Alex Karras, known to my generation more as Emmanuel Lewis’s
warmhearted pa on Webster than as a ferocious Lions
lineman, passed away earlier this week at 77. Deep in the
obituaries, if there at all, contained mention that Pete Rozelle
kicked Karras, and the “golden boy” Paul Hornung, out of the
National Football League for betting and obnoxious associations in
1963.
Had Pete Rose died this week instead of Alex Karras, the lead,
and much of the obituary that followed, would have fixated on
gambling. This despite Rose leaving a more indelible mark on
baseball than Karras left on football. Alas, the customs of
baseball and football are as alike as the neutral zone and the
strike zone, the former where balls go and the latter where strikes
do.
Americans place more wagers on professional football than on all
other sporting events combined. The appearance of handicappers on
pregame shows, the easy availability of parlay cards, and the
diversity of prop bets (“Will Rex Ryan still be the Head Coach of
the Jets Week 17 of the 2012 NFL Season?”) have through the years
advertised the ties between gambling and the gridiron.
Fantasy Football, best seen as a recovery program for degenerate
gamblers, distorts how one watches the game as grotesquely as
betting does. If you have observed a gambler clamor for a team to
kick a field goal rather than kneel out the clock, or a
rotisserie team owner scream at the quarterback to throw to an
obscure player, then you know how both bettors and fantasy
enthusiasts watch a different game than the rest of us.
Gamblers play a different game, too, which makes their presence
on the field so dangerous. While trailing against Army in 1920,
George Gipp, thought by some to be college football’s greatest
player, hurled a bomb when the situation called for a punt. “That
was gambling, absolute gambling,” a shocked, shocked Knute
Rockne later explained, “and proved to me that Gipp was a
gambler.”
But the previous year, Gipp made no secret of wagering when he
led Notre Dame to an improbable, if profitable, 12-9 conquest of
Army. “The victory was literally profitable to the Notre Dame
players who, collectively, had raised around $2,000 of their own
that they wagered against Army, whose players also put up the same
amount, in a winner-take-all bet, not uncommon among big-time
college teams of the era,” Jack Cavanaugh explained in The
Gipper. The largest chunk of the pot belonged to Gipp, who
attended the pool halls of South Bend as religiously as he avoided
its classrooms. If the pigskin martyr made a celluloid hero by
Ronald Reagan had ever really uttered the phrase, “Win one for the
Gipper,” he certainly meant a pool-hall hustle or a card game —
not a mere athletic contest.
Part of Karras’s bitterness over his suspension stemmed from the
league’s more lenient policy on gambling when it came to bosses.
Tim Mara, patriarch of the New York Giants, bought into the NFL
through profits earned as a bookie. Carol Rosenbloom, who owned the
Baltimore Colts and then the Los Angeles Rams, was an inveterate
gambler whose drowning sparked bookie-retribution conspiracy
theories. Art Rooney won a fortune picking horses before he went
all-in as founder of the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Do as we say, not as we do.
Far from a Pete Rose-pariah, Karras’s star rose after his
gambling suspension. He punched out a horse in Blazing
Saddles. He manned the Monday Night Football booth
with Howard Cosell for several seasons. He could be seen on Johnny
Carson’s couch, and alongside Charles Nelson Reilly and Richard
Dawson on Match Game, during the seventies. Karras’s
career took off after retirement.
In 1962, Alex Karras won the $100 bet on the Green Bay Packers
that lost him his job. But he didn’t lose much else. During his
suspension, he poured drinks at his controversial bar that
initially drew the NFL’s interest, wrestled professionally, and
defiantly named his son Alvin — Pete Rozelle’s given first name.
With his livelihood and sense of humor intact, the reinstated
Detroit Lions captain later informed a referee asking “Heads or
tails?” at midfield: “I’m sorry, sir. I’m not permitted to
gamble.”
Major League Baseball, which features no games of chance to
start its contests, proves less tolerant of its gamblers than the
National Football League does of its. If only Pete Rose, a
linebacker on the baseball diamond, had answered his true sports
calling, he too might have had eulogists depicting him as a person
as cuddly as Alex Karras’s television son.
There’s no crying in baseball. There’s no “Say it ain’t so, Art
Schlichter” in football.
