Larry Merchant, Dirty Jokes, and Betting on the NFL: The National Football Lottery

Larry Merchant is best known as an icon of boxing, serving from 1978 to 2012 as a commentator and analyst for HBO. In the early 1970's, however, Merchant was a reporter for the New York Post, and had an idea to write about America's obsession with sports betting, and betting on the National Football League in particular, with himself as the guinea pig.

The premise of The National Football Lottery is a little misleading; Merchant indeed uses his $30,000 advance on the book to bet on sports, but only thinks about using all of it in passing. There are times where the reader wishes Merchant went all in on at least the Super Bowl, but it's his money to spend, not ours.

Merchant comes from the tabloid school of writing, and trusts his audience enough to start with a dirty joke. The anecdote, involving a horny dwarf and a bank executive's testicles, works as an allegory for gambling; when you hedge your bets properly, you can have someone by his balls. The author wonders out loud whether or not he is the horny dwarf, but we never get a clear answer. Merchant's author photo does emphasize a hobbit-like physique which got him far enough to be a last-string quarterback for Bud Wilkinson at Oklahoma twenty years earlier.

Merchant forgoes the NFL preseason, as all true sports fans do. There were six weeks of exhibition games in the early 1970's, often held at neutral sites such as Memphis or Birmingham. Even the 1972 Dolphins dropped a few games in the preseason. Instead, he heads for Monte Carlo and wins a small bundle. Larry also starts to talk to himself, and looks to find other ways to pepper what may turn out to be a long season with humor.

An interesting attempt is made to tie football with love and sex, with Merchant comparing his lovers to starting and rookie quarterbacks, and winning a middle bet as having a multiple orgasm. That Larry Merchant would include scenes of himself having sex with beautiful women isn't that far out of reach for such a book as this. It is only creepy when Larry Merchant has visions of Tim Van Galder as he approaches climax.

Merchant was lucky in choosing 1972 to conduct his experiment, and not only because $30,000 then has the buying power of $170,000 in 2014. While the author places the bets, the reader has the inside information and hindsight to smile when Larry places a $2,000 bet on the undefeated Dolphins. With a few clicks and strokes, the reader can also cringe as he sees the author place $3,000 on the Atlanta Falcons the same week. It is not unintentional when Merchant quotes Ball Four after losing $1,300 overall that Sunday; you'd say "shitfuck" too if you made such a bad decision.

Throughout the season we get to meet a wide array of gamblers, from the doormen to the oddsmakers. We also get to know some of the players and coaches, if only through Merchant's opinions of them. Rookie kicker Chester Marcol is a breakout star for the Packers, largely because the brunt of Green Bay's offense rests on his foot. John Brodie and his backup Steve Spurrier lead the 49ers into the playoffs, while Bob Griese and the late Earl Morrall lead the Dolphins into immortality. Larry's devotion to Falcons coach Norm Van Brocklin, whom Merchant covered while writing for the Philadelphia Daily News, blinds him into betting for Atlanta, giving the author the most consistent amount of trouble. An irrational hatred for the Giants after they decide to move to New Jersey helps Merchant offset some of those losses, and pays for a gaudy sculpture.

While the book is always interesting, its format does get tiresome. There are several blind items about players fixing games (but always in the past), and hopes that New York would legalize sports betting, which it never has and probably never will.

The stories of the anonymous players are fun, but except for maybe one incident there doesn't seem to be much weight to most of the allegations. The use of the term "quarterback" to describe Merchant's lovers can also be a bit patronizing at times, especially when neither of them would wind up being Larry's eventual MVP.

Merchant goes to Las Vegas near the end of the regular season, both to get to the heart of the sport gaming industry and to live out a more subdued Hunter S. Thompson fantasy. We meet some of the men who truly made sports betting what it is today. Larry holds Lem Banker up as a linemaker for the people, while he considers Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder to be better at building a brand than picking winners. Bookmaker Bob Martin, whose establishment Merchant frequents while in Vegas, is credited with the half-point line, eliminating the tied bets which still occurred in 1972.

Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal is best known as the inspiration for the movie Casino, but was also one of the most respected gamblers in America, and as the de facto head of the Stardust, brought sportsbooks into the casinos. Merchant thinks of Rosenthal as a guru, while the reader can only think of that Cadillac blowing up at the beginning of the movie.

The 1972 NFL playoffs are one of the most memorable of the early Super Bowl era. No less an NFL authority than the Village Voice's Andrew Sarris, in his review of The National Football Lottery, considers that year's playoffs to be something else. It's hard to consider anything in a 40-plus year old book as a spoiler, so we laugh when Merchant bets 7-1 on the Raiders, who would lose to the Steelers on The Immaculate Reception. During Super Bowl week, Merchant decides to escape the craziness of his surroundings and spends a day in Hollywood with Seymour Cassel, Peter Falk and John Cassavetes. They are on the set of A Woman Under The Influence. Of course they were.

Larry Merchant does come out on top, winning a small fortune after all is said and done. However, Merchant's lifestyle changes (including renting a larger apartment and getting fancier clothes) give us a hard read as to how much of a net gain he earned. It's hard to tell whether shuttle jets to Boston (where he meets the alleged fixer) or Washington D.C. (where after accidentally getting on another plane to Boston, finally goes down to watch the Giants play the Redskins) were a normal thing for Merchant at the time. Larry gives us some sensible tips: Bet on the obviously better team when they're favored by a few points, don't give too much credence to home field advantage and injury reports, etc., but is also the first to admit the past season was in large part a fluke.

More importantly, The National Football Lottery allows us to catch a gliimpse of a unique moment in pro sports. Not only could fans only get two or three games on their television, home games would be blacked out entirely until 1973. Los Angeles didn't just have an NFL team, they hosted the Super Bowl. And commissioner Pete Rozelle was doing his best to both grow the sport while curbing gambling. Rozelle did have a few valid points about not wanting to get punched in the face (again), and of point shaving, but largely he is trying to cover himself.

In 2014, Roger Goodell has bigger concerns on his table, but seems to have enough power to stall sports betting in most states, while fantasy football has become a league sanctioned lower-stakes substitute, the Nutrasweet of gambling.

The National Football Lottery is at once an interesting experiment in gambling, and a fascinating time capsule of pro football at the dawn of the modern era. The NFL is as big as it has ever been, but it's almost comforting that its self-righteousness and its propensity towards covering its ass has been there for a long time. We are at the point where the certainty of pro football is starting to be questioned, but people will always gamble, and those who are in control of sports will continue to look down upon it, even as their own pedestals begin to sink into the ground.