A LONG LINE OF BETTORS : Rose Case Is Just the Latest Example of Gambling by Sports Personalities

Every now and then in the days of vaudeville, a trouper would tell about the salesman who was known as the best tipper in town.

Seated in his favorite restaurant one night, the story went, the big tipper looked around for his usual waiter.

“Where’s Harry?” he asked.

“Harry isn’t here right now, Mr. Smith,” a new waiter said, smiling broadly. “You’re mine now, sir. I won you in a crap game this noon.”

The moral, one supposes, is that there’s a great deal of betting out there. And indeed there is. Most everybody bets. On something. Once in a while, at least.

Quite obviously, Pete Rose, the Cincinnati Reds’ manager whose betting habits have caught baseball Commissioner Bart Giamatti’s eye, isn’t America’s first gambler. He isn’t even the first betting man to manage in the big leagues. Hall of Famer Rogers Hornsby, among others, was a steadfast gambler, according to his friends, who have said that in the ‘20s and ‘30s Hornsby had credit lines with bookmakers in every city where he managed.

It has not been clearly shown, of course, that in the last couple of years, or even the last 10 or 20 years, Rose placed bets on his own team, or even on baseball games.

Rose denies it. And as his lawyers say, his accusers are themselves accused--in some cases convicted--lawbreakers.

What is clear, however, is that Rose is a gambler.

He is, the facts show, a high roller who learned long ago that the world is full of things to bet on, baseball or no.

Judging by his habits, he would seem to be one of the many gripped and dominated by the life of the betting man--by the illusions and delusions, by the thrill of the action, win or lose.

That’s a tough life. In contrast with, for instance, a weekend golfer--who limits his wagers to $1 or $5 a hole--the honest big-time gambler commonly loses everything in the end, if not well before the end.

In the history of gambling, it’s a familiar story. For hundreds--perhaps for thousands--of years, there have been individuals who bet everything they had on their hunches and perceptions.

Among the first to be gripped in a major way by the allure of all-out risk-taking were the 17th Century sailing-ship underwriters of Amsterdam.

The inventors of modern international banking, Holland was a major world power in those days, and the Dutch had more than 10,000 freighters at sea simultaneously. The ships were franchised by the Dutch syndicates that at first beat the odds so many times--on borrowed money, no doubt--that their businessmen became the globe’s wealthiest.

One of their best little investments was a business trip to New York, where they bought Manhattan.

Looking for a place to double their earnings, Dutch speculators, along the way, invented the stock market.

When the Dutch eventually lost their shirts, the center of the action shifted, first, to the stock market of London, where the British replaced the Dutch on top of world trade, and then New York, where in time the Americans took over.

By the 1920s, an American baseball commissioner who had a reputation for smashing the gamblers of sport was among the many speculators caught up in the action of the bulls and the bears.

This was Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the enforcer himself.

“Landis gambled heavily in the stock market, and lost heavily,” the late Red Smith, wrote some years ago in the New York Times.

A distinction can be made, to be sure, between stock markets and Nevada casinos, but it isn’t as significant, surely, as the distinction between plunging on the stock market and shoveling coal or repairing shoes.

Above all, the history of gambling confirms that there is almost always a place for anyone willing to take financial chances. There’s room for everyone who seeks to risk assets for opportunity--the opportunity to get ahead, in either the market or other gaming.

Count the ways:

--Bingo has been a fact of life for many years in many churches.

--Betting on horse races was already a worldwide tradition when it amused George Washington and his friends in the 18th Century.

--Since the development of organized baseball in the 19th Century, groups of gamblers have sat in ballparks, betting on the next pitch, the next hit, the next run.

--Gambling has been a crime for some 200 years in America, strictly illegal everywhere--except in the states that have pronounced it legal. For one thing, those purchasing legal lottery tickets helped finance the American Revolution, although most proceeds went to home-side promoters, and very little to the soldiers in the field.

--Today’s lotteries make money for 29 states, although sometimes not as much as the promoters promised. Among the many gamblers holding lottery tickets these days are some who have been critical of Pete Rose.

--Before, during and after the Landis cleanup era, several club owners, including George Steinbrenner, have raced horses, and bet on them as well. While entertaining his players at a casino one day, Steinbrenner, according to Red Smith, instructed them to bet big to show that they were Yankees.

--John McGraw, one of the most famous of baseball’s old-time managers, was a part owner of a race track in partnership with his boss, Charles Stoneham, owner of the New York Giants, who also had another partner: Arnold Rothstein, one of the most famous gamblers of his era.

--River-boat gambling, having amused generations of 19th Century plungers, will resume in Iowa next year, when poker also returns to Deadwood, S.D.

Pete Rose ain’t alone.

UNATTENDED CORRUPTION

The one great fear among sports administrators is that in time, betting will lead to throwing games.

On this subject, however, the history of gambling is less than instructive.

At the end of the World War I, for instance, it took two comic-opera betting rings to get the ball rolling in the nation’s biggest game-throwing scandal.

Both groups claimed to have the financial support of the New York gambler, Rothstein, who might have supported neither, and both made a few bucks, presumably, backing the underdog Cincinnati Reds against the talented Chicago White Sox in the 1919 World Series.

A general perception that eight Chicago players were bribed, or were promised bribes, to fix the Series--with Rothstein’s money as provided by at least one of the two betting groups--has made the 1919 Sox everlastingly infamous as the Black Sox.

Seventy years later, however, the facts remain elusive. To this day, no one knows for sure what happened that October. Two or three historians insist that there was no fix.

But three misconceptions have lasted:

--The first is an impression that the White Sox were found guilty of throwing the Series and suspended from baseball.

Actually, after a long trial in Chicago, the jury, in one industrious afternoon, unanimously acquitted Shoeless Joe Jackson and the other seven.

Even so, they were all banished from baseball--hours later--by a commissioner who said, simply, that he was acting “regardless of the verdict of juries.”

This was Landis, who on taking office had promised publicly--before the trial began--that the Black Sox would never play again.

--A second misconception is that baseball has always been clean and wholesome, except for the Black Sox, who were somehow unique.

Actually, fixes, attempted fixes, and rumors of fixes accompanied the game from its beginnings more than a century ago.

“Bribery became a common weapon,” historian Eliot Asinof writes of that period.

A turning point for the worse occurred in 1917, when the government closed all U.S. race tracks, but no ballparks, for the duration of the war, leaving nothing but baseball for the gamblers and bookmakers to play with.

Author of “Eight Men Out,” the story of the Black Sox, Asinof found that in the cities of the big leagues, months before the Black Sox Series, “Gamblers openly boasted that they could control ballgames as readily as they controlled horse races.”

On some ballclubs, Asinof, writing in 1963, added, “(Gamblers) went so far as to put a few choice players on weekly salaries. . . .

“Bribed players learned to become adept at throwing games.

“A shortstop might twist his body to make a simple stop seem like a brilliant one, then make his throw a split second too late to get the runner. An outfielder might desperately dive for (a fly ball), only to see it skid by him. . . .

“Such maneuvers were almost impossible for the baseball fan--even for the most sophisticated sportswriter--to detect.”

In 1917, moreover, two years before the Black Sox Series, the Chicago players themselves used their own money to fix a doubleheader. At the request of a club employee never identified, they were openly assessed $45 apiece to reward two Detroit pitchers--although they all knew it wasn’t a reward but a bribe--to lose a critical series to the pennant-contending White Sox.

Fittingly, considering the times, the Chicago grand jury that broke the Black Sox story had originally been convened to investigate another fix, or attempted fix, one involving the Cubs and Philadelphia Phillies.

The two Chicago cases were “the culmination of at least 20 years of unattended (baseball) corruption,” Richard C. Crepeau concluded in a 1980 book, “Baseball.”

That was the atmosphere in which 1919 baseball was played. That’s what it was like in the big leagues when the Black Sox, at the very least, secretly discussed throwing games--the catchall crime for which Landis banned most of them.

As the 1919 World Series approached, wrote Asinof: “It never entered their minds that they couldn’t get away with a (fix). There was almost no discussion of its dangers.”

Interviewed many years later, Black Sox first baseman Chick Gandil said: “(Ballplayers) all mixed with gamblers (in those days), and most of them (the players) were honest.”

--The third misperception exists in the area of finance. Since the Black Sox, as pampered ballplayers, made good money playing a game, why would they even think of taking a bribe to throw a Series?

This question would be valid today, perhaps, in an era when .250 hitters make $1 million to $2 million a year.

But during the long period before 1975, when organized baseball enslaved the players with a perpetual reserve clause, it was the club owners who made most of the money.

Black Sox owner Charles Comiskey was particularly stingy, his players said, and they were increasingly bitter about it.

“(Other American League) players justified the Black Sox’s action because of the low salaries paid by Comiskey,” Crepeau found in researching his baseball book.

Writing in American History Illustrated years later, Dean Smith noted that Shoeless Joe Jackson, the Black Sox outfielder who was en route to the Hall of Fame before the scandal, was among Comiskey’s absurdly underpaid, even when the changing value of the dollar is figured in.

“The great Jackson, batting .351 for the season, earned only $6,000,” Smith said. “(That compares) with the $10,000 Cincinnati paid its leading hitter, Edd Roush,” who batted .321 in 1919--and .214 in the tainted 1919 Series, in which Jackson batted .375.

Black Sox pitcher Eddie Cicotte’s 1919 salary, Smith reported, “was about $5,000--and he a 29-game winner with an ERA of 1.82.”

Cicotte, then in his 13th season as one of baseball’s finest pitchers, led the league that year in games won as well as winning percentage, .806; complete games, 29, and innings pitched, 306 2/3.

If Cicotte found a $10,000 bribe irresistible, it could have been because he realized he could double his annual salary in a couple of afternoons.

These days, by that standard, it would take an improbable $4 million to fix a good pitcher.

The baseball Establishment in the Black Sox era, and for years afterward, was continually plagued by its fears. Decade after decade, it feared and fought against two major reforms, free agency and arbitration--the two forces that have pushed baseball’s salaries into line with the personal incomes of 1989 entertainers in other fields.

Somewhat ironically, the legacy of these two changes is that a fix today is almost certainly out of the question.

The legacy of the Black Sox was equally surprising. Despite the complaints about impure role models for kids--complaints that are being heard again today in the Pete Rose case--baseball attendance and receipts rose steadily in the early ‘20s. And thereafter.

One lesson is that the role-model issue has been drastically overdrawn, some baseball critics say.

Others point out that, in the 1980s, baseball’s attendance and receipts have soared higher than ever--in part spurred by the free agents who have helped balance the competition.

The game has prospered, they say, in spite of itself--and heedless of the Black Sox.

GAMBLERS RAMPANT

That gambling is injurious to human beings has been documented over the years by many research groups.

Some say alcohol is gambling’s only rival in the damage it does to compulsive addicts and their families, friends and associates.

Indeed, as a vice, gambling is so prevalent that it has triggered one sports scandal after another in this century.

Some of the more celebrated incidents:

--National Football League Commissioner Bert Bell suspended a New York Giant player, Merle Hapes, for not reporting a bribe offer before the 1946 championship game, in which the the Chicago Bears were a 24-14 winner. Another Giant involved, Frank Filchock, was allowed to play that day, but Hapes never played again.

--Seventeen years later, Commissioner Pete Rozelle suspended two prominent NFL athletes, Paul Hornung of Green Bay and Alex Karras of Detroit, for one year after determining that they had bet on their own and other NFL teams. Five other Detroit players were fined $2,000 each for betting on an NFL game in which they had not played, and the Detroit club was fined $4,000 for not promptly reporting some of the incidents.

At the same time, Rozelle announced that he was looking into allegations that Carroll Rosenbloom, who then owned the Baltimore Colts, had bet on NFL games. Rosenbloom, later a Ram owner, was eventually cleared.

Karras angrily protested his suspension, but Hornung, who said he had grown up at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Ky., freely admitted he had bet.

--Rozelle subsequently announced an indefinite suspension for Joe Namath of the New York Jets, the Hall of Fame quarterback, for associating with gamblers at his New York night club, Bachelors III. Namath, who decided to sell out, was reinstated without missing any games.

--Less than a week before Super Bowl IV, in which the Kansas City Chiefs, with Len Dawson at quarterback, routed the Minnesota Vikings, Dawson was named as a player who might be questioned in a grand jury investigation of gambling in Detroit.

At a news conference in New Orleans, site of the Super Bowl that winter, Dawson said he was a casual acquaintance of one of those arrested in Detroit, restaurateur Donald Dawson, but denied all gambling allegations and implications. He was promptly cleared. The Dawsons are unrelated. The NFL criticized as irresponsible the radio station that had brought in the name of the Kansas City quarterback.

--Hall of Famers Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker were among the baseball players who bet on games in which they were involved--as either winners or losers--earlier in the century, when they got away with it because Landis wanted to keep the spotlight on the Black Sox as baseball’s only bad guys.

According to Cobb’s biographer, Charles C. Alexander, Cobb told Landis that he had bet on baseball games. Then, and in a subsequent letter to a friend, Cobb also admitted that he had located a bookmaker for a syndicate of four ballplayers, including Speaker, who placed bets totaling $1,800 on the Detroit Tigers.

At the time, Speaker managed the Cleveland Indians, who allegedly threw the game to Cobb’s team, the Tigers, later managed by Cobb. In the late fall of 1926, the baseball Establishment allowed Cobb and Speaker to quietly resign.

Others in baseball could only wonder, as they still wonder, about those two sudden, nearly simultaneous resignations by two of the most famous baseball people of the century.

Several months subsequently, the Establishment quietly arranged for Cobb and Speaker to play for two other teams in 1927.

Meanwhile, Landis and other baseball leaders continued to belittle the Black Sox, particularly Shoeless Joe Jackson.

--Hal Chase, a National League first baseman in 1905-1919, was called the busiest gambler of his time in baseball. In 1917, Chase was investigated by the league on charges that he had bribed his own teammate, Cincinnati pitcher Jimmy Ring. Their manager, Christy Mathewson, believed Ring’s testimony, disbelieved Chase’s, and, when the league surprised the Reds by clearing Chase, traded him to New York.

“Mathewson was disgusted,” historian Asinof writes, noting that Chase never waited “for gamblers to approach him before selling out a ballgame. He’d arrange it himself and bet accordingly.”

In 1919, Chase was “indicted as a fixer (after) cheating in games for years,” Crepeau reported in his history book.

Why did Landis clear Chase?

Asinof, Crepeau and other writers of that period have concluded that Landis conspired with the owners of the clubs to bolster public confidence in baseball by pretending that the Black Sox were the only criminal element in a sport that was otherwise clean.

--After Happy Chandler succeeded Landis as commissioner, he suspended Manager Leo Durocher of the Brooklyn Dodgers for a year on grounds that he had “not measured up to (baseball) standards.”

Durocher said recently that he wasn’t banned for gambling but for “associating with undesirable characters.” He also suggested: “That wouldn’t stand up in court today. Times have changed.”

--During Bowie Kuhn’s term as commissioner, Detroit pitcher Denny McLain was suspended for six months in 1970 after a 40-minute interview in which he told Kuhn that he had wagered on basketball, hockey and football games. McLain said baseball was too tough to bet accurately.

--In basketball, point-shaving is the fix that has trapped the largest number of college players, 47 in one 1961 scandal. The 47 played for more than 20 college basketball teams.

The art in point shaving is to win by two points when your team is favored by five, or to lose by 10 when the betting line says four, and it has been tried so often that nobody knows how many basketball games have been fixed.

One of the gamblers jailed in 1961 said he had fixed more than 100 games. Even he had lost count. The players all escaped jail terms by testifying against the gamblers.

--A pro basketball player, Jack Molinas of the Ft. Wayne Pistons, was expelled from the National Basketball Assn. without a hearing in 1954 after admitting that he won $400 on bets he placed on his own team.

Then Molinas went to law school and sued the league after convincing himself that the NBA was in violation of antitrust laws.

But he couldn’t convince the judge.

SCHLICHTER PARALLEL

In the case that has some resemblance to Rose’s, former quarterback Art Schlichter blew $1,609,000 on bets he made as a compulsive gambler at Ohio State University in 1980-81 and in his rookie season with the old Baltimore Colts, who selected him in the first round of the NFL draft in 1982.

Son of a prosperous farmer in Ohio, Schlichter missed the 1983 season when he was suspended by Rozelle for gambling. Reinstated in 1984, he was cut a year later, when the Colts said they had overrated him as a quarterback. At 29 he is now out of football.

Schlichter’s gambling problem has brought him back into the news once or twice, but not lately.

Schlichter apparently had an appetite for $5,000 bets. He once reportedly lost $30,000 on a basketball game at a time when he couldn’t afford to buy a gallon of gasoline.

After studying him and his gambling background, Schlichter’s doctors made these points:

--His problem is rooted in the Ohio horse-racing country.

--At the race tracks near the farm where he was born and lived as a boy, “he learned that betting is respectable, that everybody bets.”

--His mother and other relatives owned race horses, and so did one or two of his football coaches at Ohio State.

Confirming that Schlichter’s case is typical, Dr. Robert L. Custer, a Washington psychiatrist who treats both alcoholics and gamblers, said: “More than 95% of the persons who have had treatment as compulsive gamblers were introduced to gambling as teen-agers.”

Custer and other psychiatrists have developed a compulsive gamblers’ profile:

--They are immature individuals who gamble to get a thrill that will mask their unreasonably low self-esteem.

--Like workaholics, they have restless, assertive, highly competitive personalities.

--Like kleptomaniacs and pyromaniacs, they are impulsive.

--They also tend to be, in their own way, moral. Thus, if they’re in sports, compulsive gamblers don’t bet against their own teams.

Doug Conner of the Times library assisted with research for this story.

ROSE SHOVES UMPIRE

Manager Pete Rose and umpire Joe West shove each other after the Reds lose, 5-2. Page 3.