“If you’d put me in a phone booth with the five smartest people in the world, it would’ve been 3 1/2, 4 tops,” Roxy explains. But it is not the point of The Line to be smart about football. The of The Line is to be smart about the citizens betting football, and especially for the Super Bowl, The Line is dealing with a hugely depressed cumulative intelligence level.
This is because the Super Bowl has become a daytime version of New Year’s Eve, overrun by innocents at play. Americans, otherwise as licit as they are sanctimonious, buy bets on the Super Bowl shamelessly, in the same prescriptive holiday spirit as they purchase turkey at Thanksgiving or roses on Valentine’s Day.
Roxy and the bookies his firm serves refer, gently, to this amateur America as The Public-a giddy bunch, quite apart from the pros, The Sophisticates. It is, however, largely thanks to The Public that $40 million will be bet on the Super Bowl in Nevada, where it is legal, and, Roxy estimates, pulling expert evidence out of his desk, a hundred times that illegally. Four billion. Roxy is not only the heir to Jimmy the Greek; but he is also sort of a national spokesperson for sports betting-rather like a Gloria Steinem or a Charlton Heston in his field-at a time when sports betting is very definitely a growth industry. In Nevada, it’s up 500 percent in the last decade, reaching maybe $40 billion to $50 billion nationwide, and it won’t go away because it’s all TV-driven-more games, more bets. It attracts a high-demographic young male clientele and is rationally and humanely a far more defensible source of state revenue than are the lotteries, which prey on the poor and the ignorant.
‘“The wonderful thing about sports betting,” Roxy says, “is that if you win, you know you’re an expert, but if you lose, it’s because everybody saw somebody fumble on TV.”
Roxy explains this in Vegas, garbed in the following ensemble: button-down oxford, rep tie, tweed-bag coat. There is no pinky ring or chest rug. In fact, with his mousey spectacles, sandy hair and rosy cheeks, Roxy resembles the Disneyesque Rick Moranis-Honey, I made the line!-and he speaks with considerably more wit and articulation than the fatuous NFL commissioner and other professional scolds who decry sports betting.
Nevertheless, although Roxy does not call up the vision of what even The Times of London has labeled “the king of Las Vegas oddsmakers,” he was himself A Sophisticate once. This came after a very normal middle-class upbringing-his sport was swimming-and a brief managerial tour at the helm of some Roy Rogers restaurants that his father, a successful businessman, owned.
But Roxy, who answered then to the very hoity-toity name of Michael Roxborough, did not enjoy “conventional work,” and so, in ‘76, age 24, he came to Vegas to be a full-time Sophisticate. “The only thing was, I found out I had to work 60 hours a week at gambling to escape the conventional work of 40 hours a week.” Roxy did, however, develop one niche, an ability to win at betting total runs scored, over-and-under baseball. At least in this one arcane domain, Roxy was ahead of the line.
Or really, for this brief period around 1980, it was a soft Vegas line. As with all lineage, The Line line had run out. It had started nationally after the war as the Minneapolis Line, then moved to Vegas when The Greek opened his Hollywood Book there in the ’50s. As The Greek devoted more of his energies to becoming America’s celebrity gambler, Bob Martin, known as The Man, put out the line, but the Man ran afoul of the law, and there was an interregnum.
About this time, to help a book up in Reno, Roxy started running baseball totals, which was his specialite, as we know. Slowly, then, his work as an oddsmaker expanded, until, almost by default, he found himself putting out The Line on his kitchen table. Now, he is officially the president of Las Vegas Sports Consultants, with a staff of seven and an arsenal of faxes and computers, supplying the American numbers to legal books from Europe to Australia-as well as to 60 newspapers.
At Community College of Southern Nevada, Roxy taught a credit course in Race and Sports Book Management, and his textbook will advise you in the matters of steam, vigorish, middles, the dime line, moving cub totals and why all Ivy League games are circled. You wanna buy a half-point? Book to faces? Roxy’s textbook will explain that to you, too.
Roxy’s mother, a matron disgraced, used to tell her friends only, gingerly, that her dear son “worked in the West,” but since he has been on TV, Dan Rather even, she proudly identifies his vocation and address. Her son Roxy is The Line in the U. S. of A.; Roxy, the preppy Vegasian, is sports gambling in our time. No wonder “Bugsy” is such a box-office disappointment.
Also: take the points, Sunday. Roxy figures The Sophisticates will, once The Public has distorted his line.
