The nation . robe, horse-race bookmaking accounts for only42 per cent of a bookies the play on boxing hasdropped through the years a cham-pionship bout still draws big addition, there is the big play inbaseball (30 per cent) and the lesserbut still heavy play in football andbasketball. In the fall, during itsrelatively brief season, football is agold mine for the books. A graphicexample was the betting feveraroused last fall by the NationalFootball League championship play-off between the New York Giantsand the Baltimore Colts. These twoclosely matched teams stirred upt
The nation . robe, horse-race bookmaking accounts for only42 per cent of a bookies the play on boxing hasdropped through the years a cham-pionship bout still draws big addition, there is the big play inbaseball (30 per cent) and the lesserbut still heavy play in football andbasketball. In the fall, during itsrelatively brief season, football is agold mine for the books. A graphicexample was the betting feveraroused last fall by the NationalFootball League championship play-off between the New York Giantsand the Baltimore Colts. These twoclosely matched teams stirred uptheir partisans and lured the gam-blers: the result was a flow of wagersthat is probably unprecedented fora single event. Roger Kahn, sportseditor of Newsweek, quoted a veter-an bookie as estimating that acrossthe nation at least $100 million wasriding on the outcome of this onegame. Once one begins to. thinkabout what such figures mean, onceone begins to see the logic behindthe colossal betting estimates, one. 283 begins to get some idea of the in-credible size of the reservoir of gam-bling cash that finances the under-world of New York. Yet even this is not the full pic-ture. To the take from bookmakingmust be added the take from a rivalgambling racket that is nearly ashuge — policy. Everybody Plays Betting on the numbers was con-sidered a major underworld goldmine back in depression days whenDutch Schultzs policy empire flour-ished in Harlem and the Bronx andlured a gross annual play, in nickelsand dimes, that built up into $20million a year. Nickels and dimeshardly rate as money any more;now the play is for 50 cents or $1,even for $10 or more, and now theracket isnt confined to the slums ofHarlem and the Bronx — it hasspread all over the city, even intothe canyons formed by the tall sky-scrapers of Wall Street, where theprincipal gambling interest is sup-posed to be the stock market. A couple of years ago I walkedinto a downtown Broadway officebuilding one wintry day and
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1800, bookdecade1860, bookidnation191jul, bookyear1865
