All Bets Off

Insight on the News, Nov 20, 2000 by Patrick Hruby

Will a proposed federal ban on college-sports gambling be enough to stymie scandal?

With the ball on the 1-yard line in the third quarter of a 1994 college-football game between the Northwestern Wildcats and the Iowa Hawkeyes, Wildcats running-back Dennis Lundy took a clean handoff and barreled toward a touchdown -- only to fumble a foot from the end zone. A lousy break for a lousy Northwestern team? Not exactly. As Lundy later would tell a federal judge, he fumbled on purpose, the better to cover a $400 bet he had made against his own team.

Lundy won his bet, but Northwestern lost big time as the fumble led to the exposure of an extensive gambling scandal, one that touched two sports and several student-athletes, sullying the school's image. With scandals such as this in mind, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is pushing two bills that would outlaw amateur-sports gambling, now legal only in Nevada. Supporters of the legislation, including the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and many prominent coaches, contend betting on college athletics is an unseemly practice that threatens the integrity of competition.

"Gambling on kids and teen-agers is just wrong," says Doris Dixon, the NCAKs director of federal relations. "And if you're betting on the games, there's always a chance that somebody's going to try and fix them."

Opponents of a federal ban argue that such a measure is wholly cosmetic, a nonsolution that will punish Nevada unduly while doing nothing to address the pervasive problem of illegal sports gambling on campuses -- not to mention game-fixing. "Doing away with Nevada sports books is not going to impact scandals," says Frank Fahrenkopf, president of the American Gaming Association, a gambling industry lobbying group. "Who's more of a threat to athletes -- a Los Angeles businessman who flies over to Las Vegas and bets $50, or a bunch of guys at a campus tailgate party who know the players and are illegally betting hundreds of dollars? I don't think it's the guy in Nevada."

Sponsored by McCain and Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., in the Senate and Reps. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Tim Roemer, D-Ind., in the House, the proposed antigambling bills would close what is known as the "Las Vegas loophole" in a 1992 federal law that banned betting on amateur sports in every state except Nevada. In Nevada, where sports gambling is a $2.3 billion-a-year industry, a discriminating gambler can bet on the total points in a game, the halftime score, even the most points scored by an individual.

One of the most popular forms of wagering is on the point spread, or the margin by which a particular team is favored to win or lose. That's what former Notre Dame kicker Kevin Pendergast bet on in 1995, when he traveled to Las Vegas and placed a $20,150 wager at Caesar's Palace that the Northwestern men's basketball team would lose a game against Michigan by at least 25-and-a-half points.

Why make such a large bet on such long odds? Pendergast had arranged to pay two Northwestern players -- starters Dewey Williams and Dion Lee -- thousands of dollars to keep the Wildcats' score down. It was a classic case of point-shaving, one for which all three participants were sent to prison.

"Did legalized gambling force Kevin to do this? Absolutely not" said South Carolina head football coach Lou Holtz, who coached Pendergast at Notre Dame. "However, I believe that the choice and the opportunity to cheat a system and make some easy money was very enticing."

Holtz made his remarks at a June hearing on Capitol Hill, where he and Kentucky head basketball coach Tubby Smith told Congress that all forms of college gambling place their sports at risk. Dozens of other coaches agree, as does the National Gambling Impact Study Commission (NGISC), a congressional branch created in 1997 to examine the social consequences of wagering. "Gambling poses a grave threat to the integrity of college sports," NGISC member James Dobson told Congress in March.

Just how grave? The 1990s were home to a half-dozen high-profile student-athlete gambling scandals. Although relevant statistics are scarce, a 1999 University of Michigan survey of male college athletes found that almost half have bet on college sports, with one in 20 admitting to wagering on their own games, shaving points or providing inside information to gamblers.

Then there are the referees. According to Smith, a second Michigan survey of officials found that 84 percent have bet on games during their careers, with more than 20 percent doing so on the NCAA tournament. Worse still, two officials admitted their knowledge of the point spread affected the way they called a game.

Proponents of a betting ban say that legal college-sports betting encourages illegal betting, particularly by students. According to Dixon, Nevada sends a mixed message to the rest of the nation. "It would be like exempting Florida from heroin laws, or Texas from cocaine," said Smith. "The student groups that advise us say, `We sort of know [college-sports gambling] is illegal, but the point spreads are in the newspaper. So we figure it can't be that bad.'"