Jimmy The Greek was the first to bring sports betting to the big time

[stevo]

Behind the Bets: All The Greek to me

Jimmy The Greek was the first to bring sports betting to the big time

By Chad Millman
ESPN The Magazine

I had a Sunday ritual when I was growing up in the Chicago burbs in the 1980s, at the height of my Bears fandom.

At 11 a.m. I'd plop down in the corner of the leather sectional in my family's living room and turn on "The Mike Ditka Show." It was hosted by Johnny Morris, who had been a Bears receiver when they won the 1963 NFL title.



Honestly, the show was horrible. Looking back now it may have been what inspired a thousand "Wayne's World" sketches. I watched it because I wanted to build anticipation for the sweetest part of the day, which was "The NFL Today."



The chemistry on that set -- between Brent Musburger, Phyllis George, Irv Cross and Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder -- was combustible. Literally. It once led to a barroom brawl between Jimmy and Brent after a show because The Greek was miffed about his lack of airtime. The story fed New York tabloids for a week. And it's also how "The Legend of Jimmy The Greek," the new ESPN 30 for 30 doc directed by Fritz Mitchell that premieres at 8 p.m. ET on Tuesday, Nov. 10, opens.



Because of the spectacular way The Greek flamed out in 1988 -- making racist comments about black athletes that led to him getting canned by CBS -- it's easy to forget the role he played in, as Frank Deford says in the documentary, lifting "sports gambling out of the corners and into middle-class America."



Back then, "The NFL Today" was a pregame show juggernaut. It had no competition. And The Greek, who signed on with CBS in 1976, was the show's wild card. He always had a gold chain dangling from his neck that lay over his shirt and tie and got tangled with his mike. The skin on his face folded over at his nose and his jowls were like a bulldog's, which made the dimple in his chin look as deep as a canyon. Watching him was kind of like watching Paula Abdul on "American Idol": You had no idea what he was going to say, which made it impossible to turn away. Maybe he was going to rip Phyllis George. Or maybe he'd say Howard Cosell was going to retire. It didn't matter how outrageous the statement, he was lauded for it.

But just listening to his gravelly tone made you feel like you were connected to the underworld, like he was your guy on the inside. He never openly talked about betting on the show -- the NFL forbade it -- but together, Musburger and The Greek played a great game of disguising what his true purpose was: to tell fans who was going to cover and who wasn't. The two of them constantly laid surreptitious hints about how many "points" The Greek liked one team to win over another or how "well" The Greek did the weekend before. It was wink-and-a-nod television, the kind that made viewers feel like they were in on the joke. It helped him connect with the audience.

The Greek didn't make his name as a player or a coach or even a grizzled, longtime NFL print guy. He was a famous gambler-turned-syndicated linemaker, a precursor to Danny Sheridan. When people talk about the Jets being 17-point underdogs to the Colts in Super Bowl III, they are quoting the line The Greek made that was printed in hundreds of newspapers. "It's what made me famous," he says in the 30 for 30 doc.

But what made him The Greek was how well he gambled. He was doing that before he knew how to do just about anything else, when he was only 13 years old. Part of his habit was born from tragedy. When The Greek was 10, his mother and aunt were murdered by his deranged uncle, who was upset The Greek's aunt had left him. With his father constantly working, young Jimmy trolled the dozen gambling halls in his hometown of Steubenville, Ohio, on the banks of the Ohio River. He was so busy running the numbers he quit school as a 10th-grader. And when he won more than a thousand bucks off an $80 bet on Cavalcade in the 1934 Kentucky Derby, a bettor's life was born.

In 1943, he earned his nickname and his first dose of fame when gossip columnist Walter Winchell called him "Jimmy The Greek" in a story about Jimmy winning $62,000 by betting against Notre Dame. Five years later, The Greek won $170,000 by betting on Harry Truman to beat the heavily favored Thomas Dewey. His theory: Women hate guys with mustaches, and Dewey had a mustache.



His life, which ended in Las Vegas in 1996 at age 76, was fascinating, complicated and compromised. All of this comes across in the "The Legend of Jimmy The Greek."

But mostly, he was a gambler, so every fortune was followed by a fall. That was just as true when he was canned. "The black is the better athlete," The Greek had said to a reporter. "And he practices to be the better athlete, and he's bred to be the better athlete because this goes way back to the slave period. The slave owner would breed this big black with this big black woman so he could have a big black kid. That's where it all started."



In saying this, he made a bet the rest of the country would respond the way it always did when he said something outrageous: The people would laugh, they'd agree, they'd applaud. He was their guy on the inside, after all. He knew the truth.

Of course he got this one wrong. And he lost big.



Chad Millman is a senior deputy editor at ESPN The Magazine and once wrote a book called "The Odds." His column takes a close look at the culture surrounding the bet.

Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder was the first to bring sports betting to the big time - ESPN

[Mr Falcone]

Fucking Political Correctiness.......He fell off the Planet after that

[Juice]

Scotty Schettler and I talked about this very thing when I met him a couple of years ago. He has a thread in here stating JTG as the number one guy because he made it all glamourous all of a sudden and was very adamant about JTG's contibution to it all. He gave me a rather fascinating oral history of it all from his point of view. He can flat out tell a story.

I watched that show in Chicago also. I LOVED THAT SHOW. My dad played on the 63 Bears team with Johnny. He was at my dads wedding and everything. He and Jeannie are cool. They did the sports on channel 2 for years. Bill Curtis of A and E fame plus all kinds of national commercial you see today, was the anchorman.

WOW, I did not know Chad was from Chicago. To think, he only stood in my window at the Stardust for like about 6 months and wrote the book, The ODDS, right in front of me you might as well say.

A guy I have decided should write my book, Sportsbook stories from the 90's. From degenrate to mature degenrate. A book that includes the Vegas Crusade Stories and feauture Senator John McCain himself. Dont look now. Sportsbook stories from the 90's. From degenrate to mature degenrate. - Sportsbetting Forums | Offshore Sportsbooks & Online Sports Picks


A guyI have been trying to get in contact with him for like a month now.

If any of you can help me in this endevour, I would appreciate it. Thanks.

[indio]

This article has more holes than swiss cheese.

Jimmy the greek made those comments "off the record" with someone at a bar, when he found out he was quoted, he told a friend "your talking to a dead man walking". He knew how the statement would get scrutinized. He didn't think people would laugh like Millman writes. It was nothing but typical cheap shot journalism and Snyder knew the leftist weasels who dominate the newspapers would make a huge deal about it. These hypocrites constantly invoke darwinism as gospel, yet considered Snyders comments racist? what a joke.

Also, Jimmy the Greek was never considered a big or successful gambler in the community of actual gamblers. He was a personality, and he knew how to run with it. This at least were the opinions of real gamblers like Lefty Rosenthal, at least that's what he says.

I'm just basing my opinions on interviews I've seen with Snyder himself, Rosenthal, and a few others.

[howid]

Also, Jimmy the Greek was never considered a big or successful gambler in the community of actual gamblers.

i've read how he would handicap horses. he'd be in the clubhouse and ask the opinion of those he respected and ''handicap the handicappers.''

for sure way more a personality than a gambler.

[pokerjoe]

Originally Posted by Juice

Scotty Schettler and I talked about this very thing when I met him a couple of years ago. He has a thread in here stating JTG as the number one guy because he made it all glamourous all of a sudden and was very adamant about JTG's contibution to it all. He gave me a rather fascinating oral history of it all from his point of view. He can flat out tell a story.

I watched that show in Chicago also. I LOVED THAT SHOW. My dad played on the 63 Bears team with Johnny. He was at my dads wedding and everything. He and Jeannie are cool. They did the sports on channel 2 for years. Bill Curtis of A and E fame plus all kinds of national commercial you see today, was the anchorman.

WOW, I did not know Chad was from Chicago. To think, he only stood in my window at the Stardust for like about 6 months and wrote the book, The ODDS, right in front of me you might as well say.

A guy I have decided should write my book, Sportsbook stories from the 90's. From degenrate to mature degenrate. A book that includes the Vegas Crusade Stories and feauture Senator John McCain himself. Dont look now. Sportsbook stories from the 90's. From degenrate to mature degenrate. - Sportsbetting Forums | Offshore Sportsbooks & Online Sports Picks


A guyI have been trying to get in contact with him for like a month now.

If any of you can help me in this endevour, I would appreciate it. Thanks.

Great post.

[Crony]

Always thought that black people have more fast twitch muscle fiber than white people.

As for why, not really sure. Could be natural selection in Africa. Could be a lot of things. The Greek's theory does not seem that far fetched or racist to me.

[clevfan]

Jimmy fired, Jay-Z embraced for similar stuff

By PHIL MUSHNICK
NY POST
Last Updated: 8:13 AM, November 9, 2009



For those inclined to consider collisions of circumstance, here's a good one: Tomorrow at 8 p.m., ESPN's "30 For 30" documentary series presents filmmaker Fritz Mitchell's superb one-hour take on the rise and colossal fall of Jimmy The Greek Snyder.

Naturally, the piece spends more than a few minutes on the events of January 1988, starting with the beginning of Snyder's end, when a local TV crew found him in D.C.'s renowned restaurant/hangout, Duke Zeibert's, and asked questions that Snyder was ill-suited to answer.

To know The Greek -- and I knew him well -- was to know that a) he enjoyed attention, and b) he was incapable of delicate answers to any questions. And these questions, in conjunction with Martin Luther King Day, were about race, specifically why blacks are superior athletes.

Snyder provided a fractured lecture on U.S. history, genetics and the breeding of slaves, all roughly spoken. That's how he spoke about horses, pastry and people. And although some answers sounded as if he admired African-American athletes and some sounded resentful, it all came out the same: Ugly. He sounded like a racist.

But what could anyone expect? For crying out loud, he was from river-town Steubenville, Ohio; he was a kid when his uncle shot and killed his immigrant mother. Who did CBS think was in its employ, Adlai Stevenson? His 12 years as a kibitzer/tout on CBS's NFL pregame show were based on being a street guy with a big mouth and lots of opinions.

And so CBS fired him because he was a street guy with a big mouth and lots of opinions.

Abandoned as a pariah, The Greek's career -- TV, movies, commercial gigs -- was over. He'd gone bust before, lots of times, but he wasn't going to rally from a racist rap.

Demetrious Georgios Synodinos, born to wrong-side Steubenville, was buried there in 1996.

Back to colliding circumstances. For the last few weeks we've been told that Jay-Z's "Empire State of Mind," has become the Yankees' anthem. Invited by MLB to perform a sanitized version in Yankee Stadium and on Fox before the World Series, Jay-Z has been embraced by the NBA (he's a part-owner of the Nets), Mayor Bloomberg, Al Sharpton, the pandering media and millions of mostly young Americans.

Yet, his stock in trade is the promotion of every run-backwards, self-enslaving stereotype of blacks, from violent crime to the degradation of women, from drugs, call-out trash-talk and endless boasting, to a fixation on wild spending on cars and jewelry.

The lyrics to Empire State of Mind include: "Catch me at the X with OG [Original Gangsta] at a Yankee game. S--t, I made the Yankee hat more famous than a Yankee can. You know I bleed blue, but I ain't a Crip, though. But I got a gang of niggas walkin' with my clique."

Many of his raps and songs include worse, far worse.

Twenty-one years ago, Jimmy The Greek applied a stain to himself that CBS determined he could not wash away or diminish. He was fired because he sounded disrespectful of black Americans. And we'll have none of that.

*

[nino brown]

he was awesome in cannonball run.

[clevfan]

A 'Greek' legend made and unmade

By Kevin McDonough
November 10, 2009 10:11 AM

The sports documentary series "30 for 30" (8 p.m., ESPN) recalls a lost media world and a larger-than-life American with "The Legend of Jimmy the Greek." A gambler from an early age, Jimmy Snyder popularized sports betting with his syndicated column and his appearances on the CBS pre-game Sunday series "The NFL Today." Broadcast before cable or the Internet, the show had a huge audience who followed "The Greek"'s picks for the week.

"NFL Today" colleagues Brent Musberger, Phyllis George and Irv Cross recall his temper and high-maintenance personality. The film's director worked as a researcher for the program and was given total access to its veterans and fans, including then CBS news anchor Dan Rather.

George recalls tales of his crude sexism, a memory tempered by her awareness that Snyder had lost three children to cystic fibrosis. So she understood and forgave his anger. A man who gained and lost fortunes several times over, Snyder lost his mother to a bullet when he was 10 years old.

His tale ends in catastrophe. A local camera crew caught Snyder on tape making awkward remarks about centuries of breeding being responsible for the natural superiority of black athletes. Castigated as a racist, Jimmy died a broken man. To many, his remarks seemed more of a sign of being out of touch, uneducated and over the hill than truly hateful.

Rather reflects on the tragedy of Synder's exile from network television for an avoidable mishap. When he does, it's hard not to wonder if Rather is really talking about himself.