4 Dirty Little Secrets About The Cheap Air Hockey Hire Industry
Joao Charlesbois
The game was long over, but the action was just beginning. J.A.
Davis, a 23-year-old Texas Tech senior, fought against the flow
of departing fans as he weaved down the concrete aisles of Jones
Stadium in Lubbock. He was in search of a better seat to catch
the closing minutes of the Red Raiders' made-for-ESPN Thursday
night football game against No. 1 Nebraska on Sept. 8. It didn't
matter to Davis that Tech was already soundly beaten -- it
trailed 35-16 with barely two minutes to play -- or that
Nebraska had the ball. In his world, wins and losses are
secondary to point spreads and over-unders, and on this day
Davis had taken the Cornhuskers, giving 25-1/2 points.
Meet the Juice Generation. For them, finance isn't a major, it's
knowing how to spread $1,000 in wagers over 10 Saturday college
football games and stay alive for Sunday's and Monday's NFL bets
with a zero balance in their checkbooks and their credit cards
maxed out. Class participation is sitting in the back of a lecture
hall with Vegas-style ``spreadsheets'' laid out, plotting a week's
worth of plays on games from Seattle to Miami. Communication is a
desperate call to some 1-900 tout service in search of this week's
Lock of the Year. Road trip is a drive through the desert to Las
Vegas or across Midwestern plains to Native American and riverboat
casinos, both of which have proliferated like Home Depots.
There is nothing in the collegiate rite-of-passage handbook about
gambling. There are chapters on alcohol, drugs and sex laid out
against a backdrop of winking acceptance. Kids. Society has hacked
out a neutral zone of sorts and allowed undergraduates to briefly
frolic in it. But gambling? Who knows from gambling -- in
particular sports gambling -- on campus? It is the dirty little
secret of college life in America, rampant and thriving. ``It's
ubiquitous, it's popular, it's pervasive,'' says psychologist
Michael Frank of Richard Stockton College in Pomona, N.J., one of
a scant few academicians who has studied the phenomenon.
``Wherever you go in the country, you're going to find access to a
bookmaker. It's true in casinos, it's true at the General Motors
plant, and it's true on college campuses all over the country.''
This outbreak might seem inconsequential, considering that
legalized gambling is a growth industry in the U.S. However, most
of the gambling that college students do is not legal. And just as
we think of colleges as institutions of higher learning, so it is
with gambling. ``A kid finds a bookie on campus, he learns about
gambling, he gets hooked,'' says Arnie Wexler, a leading
consultant on problem gambling. For every college kid who derives
nothing but entertainment from his betting, there is another who
cons his parents to get money to cover his gambling losses,
another who becomes so consumed with betting that he tosses away
an education and another who plunges into gambling addiction. It
is far from harmless recreation.
Lesieur headed a panel that in 1991 published the only widespread
study of gambling among college students. The study, with surveys
at six schools in five states, concluded that 23% of the students
gambled at least once a week.
Yet during two months of research, SI found that it was nearly
impossible to visit a campus in search of organized gambling and
not find either 1) sophisticated on- or off-campus bookmaking
operations with a large student clientele or 2) legal casinos
within a short distance of the schools, easily accessible to
underage students (box, page 84) -- or both. Tom Decker, a retired
FBI agent who investigated sports gambling, says, ``You'd be
shocked at how easy it is for kids to get involved in gambling and
how many of them do. You and I could go into a bar in Athens,
Georgia, right now, and within minutes we'd have the name of a
bookie. Within minutes.'' (In fact you could bypass the bar and go
straight to the University of Georgia campus, but we'll come back
to that.)
Occasionally illegal college gambling operations will come to the
public's attention, usually when they've run afoul of the police.
Since 1992 this has happened at Michigan State, Maine, Rhode
Island and neighboring Bryant College, Texas, Arizona State and
Northwestern. Sometimes college athletes are involved (Maine,
Rhode Island, Bryant, Northwestern), which gives the incident a
longer public shelf life. But college officials often dismiss the
incidents as isolated and blame unsavory outside characters for
corrupting their youth. The views of James Rund, interim associate
vice president for student affairs at Arizona State, are typical.
Of the busting of four students at his school in February 1994 for
helping to run a bookmaking operation, Rund says, ``To
characterize it as a student gambling ring is an exaggeration and
probably an inaccurate depiction of the circumstances.'' He says
this despite the fact that names of members of 15 of Arizona
State's 22 fraternities appeared in betting records seized by
police.
Busting gambling rings is labor-intensive work for
law-enforcement agencies, and there's little chance that those
apprehended and found guilty will receive heavy penalties since
much of the public considers gambling a victimless crime. ``The
payoff is trivial,'' says Frank, meaning that perpetrators
seldom receive long jail sentences (or any jail sentences at
all). Interest fades.
The aforementioned ring busted in February 1994 by the Tempe
(Ariz.) police was operated by a 30-year-old former Tucson
sportscaster, who was assisted by four Arizona State fraternity
brothers. Of the 245 betting accounts uncovered, 140 belonged to
fraternity members at the university. Police suspect at least 60
other Arizona State students were also book clients. An average of
nearly $120,000 a month was wagered, mostly by students, through
the book between August 1993 and February '94.
J.P. Browman, a 23-year-old senior at Florida, for the last four
years operated a book that catered exclusively to students at
his university. J.P. has a wiretap detector on his phone, a
mnemonic phone number and, he says, $42,000 in profits. His only
regret is that he can't put his bookmaking work on his resume.
Mike Tyler, a 21-year-old sophomore at Texas Tech, has contacts
with five different off-campus bookies in Lubbock and estimates
that at least 200 other students have contacted bookies or made
bets through him. This comes as no shock to Sgt. Tom McDonald of
the Texas Department of Public Safety, who can name 58 illegal
bookmakers in Lubbock County alone and says, ``Nearly every
bookmaker in this town got his start as a student at Texas Tech.''
From the never-too-early-to-get-started department, on March 1
police in Nutley, N.J., busted a student-run sports gambling
operation at Nutley High that took single bets as high as $1,000
and used threats of violence and kidnapping to get losers to pay
up. One prosecutor said the operation was ``sophisticated and
exactly mirrors an adult-run organized crime bookmaking
operation.'' This lends credence to assertions by many college
gamblers that they started betting seriously in high school.
And if you're attached to the youthful enthusiasm that surrounds
a college sporting event -- the painted faces, the silly signs,
the reckless support -- there is reason to pause and wonder if
perhaps some small corner of Cameron Indoor Stadium, just to
name one arena, is Crazy because a few of the Crazies took Duke,
minus 4, for $25. And to wonder, also, just how short the jump
is from student to athlete and just how thin the line between
pure competition and fixed games may be. Says Kentucky football
coach Bill Curry, ``There's an awful lot at stake when somebody
asks you, `How's [running back] Moe Williams's shoulder?' ''
GAINESVILLE, FLA.: Lyle Ellington is a 21-year-old senior at
Florida, a tall, athletic-looking fraternity kid. He has been
betting since junior high, when he handicapped horse races at
South Florida tracks. At Florida he became the biggest client for
several prosperous campus bookies, including J.P. Browman.
``The most I ever bet on one game? Twenty-four grand. San Diego
Chargers versus Miami Dolphins in 1991,'' says Ellington. ``I took
the Dolphins -- I always take the Dolphins -- and I was already up
that week, like, 30 grand. Everyone's riding my coattails, so I
decide to push it. I bet 24 G on Miami. Going into the fourth
quarter the Dolphins are up by, like, 13. I'm staring $50,000
dollars in the face. Then Rod Bernstine ripped out my heart.
Scores three ---- touchdowns in the fourth quarter. San Diego
always kills me, though. I remember the Chargers were playing the
Los Angeles Raiders on a Sunday night a few years ago, and I took
L.A., minus 6. The Raiders were up 9-7 with less than a minute
left. Ronnie Lott intercepts the ball and falls to the ground.
That's the way it ended. Cost me 12 grand. I was dying because I
couldn't watch the game. I was pledging my fraternity. It was Hell
Night.
Campus gamblers seem old in much the same sense that college
football players who weigh 280 pounds and bench-press
sport-utility vehicles seem older than their classmates. The
college bettor speaks the language of the trade -- juice, vig,
teaser, parlay, quarter ($25), dollar ($100), push -- and
sometimes deals in amounts that would buy sport-utility vehicles.
It seems out of place in a youthful, academic setting. Gamblers
come equipped with war stories of losing money and winning money,
stories you expect to hear from older, harder men. They have the
ability to make a campus hangout feel like a Keno lounge or a
storefront off-track betting parlor.