OPINION:
The Super Bowl is the Super Bowl for bettors and bookies alike. For bettors, it’s the last chance of the football season to get it right if you’ve been losing. Because of that, if you’re the bookie, the stakes are higher than ever to protect your book.
Nobody knew that more than legendary Las Vegas bookmaker Art Manteris, who for 40 years ran the largest Las Vegas sportsbooks in Caesars, the Stardust and the Hilton. He took bets from gangsters, celebrities, sports legends and icons of industry — like a million-dollar bet from Vegas resort owner Kirk Kerkorian on the 1995 Super Bowl between the San Francisco 49ers and San Diego Chargers.
“Million-dollar Super Bowl bets are still a highlight to be sure,” Manteris said — even when he faced the prospect of a Super Bowl beatdown for his book.
“Scott Norwood’s missed field goal [in Super Bowl XXV between the New York Giants and the Buffalo Bills] for the Bills still causes me nightmares,” said Manteris, who retired in 2021.
The bookmaker, who was inducted into the Sports Betting Hall of Fame in 2019, is telling the stories of the big bets, the big moments and the big figures he encountered over his career as a Vegas bookmaker in a new book called “The Bookie — Inside the High-Stakes World of Sports Betting: A Legendary Bookmaker’s Tale of Gangsters, Celebrities and the Art of the Game” with co-author Matt Birkbeck.
In today’s world of legalized sports betting and the pressures and scandals that have come with it, “The Bookie” is an entertaining education that is a must-read for everyone with a passion for sports — even those who don’t wager. There are tales of Donald Trump, Mike Tyson and many others who were part of the world of “The Bookie.”
Sports betting scandals are dominating the news these days with the advent of legalized sports betting. Manteris and fellow Vegas bookmaking legend Roxy Roxborough were on the brink of introducing legalized sports betting nearly 30 years before the Supreme Court ruled in 2018 that the 1992 Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act was unconstitutional, opening the door for legalized sports betting nationwide.
They had a plan for horse racing tracks to begin taking sports bets, including Laurel Park in Maryland, before PAPSA became federal law.
“If things had gone our way in 1991, legalized sports betting would have expanded at race tracks across the country and racing in general would have been saved and the offshore [betting] industry may never have taken root,” Manteris said. “Instead, one big offshore operator told me recently that ‘PAPSA made me a rich man.’”
Manteris offers a cautionary tale about the way legalized sports betting has unfolded – particularly the marriage that has taken place between betting and the sports leagues. He was taking bets on the Floyd Mayweather-Manny Pacquiao fight when he got inside information that Pacquiao was hurt.
“There had been so many times in my career that I’d received calls like that and rarely were they credible tips,” he wrote. “But to tell me Pacquaio was ‘not right’ felt like a gigantic warning on a gigantic event with gigantic repercussions.
“My options were clear,” he wrote. “I could either protect my book and change the odds and say nothing or say something publicly with the expectation that the fight would be postponed and bettors would get a fair shake. I protected my book.
“It was then that I realized that I never should have been promoting fights while also booking the same event,” Manteris said. “It was an epiphany, and lesson I will never forget. There must be a clear separation between gambling on sports and participation in sports. The leagues used to agree, but today, that line is not only blurred, it is nonexistent.”
He’s had to shut down famous athlete bettors such as golfer Phil Mickelson and hockey player Jaromir Jagr. Mickelson had entered into a betting syndicate with Carl Icahn and Billy Walters, maybe the most successful sports bettor bookmakers have ever seen. They came up with a system that gave them early access to odds, which put the Hilton sports book at risk. Manteris had to go to Hilton Chairman Barron Hilton to convince him that the group was affecting outcomes.
“Mr. Hilton quashed it immediately, no questions asked,” Manteris wrote. “I had to cut off Mickelson.”
Jagr was a different story – hardly the sophisticated bettor Mickelson was. Jagr didn’t bet on hockey, but he did bet on every other sport, losing big and often.
“Jagr was so bad at sports betting, we actually felt guilty and had to put the brakes on him,” he said. “I didn’t do that for a lot, but I did for Jagr.”
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