As dopey as it sounds, Mike Francesa is right when he says the NFL season moves quickly. One minute you're watching the opener in sweltering heat, the next the leaves are falling and it's Week 4.
My thoughts of gambling and gamblers turned this week to arguably the greatest prognosticator of all times, one Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal. Again, without dipping into the Wikipedia entry, Frank's skill and fame transcended the worlds of sports, gambling, and organized crime, to be commemorated in one of the best movies ever.
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| Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal: Hot under the collar at some sort of hearing? |
A decent high school athlete in his home town of Cleveland, Lefty got into the gaming business working for the wire services which carried primarily horse racing results to mostly illegal bookmaking establishments throughout the United States. A mathematical whiz, Lefty's real genius lay in other areas, primarily in creating the spreads for betting on basketball and, most importantly, football.
Lefty's prowess at establishing and moving lines that kept the money flowing on both sides of a wager was a unique and highly valuable skill. Before long, he found himself in Las Vegas, where he was responsible for setting the line on NFL games. Lefty's lines came out on Tuesday morning, and all the other books, legal and illegal, followed suit.
Being the point man for sports gambling was often problematic for Lefty. He tried to go more legit, doing a local late-night talk show in Vegas. At the same time, he married a former show girl, whose excesses with drugs, spending, an old boyfriend, and other assorted vices made her locally notorious.
The delicate balancing act between legalized sports betting in the casinos and ties to organized crime in the form of Lefty's associate Anthony Spilotro came crashing down in the 1980s. Lefty had a few chats with the Feds, just missed getting blown up in his car, but eventually managed a retreat to California. He remarried, and raised a daughter who became an Olympic-level swimmer, with Dad keeping an eye on the stopwatch.
If all this sounds vaguely familiar, it's because Lefty was the subject of Casino by Nick Pileggi, which eventually became the basis of Casino, the film by Martin Scorsese. In the movie, Lefty becomes Ace Rothstein, played by Robert DeNiro, but otherwise all the crazy goings-on in that movie are basically a documentary. Wild...
On to the picks - generated via the proprietary Spreadbuster algorithm:
Three-Star Picks
Last week: 2-2. Overall: 3-5
Two-Star Picks
Last week: 2-2. Overall: 5-3
One-Star Picks
These games are anyone's guess.
Last week: 2-5. Overall: 6-8-1
Total. Last week: 6-9. Overall 14-16-1
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