Did Pete Do It?

By Tom Callahan

The race is not always to the swift. The battle is not always to the strong. But that's the way to bet.

-- Damon Runyon

Since the celluloid Gipper has repaired to California and the call to win things for him has happily left the language, maybe it is not too impolite now to remember that the real George Gipp of Notre Dame was a low-life gambler who openly bet on his own football games and everything else from cards and craps to flies landing on sugar cubes. Gipp seldom attended class and only occasionally graced football practice. The sentimental writer Red Smith, a Notre Dame man himself, used to refer to the great dead hero as "the patron saint of eight-ball pool."

While it is possible that on his deathbed young George beseeched coach Knute Rockne to win one someday for the Gipper, it would have been more in character for Gipp to want to get $500 down on the streptococci. Myths, legends and lies are the beams and girders of games, but isn't it a bit much the way the country has been getting ready to be appalled by Pete Rose? O.K., he's a plunger. Everyone knows gambling pervades sports. It pervades life.

"Why don't the newspapers run whores' phone numbers?" Indiana basketball coach Bobby Knight would like to know. But he is an excitable character. "They run odds and point spreads on all the games. Is betting on basketball, football or baseball less illegal than prostitution?" It is, judging from the easy patter heard at every corner of sports. Make that every corner of society.

When golfer Lee Trevino was leading this year's Masters tournament, he proclaimed to a press assembly, "If a man had walked up to me and bet I couldn't break 76, I wouldn't have taken a quarter of the bet. And I'm a gambling man." As the New York Yankees began the baseball year in a slump, owner George Steinbrenner pledged that manager Dallas Green would last the entire season. As he put it, "If you want to go out and make a bet . . ." Given Steinbrenner's way with managers, cordons of nuns might have burst from cloisters to cover that one. Once, a U.S. Secretary of State breezily invoked the name of Jimmy ("the Greek") Snyder in gauging the odds on a successful summit.

Snyder lost his respectability and his job as a television tout when he branched out into anthropology and started handicapping black athletes' thighs. Previously, neither CBS nor its audience appeared to mind his old gambling conviction. (Nobody cares or even recalls that President Ford also pardoned Jimmy.) Softened memories are measures of attitudes.

Doug Moe, the flamboyant coach of the Denver Nuggets, got to thinking a few weeks ago that pro basketball shouldn't let Kareem Abdul-Jabbar slip into retirement without somebody standing up and saying what a "jerk" the Laker center had been "his whole life." Abdul-Jabbar let it go, but the obvious rejoinder, if he remembered the headlines of 1961, was to say at least he never accepted carfare from a fixer for listening to the pitch. That was Moe's only confessed involvement in a point-shaving mess at the University of North Carolina, but it was enough for the N.B.A. to deem him an undesirable player. Naturally, all is forgotten now.

The way Jake LaMotta was featured in every pretty piece on the passing of Sugar Ray Robinson, he might have been taken for an elder statesman of boxing, a figure of charm and standing. As a matter of fact, when Robinson made a Spanish omelet out of LaMotta in 1951, the New York Herald Tribune called it "the first believable knockout of ((Jake's)) life." LaMotta swears he never took a dive except the one against Blackjack Billy Fox, and that was so long ago.

Denny McLain, the Detroit Tigers pitcher, had a delightful alibi for two mashed toes that cost the 1967 pennant. He said he hurt himself shooing a raccoon away from a garbage can. Whether the raccoon had a Mob connection was a matter of speculation, but McLain was definitely the garbage can. When his bookmaking sideline was uncovered, he blurted, "My biggest crime is stupidity." Actually, it was just the thing at which he was most accomplished.

"I can read gambling between the lines of a lot of my hate mail," says Georgetown basketball coach John Thompson. Bill Walsh of the San Francisco 49ers speaks of "those low, throaty, ominous" boos when the home football team sits on a small lead, the point spread be damned. "I think there's an element of it everywhere," Bobby Knight says. "I think there are coaches who bet. I think there are referees who bet. I think there are plenty of sportswriters who bet."

In a Super Bowl press box, a writer let out a small whoop as the Raiders blocked a Redskin punt in 1984. "I'm sorry, that was really unprofessional," he said sheepishly. "But I've got $2,000 on the Raiders." Win or lose, does the two grand get into the story, affect the quality of the praise, increase the vitriol in the criticism? What do you bet?

With picturesque characters like Sorrowful the Bookmaker, Philly the Weeper and Harry the Horse, Damon Runyon made gambling a rollicking game. Americans bet $32 billion with bookies every year, and an additional $17 billion on legal lotteries. Gamblers will always gamble, the states often say when they enter the racket, just before they start advertising for more gamblers. Speaking of myths, legends and lies, the Government's famous plan to supplant Harry the Horse in the bookie business should never have been taken seriously. Harry has always given the customers something that Lotto and OTB never will. Credit.

In Cincinnati, where Procter goes on associating with Gamble, the Reds are still waiting to learn whether Rose bet on Thoroughbreds or himself. All around, the Lotto jingles play accompaniment to the mystery. At the next World Series, whether Rose is there or not, one thing is sure. The mayors of the competing towns will wager a bushel of rutabagas against a barrel of pistachios on the great American pastime.