Gamblers back an unlikely baseball hero

“ROLL TIDE,” one of my fellow hill walkers Shane said out of nowhere as we came down off the Temescal Trail, north of Santa Monica.

“Roll Tide,” responded the girl walking in the other direction.

She sauntered on, not looking around. Nor did Shane. She was wearing a University of Alabama t-shirt and he simply wanted to pay his respects to her team, the Crimson Tide, the famous footballing institution on the banks of the Black Warrior River in Tuscaloosa.

I was confused though. Wasn’t he selling out his Syracuse Orangemen, the only show in Upstate New York?

“I made a lot of money on Alabama last year,” he responded.

Which was surprising considering ‘Bama’s relatively lacklustre season. Having won the national championship the season before, powered by newly recruited New Orleans Saints running back Mark Ingram, they never looked like retaining the title.

And didn’t they discard a 24-0 lead last November against bitter state rivals Auburn, eventually losing 28-27 in one of 2010’s truly mesmerising sporting contests? Roll Tide indeed.

America has a strange relationship with sports betting. It’s illegal everywhere but Nevada and yet it seems to have a legitimate grip on close followers of college football and the NFL as well as all the rest.

But what it doesn’t have is the sleazy feel of petty criminality. Jimmy the Greek made sure of that.

Of course online betting has helped boost its accessibility — not to mention the coffers of the Las Vegas ‘sportsbooks’, the bookies of the desert.

And it was out of that desert from which the infamous Jimmy ‘the Greek’ Snyder emerged in the early 1970s having enjoyed two decades of good punts and bad, not to mention a court conviction for an ill-advised phone call that almost destroyed him. Born Dimetrios Georgios Synodinos in Steubenville, Ohio, the Greek had been fond of gambling on horse racing and college football, achieving notoriety in the 1940s for betting against the apparently invincible Notre Dame and backing presidential underdog Harry Truman at 17-1 with a $10,000 bet.

He then had to curtail his activities in Vegas in the 50s and 60s when he gave a tip over the phone to someone looking for information about a football clash between the University of Utah and Utah State.

Having rebranded himself as an adviser on sports PR, he began what would eventually become a widely-syndicated column on gambling, educating the wider public about spreads, parlays and futures.

The Greek, and thus sportsbetting, finally achieved acceptance in 1974 when President Gerald Ford pardoned him for his Las Vegas indiscretion. Within two years he was on CBS’s flagship NFL Today show, offering subtle tips (advice on spreads was a no-no) to millions of viewers just as football was taking off in the States.

The Greek’s subsequent demise (rambling comments about black athletes and slavery) arrived in the late 80s, long after he became irrelevant. The sports betting industry he had helped create was running on towards the end zone without him.

During this past week, Major League Baseball miscalculated the esteem with which gambling is held among those who follow American sport.

An investigation was announced when reports emerged that New York Yankees star Alex Rodriguez had taken part in high-stakes illegal poker games in California in 2009.

A-Rod, as he’s more commonly known, is probably the most hated current baseball player in a sport which seems to spew out tempestuous oddballs every other season. He will make $31m (€21m) this year and is guaranteed another $143m (€100m) before his ludicrous contract runs out in six years.

Add in the steroid use before mandatory testing, his waning talent and the fact that Cameron Diaz is his current squeeze, it’s easy to see why fans mightn’t like him.

And yet, when baseball chiefs were forced to announce their investigation while A-Rod recovered from a knee operation, the fact that it involved gambling meant the PR battle was dead on arrival.

Alex Rodriguez had achieved the impossible. The American public, gamblers and non-gamblers, was on his side.

And Major League Baseball struck out.

This might sound like a tenuous segue (well it is) but I have to pay tribute to the real sporting gamble made by committed supporters of Cork City.

Their choice, 18 months ago, was either go out of existence or risk spending a couple of years resuscitating a historically hopeless cause: professional football in the country’s second city. They chose the latter.

This weekend I watched the 4-1 win over Shels online as I waited for Twitter updates on Monday’ s League Cup semi-final. The big prize is promotion but manager Tommy Dunne was right. A national final is a gift for the people who kept the club alive.

* Contact: [e-mail] Twitter: JohnWRiordan