Jackpot Nation: Rambling and Gambling Across Our Landscape of Luck
256
Jackpot Nation: Rambling and Gambling Across Our Landscape of Luck
256Paperback(Reprint)
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Overview
You can bet on the turn of the card or a roll of the dice, but also on the NFL, the NCAA, and which Olsen twin marries first. We bet $80 billion a year, the amount growing wildly as more and more people gain access to this huge American wheel of fortune. No longer quarantined in Las Vegas, gambling has become as local and convenient as our neighborhood cineplex. If there's not a casino around the corner, there's one on your laptop computer.
In Jackpot Nation, Richard Hoffer takes us on a headlong tour, alternately horrifying and hilarious, across our landscape of luck. Whether he's trying to win a side of bacon in a Minnesota bar, hustling a paper sack filled with $100,000 in cash across Las Vegas parking lots, poring over expansion plans with a tribal chief in California, or visiting the New York prison cell of a retired bus salesman with a poor understanding of three-game parlays, Hoffer explores with wit and heart our national inclination—a cultural predisposition, even—to take a chance.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780060761455 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 02/26/2008 |
| Edition description: | Reprint |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.98(w) x 10.90(h) x 0.64(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Las Vagas, Nevada
March Madness, the Mayfield Road Gang, and Statistical Shit Storms
I had never noticed the potential for treachery in an inbounds pass, the inherent calamity in each free throw, the emetic properties of a weakly drafted pick-and-roll. Frankly, I had never paid college basketball the slightest attention at all. They were kids, children really, playing an obviously inferior game, in a vague and poorly predictive incubator for NBA achievement, if anything. As far as I was concerned—not caring that much about the NBA, either—its only attraction was as an agent of nostalgia. An alum might muster interest in his alma mater come March Madness, but it would only be relevant to the extent that there was nothing else on television or his chores on the home front had been completed.
In my own professional travails, first with the Los Angeles Times and later with Sports Illustrated, I had on occasion been dispatched to cover college basketball, but I found it neither as quaint nor as exciting as my colleagues did. The roost was almost always ruled by a longtime coach whose tenure had come to be confused with color or, worse, character. The game was often boring, the natural effervescence of youth capped by curmudgeonly adults, the whole thing constrained—strangled, I thought—by a geographical and cultural close-mindedness. Give me boxing, where the human spirit was allowed a freer reign.
Then, for the price of a $110 ticket on North Carolina, I made a remarkable discovery. It was entirely possible that college basketball was the single most exciting and noble game in all of sports, its sluggishback-and-forth really the tactical expression of discipline, the endless passing a symbol for altruism, the five-man weave that was once so tedious now a metaphor for nothing less than democracy. The warm glow I suddenly felt, sitting in a studentlike desk in the Mandalay Bay sports book, may not have been entirely a function of spectacle on the dozen screens hung before me. Probably it helped that North Carolina, favored by two and a half points in the 2005 NCAA Championship against Illinois, had a thirteen-point lead at the half.
So, here we begin, as most people have, in Las Vegas. This is gambling's ground zero, its fertile crescent, where the riotous search for destiny first sprang to life. This has to be the starting line for our race across the country, chasing luck all the way. Where else? Las Vegas is the birthplace of modern gambling, the not-so-little town that was a mythological place long before it was a cheap tourist destination. Now, as institutionalized as it ever was romanticized, it remains the original arbiter of outlaw justice, its ability to sort through losers and winners as unquestioned as ever.
This is where most people come to find out which they are. I was no exception, first arriving here from Ohio in the mid-1970s, passing through on a cross-country trip with my new wife. At that time, the slots and tables were so intimidating the thought of kissing off even a single quarter, even for the fun of it, was simply out of the question. Even though we saw plenty of rubes just like ourselves, we felt dramatically out of place. Our splurge was a milk shake at Caesars Palace's Café Roma, and we expected to get tossed the whole time.
Not too many years after that, I became a frequent visitor, covering boxing for the Los Angeles Times, as many as a dozen trips a year, the growing exposure quickly rubbing away at whatever insulation protected my common sense. The frightened hayseed from the 1970s had become Mr. Blackjack himself, discovering an appetite for long odds, tumbling chips of increasingly dangerous denominations across the felt. Looking back, of course, the frequency of my visits had hardly anything to do with my plunge into this netherworld; not a single one of my peers, the guys from newspapers, who made as many trips as I did, or more, ever joined me at the table. It was just me, something about Vegas lighting me up with excitement. There would come a time, after one (or maybe even two) too many trips, when I'd have to come to grips with whatever it was that kept putting me across from the dealer.
And yet, even as my threshold for tomfoolery was increasing, I had never bet on sports. The fact that I hadn't does not call attention to a rigidly defined system of ethics. I truly believe in the right, perhaps even the fundamental drive, to gamble. More than that: I am quite certain that, in the course of performing my duties, I often know more than the betting public. I have seldom been wrong in the prediction of any fight outcome, for example, and can definitely recognize a bad line. Evander Holyfield was not, could never have been, a 42–-1 underdog in his first fight with Mike Tyson. That's just absurd.
But I didn't bet on that fight or any other. It wouldn't be professional, or at least not sensible. To cover an event, then return to the keyboard in the wee hours of the morning and face a blank screen, its liquid gases pulsing the demands of a deadline, is an overly choreographed form of torture as it is. If there were other factors at play—the abuse of mortgage money in the absolute certainty that Buster Douglas would retain his title (he gained—holy shit!—how many pounds during training?)—they might compromise the quality, or at least the attitude, of the coverage. In any case, I did not want to be in the position of either lamenting or celebrating an outcome when it was already so hard just to deliver its news.
Jackpot NationRambling and Gambling Across Our Landscape of Luck. Copyright © by Richard Hoffer. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.