if I ever get even, I’m going to give up sports wagering for good.
