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| There goes my money rolling away … |
I ONLY cared about the Super Bowl because I bet on it.
I had no rooting interest in the game, and if anything, I have much more of a connection to the Denver Broncos than to the Carolina Panthers. I lived in Colorado at the time of the Broncos first Super Bowl victory, and that upsurge of state pride was pretty cool to be a part of. I was living in New Mexico when they won their second Lombardi Trophy, and anyone in New Mexico who is in their right mind should fancy the Broncos, given that the state’s fandom is somewhat evenly split between Denver and Dallas, and Cowboys fandom is a scourge we would all do well to stamp out. But I’ve paid comparatively little attention to the NFL this season, and what snippets I did see throughout the year failed to impress me. It seemed like a down year for the league, with a lot of the more talented teams beset by injury and a lot of the mediocre teams beset by bad QB play.
So I was basically indifferent about the game, but like many San Francisco residents, we felt a bit besieged by the NFL coming to town, setting up shop downtown for two weeks and making daily life generally inconvenient:
I do think the supposed animosity the city residents had towards the NFL imposing the Super Bowl on San Francisco was overplayed a bit in the press. I fundamentally think it’s pretty cool to be in a city that can host these sorts of events, and I enjoyed walking about downtown San Francisco last Thursday afternoon, chatting with a couple of beat writers from out of town (and pointing them to good restaurants) and also talking with a few out-of-town visitors. The traffic and transport stuff was an inconvenience and an annoyance more than anything else. But the world’s largest circus coming to town also gave us incentive to ditch for a couple of days, and what better place for The Lose to go than to the world capital of Lose, the place whose sheer existence and prosperity is predicated upon people losing, and often doing so in spectacular fashion?
And when in Rome and all that. It makes no sense to come to Las Vegas for the Super Bowl and not bet on the game. More money is wagered on this day in Las Vegas than any other. The queues for the sports books on Sunday were up to an hour long. There were well over 500 prop bets to choose from of all sorts of degrees of ridiculous (an alarmingly large number of people in the burger joint where we were hanging out cheered when the coin toss came up tails). If we just wanted to watch the game with indifference and banality, we could’ve just stayed at home.
I’m not a huge gambler in any sense, maintaining a solid life principle of never wagering any money that I feel like I can’t afford to lose. Myself and The Official Spouse of In Play Lose settled on $115 in wagers on the Super Bowl. I wasn’t emotionally attached to either team, and simply bet along the lines of how I felt the game would go, which was that the Denver offense wouldn’t be able to do shit, and Panthers QB and league MVP Cam Newton would make enough plays here and there. I figured the Panthers would win, and put $40 on Carolina -5½.
And that line held up pretty consistently for two weeks. It dropped to Carolina -5 on Saturday night and then was down to Carolina -4½ on Sunday morning. The Denver money had rolled into town. (Perhaps unsurprisingly on account of geography, there was far more blue and orange on display in Vegas than their was black and teal.) The goal of the bookmakers is to get as close to even money wagered on both sides, of course, which is why the line moves about at all, but their opening line of Carolina -5½ would indicate that their thinking about this game was similar to mine. The difference being that, in the end, they didn’t lose any money on the game by being wrong.
And from a neutral perspective, what I would say about this game was that it was six kinds of crap. The Lose loves me some great defensive line play, and that was in abundance from both teams. Both defenses lived up their billing. Both offenses, however, were horrific messes. Every pass Peyton Manning threw looked like a dying chicken best served on one of his Papa Johns pizzas. The Broncos mustered less than 200 yards of offense and were 1/14 on third down. The Panthers, meanwhile, looked spooked by the big stage and played like it. They committed four turnovers and 13 penalties, they dropped passes in crucial situations, missed a FG and also bungled a punt coverage. The great unknown in any sort of game of this magnitude is poise. It’s not just another game, no matter how many times you try to tell yourself that it is. I was not that sold on the Panthers this season, anyway, despite their gaudy 17-1 record which probably had more to do with playing in an awful division (the NFC South) and playing 8 games against two other generally awful divisions (the NFC East and the AFC South), and so from a casual perspective, the victory by a more experienced squad who also had more tough games this season isn’t that much of a surprise.
But once I put that $40 down on Carolina -5½, by God, I was a Panthers fan. Or, more to the point, I was Panthers -5½ fan. It’s amazing how just that act of wagering changed my mindset completely.
We also put down $40 on Saturday night’s game between the Warriors and the Zombies (which some would say a battle of Kevin Durant’s soon-to-be former and soon-to-be future employers). The line for that game fluctuated between GS -7½ and GS -8½ for a few days, and had settled at GS -8 by the time we got to the window on Saturday. And I’m watching the game, in which the Warriors all but run OKC out of the building in the first half and then can’t throw the ball in San Francisco Bay in the second, and I’m watching the Dubs’ lead shrink from 19 to 15 to 12, and pretty much the only thing going through my mind is that I’m worried Golden State isn’t going to cover the spread. It doesn’t even really occur to me, when the game is tied at 104-104 with a couple of minutes left, that the Dubs might, in fact, wind up losing the game. In my wager-centric view, they’ve already lost and this is a complete, utter failure all around. The Dubs wound up righting the ship, winning the game 116:108 and making my GS -8 wager a push, and what’s going through my head? “Damn, if only we’d gotten to the sports book at the Bellagio this morning, when the line was GS -7½.”
And that same mentality carried over to a Super Bowl game in which I cared little to not at all. Had I been watching this at home, I probably would’ve turned the game off because I was bored. Plunk down some bucks and suddenly, every Panthers mistake (of which there were many) is cause for outrage and scorn. I’d given myself a reason to care about the Super Bowl, but all I really cared about was the outcome and whether I wound up with money in my pocket. It was a selfish reason, one which ultimately made me feel even more detached from the game than before.
The Lose considered this quick junket to Las Vegas as something of an experiment, being someone who is fascinated with both the sociology of sport and the history of sport, and having come to understand that the history of sport, as a spectacle and pastime, is also essentially a history of gambling on sport.
Wagering has been basically driving spectator interest in sport for thousands of years, and done so across a variety of cultures. Plenty of money was changing hands over the weekends when up to 200,000 spectators would turn up for the chariot races at Circus Maximus in ancient Rome. The delays between races – oftentimes a product of collisions of humans and equines against stone walls and pillars – just gave everyone in attendance more time to get their next bet down. When the Romans and the Greeks weren’t betting on horses, they were betting on prizefighters. We, as a species, have not only been encouraging the beating of the the hell out of each other for thousands of year, we’ve actually been staking on it.
Meanwhile, in this hemisphere, some of the greatest stories I’ve come across are those pertaining to the fútbol that first took shape in Central and South America: primitive games using rubber balls in which use of the hands were not permitted. In general, a lot of the anthropological work done surrounding ancient cultures tends to deify and mystify them, which runs counter to my inherent belief that all societies in history have inherently been absurdist, dysfunctional messes. The original references to the fútbol matches portrayed them as being some ritualistic spectacle rife with sacrifices to the gods and the like, which didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me: I mean, if you’re going to get killed for losing a game, then why are you even playing? Well, of course, what further research uncovered was that these fútbol games were often accompanied by the most insane amounts of gambling that the planet has ever known. Chiefs were sometimes wagering their fiefdoms on the outcomes. People were literally betting the farm. Being a fútbol player in that culture was probably a perilous proposition simply because you had to face a whole lot of really angry people if you lost, and you might not be able to get past the angry mob. Because it’s your fault they’re now broke, of course, and not the fact that they were complete idiots who shouldn’t be betting everything they have on a damn game.
Wagering is a crazy sort of zero-sum game. One side wins, another loses – and often there’s someone else involved (the house) who wins no matter the outcome. The history of sport, and the history of gambling, is filled with bookies, tipsters, and a whole bunch of other dubious sorts of charlatans angling for a piece of the action. And we love this stuff. We’ve been betting on this stuff for centuries. The bloodier and messier and more vulgar the competition, the more inclined we seem to be to want to bet on it. Over time, we’ve refined our competitions and made them somewhat less revolting, but that somewhat twisted impulse to want our money where our mouth is has remained pretty constant.
And it is an impulse, because it doesn’t make much sense otherwise. The notions of luck and chance are inherently metaphorical constructs, ones dependent upon us putting importance on an outcome. We like to believe in good luck, and like to use bad luck as a ready made excuse for why things don’t work out. I remember a particular co-worker of mine when I lived in New Mexico who did the same thing for his vacation every single year: he and his wife would go to Las Vegas for a week. They’d save up for this all year, stashing every loose nickel and dime and quarter and dollar in their ‘vacation fund,’ and then they would go to Las Vegas and gamble. And gamble more. And more. They’d blow through 51 weeks’ worth of savings during a week in Las Vegas, love every minute of it and immediately want to come back for more. And, of course, an obvious question came to mind when hearing him talk proudly about these annual Vegas junkets: wouldn’t it be a good idea to, you know, actually know what you’re doing so as not to lose so much money? But they were slaves to chance, far more willing to put their trust in Lady Luck than to actually view the escapade as a money-making opportunity. They were simply hoping they would be lucky and Fortuna would smile upon them – a mindset which seems nuts among my good number of pro-level poker playing friends, but one which is far more prevalent than not. Vegas loves those sorts of people. Those bright lights everywhere aren’t paid for by a gambler’s winnings.
We gamble on a spectacle like the Super Bowl precisely because it gives us a stake in the result. It gives us something to care about. We don’t have to care about any other aspect of it – including the fact that we’re watching people essentially going through an act of systematically maiming themselves. We as an American society have done pretty well to fool ourselves into thinking that football isn’t a bloodsport. In fact, it’s the most complex and elaborate bloodsport that’s ever been created. The NFL does an interesting sort of tap dance when it comes to explaining it’s relationship with the sports books in Las Vegas, one which it’s never really had to quantify and only recently been somewhat forced to address with rumors of the Raiders looking into relocating to Las Vegas in the future. The truth is that without the massive amount of betting action that goes on surrounding the NFL – both of the legal and illegal varieties – the game would be nowhere near as popular as it is. The point spread in football is the ideal conduit for sports wagering, as it’s a game with a diverse amount of numerological outcomes (unlike baseball or soccer or hockey, where the actual line is rarely more than a run or a goal) but one that isn’t too variant (like basketball, where teams score and score and score some more). It’s a perfect little package in which to entice people to lose, and encourage those who win from time to time to think they’re smarter than they really are and then go about losing what they’ve just won.
And do not construe what I’m saying here as some sort of condemnation of gambling. Actually, it’s fun, and if you view it as recreation and nothing more, the costs don’t amount to much. We were down $41 when the game was finally over, which was about the cost of those two glasses of silky and heavenly Turley zinfandels we had at the Aria wine bar. No great loss. But there we were on Sunday night, seeing our wagers going up in smoke when Cam Newton fumbled in the gif above deep in his own territory with the Panthers trailing 16-10, feeling annoyed and aggravated and hating this stupid dumb game that the stupid dumb Panthers were choking away. The Broncos then take advantage of the short field yet again and punch it in for a TD to make it 22-10 and …
“The Broncos are going for two!” KC exclaims delightedly.
We have a prop bet of +375 on there being a successful 2-point conversion. Peyton Manning somehow noodle arms the ensuing pass into a teammate’s arms to score the deuce and we’re suddenly cheering, having covered a substantial amount of our losses, and thus confusing the hell out of the drunkass Panthers fan sitting next to us. We suddenly didn’t give two shits about the Panthers anymore. That didn’t take long, now did it? All bow to the glory that is the 2-point conversion (which the Panthers should’ve gone for in the first half, but that’s another story).
I’ve heard from quite a few people, and read quite a few articles and columns, speaking to the demise of football, simply because the same is so damn violent and the long-term physical toll the game takes upon its combatants so extreme. It was somewhat eerie to me, watching the parade and procession of Super Bowl MVPs onto the field at Pants Stadium at the game’s outset and noticing just how many of these players – some of them among the greatest players in the history of the game – walked with what was obviously a permanent limp. Rather than being a moment celebrating the glory of the game’s past, it served to remind me of the misery of an American football player’s future. But we love this stuff, and when we go to Las Vegas we love it with our pocketbooks and absent our heads. And we always have, in one form or another. It wasn’t because we wised up and realized that boxing was appalling that made it fall out of favor in the eyes of the sporting public. No, it was all of the corruption and the politics on the sidelines which ultimately turned people off. Boxing ceased to be an earnest competition in the collective sports psyche, reduced to a circus and a sideshow that seemed contrived and not quite on the up-and-up.
Which is, of course, where a sport can completely go off the rails. Pretty much the worst thing you can do in a sport is deliberately lose, and get paid to do so. We want a fair fight, after all, and not a rigged game. Through various acquaintances and such, I knew of someone working in the Las Vegas sports gambling industry at the time of the Arizona State point-shaving scandal, and he said the alarm bells were going off everywhere in the industry. Tulane’s response to a similar scandal was to disband the basketball program completely, and there has been a rather unfortunate history of this sort of thing in the sport of basketball. There was legit concern for the future of baseball after the Black Sox scandal of 1919 (a scandal which, as was pointed out in Eight Men Out, was almost certainly not the first time this sort of match fixing had occurred). Just here in the past few months, wide allegations of match fixing have started dogging tennis, and rather than be surprised by it, I suspect it’s far-more prevalent than people realize.
While I appreciate the athleticism of tennis players, and applaud the cerebral approach required to think one’s way through a match, the sport generally bores me to watch. And having been to a professional tennis tournament before that wasn’t one of the majors, I can see just how easy it would be to fix a tennis match, simply because it seems a lot of the time like guys are dogging it when they lose. And that’s not intended as a condemnation of tennis players. Think of the situation, here. Tennis players maintain insanely tight schedules, are consistently injured, and their performance is essentially judged by how they perform in only a few select events every year. So say you’re playing a match on a Tuesday night in San Jose and it’s not going very well and all of the factors I mentioned above apply. Well, fuck it, why not just get it over with? Those are all legit, extenuating circumstances for not giving your best in a match, and the trick when throwing a match is simply to make it look like you aren’t doing so. The nature of tennis, thus, provides the ideal sort of cover. It also happens to be a pretty easy game to wager on: not just who will win, but also how many sets, and how many games within those sets, factors which don’t necessarily mean a whole lot outside the gambling realm. The casual spectator doesn’t much care if a player wins the third set 6-2 or 6-3, but for the gambler, that one measly game can mean a small fortune.
Losing on purpose is, in principle, sport’s greatest sin, even if gambling isn’t involved. My favorite recent example of this came at the London Olympics in badminton, with competitors actively trying to lose so as to avoid an unfavorable draw in the next round. The actual defenses put forth in their appeals were along the lines of, “they weren’t trying to lose, they really are just that bad,” which begs the question of what they were doing at the Olympics in the first place. In that particular instance, the organizers had created a dumb format which provided a perverse incentive for players at a particular juncture to lose: they stood to have a better chance of winning a medal if they did so. And the motivation for throwing a tennis match is pretty obvious: money. Tennis has a broad, multi-tiered professional structure spanning the globe, but it’s estimated that only about 300 players or so actually break even. Frankly, you can make some pretty easy money just by dogging a few matches here and there. We think of professional athletes as being well-paid celebrities in this era, yet it was just last season that F.C. Parma, a soccer club competing in Serie A at some of the game’s highest levels, went months without paying its players. The drop off from haves to have nots happens really quickly. The NCAA, showing it’s ever touching concern for it’s commodities’ well-being, makes it a point to emphasize the perils of gambling to student athletes (perils which, to be fair, can be legit) seeing as how a fleet of indentured servants could make easy pickings for gamblers flashing cash around. The simple solution is obvious – pay the players – but that solution dips in the pockets of those who control the game, who want it all to be on their own terms and who are often just as greedy and selfish and corrupt as the gamblers, and are generally far less honest about it.
And so long as there is an interest in betting on the outcome, people are going to bet on the outcome. We have a somewhat strange relationship with gambling in this country, confining this particular aspect of it to one small corner of the country. It’s a little different in a place like Britain, where you can wander into a bookmaker’s offices and wager on seemingly anything. Honestly, I wish we were more upfront about all of it. We all love our NCAA pools and our weekly NFL pools, even though caring about whether the Lions at +7½ against the Packers is a good pick is ultimately utter nonsense. It gives us a reason to care, which is precisely what entities like the NCAA and the NFL want us to do. More interest means more prestige and publicity, which in turns means more demands and more profits.
What’s the most striking aspect of the NFL Super Bowl circus coming to your town is the way that the NFL, as an entity, seems to have license to print money, and that they can waltz into your town and set up shop and throw an enormous party that you aren’t privy to. Oh, sure, you can addle along in the NFL Fan Zone or whatever the fuck that nonsense was that took place along the waterfront, but it isn’t really about you. The Super Bowl is essentially a 2-week long cocktail party which happens to have a game tacked onto the end of it, one which often isn’t very good and with ticket prices so stratospheric that only the über-rich can take part, creating an atmosphere as stale as that plate of nachos you bought two hours ago. (The closest thing to a ‘real’ crowd I’ve seen at a Super Bowl was ten years ago when the Seahawks played the Steelers in Detroit, a rather undesirable locale with undesirable weather in close proximity to Pittsburgh, meaning the Steelers diaspora turned up en masse.) Yet Super Bowl Sunday is also something of a de facto national holiday, at this point. They’ve been selling the brand for 50 years now, and one way or another, we keep lapping it up. We find reasons to care. And as long as millions and millions of people are willing to wager billions and billions of dollars on the Super Bowl, we’ll still find reasons to care. And I’ll freely admit that, as much as I think the NFL sucks, come this time a year from now, I’ll consider doing the same thing I did this year, because it was fun, in the end. It was stupid, mindless fun and I managed not to lose my shirt.
But … but … at the same time, I could see exactly how that sort of thing is possible. Why bet $10 on the favorite at -5½? If you’re sure they’re going to win, why not bet $100 or $1000? I was pretty sure the Seahawks would cover two years ago and quite possibly posterize the Broncos in the process, but was I sure enough (or foolish enough) to wager that kind of coin? I ask because, as disciplined as we were when it came to wagering this past weekend, we still wound up ponying up a little bit more than we were planning to do. It’s not that hard to permit yourself to take that next step. In fact, it is alarmingly easy to let yourself get mesmerized and permit yourself to be sucked in.
And even the oddsmakers, whose job it is to be better at this stuff than you are, get it wildly and horribly wrong from time to time. Had you been perusing British bookmakers back in July, you’d have gotten 5,000/1 odds on Leicester City winning the EPL. I took a quick glance at the EPL toteboard in the Treasure Island sportsbook yesterday, as we were laying $20 on the San Francisco Giants to win the World Series at 10/1, and Leicester City is now 12/5 to win. Then again, if you’re giving out 5,000/1, it’s not like you’re gonna get many takers. Just a few people here and there chasing a daydream. As you may notice from this photo, you can no longer even bet on the ultimate longshot at the Venetian. They love suckers in Las Vegas, and they’ll permit a few stupid Lakers fans from L.A. to hand over some easy money, but not even these guys will let you throw away your money wagering on the Philadelphia 76ers:
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| Note absence of #4023 |
“How’d the hot dogs taste?” I asked.
“Bitter. They tasted very bitter.”
