Sports betting tales: ‘And Jimmy The Greek said, ‘Hey, kid, I can catch a ride with you?’

Benjamin Eckstein has made a career out of writing about sports betting. It has not always been the most glamorous life, but the 30-year newspaper man now lives off the 16th hole of a Las Vegas golf course. And he’s got a bunch of great stories.

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It was 1980. Eckstein, a Jewish hippie who grew up in the projects in the Bronx, was having a blast.

He had just landed a job as a writer for the New York Daily News. He was young, recently married and ambitious. He wanted to do different things for the paper, often with a gambling spin. That’s how he found himself chauffeuring around Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder.

Eckstein got a first-hand reporter’s view of The NFL Today, CBS’ popular Sunday morning pregame show that was hosted by Brent Musburger. Snyder was the resident handicapper.

Eckstein sat behind the scenes in a busy production room that featured approximately eight TVs. While Musburger would be buzzing around between shoots, Snyder, at times, would grab a seat in the room with Eckstein. They’d B.S. and chat about the games. Snyder’s on-air picks segment was full of fluff, Eckstein said, but he considered The Greek to be a relatively sharp gambler off camera.

“I wouldn’t call him Billy Walters, but I wouldn’t put him in the square category either,” said Eckstein, who got to know the late Snyder pretty well, mostly through car-ride conversations. “He’d say, ‘Hey, kid, can I get a ride back to the hotel with you?’ I had this ratty-ass, two-seat car. I’d throw him in the side and drive back to wherever the hell he was staying. I don’t even remember now, but it was one of the nicer hotels, but he couldn’t even spring for a cab.”

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Late political activist Abbie Hoffman was a "fanatic sports bettor."
Late political activist Abbie Hoffman was a “fanatic sports bettor.”

It was the late 1980s in New York City. Abbie Hoffman was calling too much.

Eckstein was a 30-something writer for the New York Daily News. He was in charge of running the paper’s weekly NFL picks contest for charity. The full-page contest featured B-list celebrities like actor Elliot Gould and sex therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer, and was sponsored by an Atlantic City casino.

Eckstein reached out to Hoffman about participating in the contest, but didn’t immediately connect with the past-his-prime political activist. When Hoffman finally got back to him, one thing became instantly clear.

“I found out he was a fanatic, crazy-ass sports bettor,” Eckstein said.

Growing up in New York, Eckstein was firmly entrenched in the hippie movement of the sixties and seventies. Hoffman was a polarizing figure to that generation, leading absurd anti-establishment protests that captivated pop culture.

Among other notable hippie-badge events, Eckstein attended the Hoffman-backed March on Washington in 1967.  During the march, Hoffman, Allen Ginsberg and others led a bizarre attempt to levitate the Pentagon.

Twenty years later, Hoffman was calling Eckstein for gambling advice, sometimes two and three times a day. The calls were intense and often included rants about Hoffman’s beloved Celtics. Eckstein never asked about Hoffman’s bookie or how much he was betting, but it was clear by his lingo that he was an experienced sports bettor.

“It wasn’t like I was talking to some Betting 101 guy,” Eckstein said. “He knew his shit. Initially, it was fun, and it was Abbie Hoffman, so it was a pretty big deal. But it became almost overbearing; he was calling me too much.”

Eventually, the calls slowed, and Eckstein stopping hearing from Hoffman, who died of a drug overdose in 1989. Some point to other causes.

“Abbie Hoffman supposedly died of a drug overdose, but insiders know it was Eckstein’s picks that buried him,” iconic Las Vegas oddsmaker Roxy Roxborough joked about his longtime partner and friend.

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Longtime sports betting writer Benjamin Eckstein and wife Denise.
Longtime sports betting writer Benjamin Eckstein and wife Denise.

The meeting occurred in a joint at LAX in 1985.

Up-and-coming Las Vegas oddsmaker Roxy Roxborough was there. So was Eckstein.

It was a quick meeting. Paperwork was signed. America’s Line was launched.

Three decades later, America’s Line is the longest running syndicated odds-based news column in the U.S. It can be found in approximately 120 papers, Eckstein says.

Eckstein moved to Las Vegas in 1987, traveling across country with his wife, two kids and two dogs in an Isuzu Trooper. Roxborough would rise to the top of the Las Vegas oddsmaker food chain. He provided Eckstein with the odds; Eckstein provided the editorial direction. There were regular meetings, big aspirations and only one definitive rule.

“We both agreed never to sell picks,” said Eckstein, who learned the inner-workings of tout services during a brief stint working for an East Coast outfit in the late 1970s. “Roxy didn’t want to get involved in it, because of his standing in Vegas. I didn’t want to get involved, because of what I saw working for one. From pushing people to buy, double-siding plays, giving out the Platinum Club picks to everyone east of the Mississippi and the Gold to everyone out west, I saw it, I lived it, and did not like what I saw. “

Eckstein and Roxborough were approached often to sell picks. Some big money was put on the table, Eckstein says, but ultimately, they chose to avoid the pick-selling industry altogether.

“Look, we don’t need to go into names,” said Eckstein, “but a lot of the biggest guys really gave the entire (sports betting) industry some really ugly black eyes, and they still do. In my heart, newspaper journalism is still very important to me. So I wanted to keep everything on the up and up. We turned a lot of offers down, didn’t even consider it. And, to this day, I’m glad we did.”