Legalized Gambling Will Destroy College and Professional Sports, Part 1
The Creation and Evolution of the Point Spread
In this chapter, I detail the creation, evolution, and use of the point spread via my interviews with Upton Bell, Ed Curd, Karl Ersin, and Mort Olshan
This is an excerpt from my 1989 book, Interference: How Organized Crime Infliuences Professional Football. Because of pp. 60-65
According to sportswriter William Barry Furlong, the point spread was invented during the early 1940s by University of Chicago-trained mathematical wizard Charles K. McNeil, who was also an obsessive sports fan.[1] This new method of handicapping attempted to attract an equal amount of betting on teams playing uncompetitive games that would otherwise draw little public interest and low-betting volume. Under this system of pricemaking, gamblers could bet on the favorite team and give points to the underdog—or take the underdog and the designated points.
Prior to this, bookmakers simply gave odds, like 3 to 2 or 7 to 5, on upcoming games. This traditional practice of making the odds rather than setting the point spreads continues to be used for betting on several sports, including baseball.
However, the best evidence is that the point spread began before McNeil. Frank Costello’s personal bookmaker, Ed Curd, who was also an influential Kentucky oddsmaker and a close friend of McNeil, told me that McNeil did not invent the point spread. “I don’t know of anyone who can take credit for that. McNeil fell into line like everyone else. But in my estimation, he was the best handicapper who ever lived. He operated out of the Gym Club in Chicago. While he was there, he was a very active player [gambler]. He was probably more of a player than a bookmaker. He was his own service. Back then, people made out their own prices [point spreads]. There were different prices all over the country.”
Mort Olshan, who later became one of the most respected sports handicappers in America, told me: “McNeil might not have invented the point spread, but he certainly refined it. There were scattered but reliable reports that point spreads had preceded McNeil in various regions of the country. They were based on regional games, particularly in the South, rather than on national projections. I understand that the point spread was used during the 1930s—before McNeil came along.”
There were at least two oddsmakers who were using the point spread form of handicapping during the early 1930s in Minneapolis: Darby Hicks and Karl Ersin. During my interview with Ersin, he told me: “It was the Depression, and I needed something to do. I always liked sports very much and used to read everything I could. I kept book after book about football. It just got to be a habit. There was already a handicapper at The Minneapolis Journal named Darby Hicks. So, during the early 1930s, I went down to the other newspaper, The Minneapolis Star Tribune, and said, ‘Can you use a handicapper?’ And they hired me. I put an article in there every week. Darby and I used the point spread as our way of handicapping, and we had a contest to see who could do better [in picking the games].”
Ersin’s oddsmaking career did not end there. “Billy Hecht owned a liquor store I used to go in, and we got to talking. He had just started something called the Minneapolis Gorham Press. He didn’t know anything about setting a line, and so he hired me and a couple of other guys. I liked handicapping on football best; it’s the best betting sport, particularly with the use of the point spread.”
The Minneapolis Gorham Press, which was created by Hecht in or about 1937, became the first national oddsmaking institution. Many considered its newsletter to be a bible for gamblers, the first national “service” for bookmakers to set and distribute the line—a list of point spreads on sporting events. Its subscribers, who numbered only a few hundred, were also invited to telephone in during the week and receive the latest adjustments to the line on the upcoming games.
Speaking of the hazards of “suspicious” games, Ersin says: “We suspected that games were fixed in the thirties and forties, but we could never find out for sure. So, for the games we didn’t want much action on we just circled. We always knew what was going on when we got loaded up with bets on them: ‘unnatural money.’ We were scared of pro games because we didn’t know what was going on with them. There were too many winners. We thought the fix was in often enough. Our clients complained that they wanted a line on the pro games, but we wouldn’t give it to them very often—because we just didn’t trust the games.”
Five-feet-six Leo Hirschfield—who had lost the hearing in his right ear after a bout with influenza while in the Marine Corps during World War I—bought into the Gorham Press in 1940 and became Hecht’s partner. Hirschfield changed the name of the company to Athletic Publications, Inc.; and its newsletter, Weekly Gridiron Record, became better known as simply The Green Sheet. The whole operation consisted of only eighteen full-time employees but, at its height, annually grossed nearly $10 million.
Mort Olshan, who was like a “surrogate son” to Hirschfield, worked on The Green Sheet along with Karl Ersin, Jimmy Harris, and Joe Katzman, who was the senior handicapper. Olshan told me: “There were four handicappers with Leo Herschfield, who was the active partner with a one-third interest and ran the service operation. I never met Billy Hecht in my whole life; he was never around. He had another partner [Joe Numero] in the separate bookmaking part of the operation. They were bookmakers and took the action. They had separate jobs and separate offices from the service activity.
“Leo was a totally honest man, and he avoided all the shady associations. He had a mind that worked like a computer. Even though he wasn’t a sports fanatic who followed the games religiously, and he didn’t have anything to do with the actual handicapping of the games, he knew instinctively when a wrong line was set.”
Born in 1926, Olshan is a Buffalo native and a Marine combat veteran who saw action in Okinawa in World War II. He attended the University of Buffalo for one year, hoping to become either a sports reporter or play-by-play announcer. He says that he, too, has been collecting newspaper and magazine clippings about football since he was seven years old.
“I read an article entitled ‘The Wizard of Odds’ about Leo and the Minneapolis line in Collier’s magazine, and on an impulse I went to Minneapolis to ask Leo for a job. I thought that there was excitement in betting and handicapping, and that there might be a future in it for me. Athletic Publications, Inc., also published player statistics and the schedules for all the games in the entire country, including the rotation of the games—which was crucial to the industry and really united it.
“I started working at The Green Sheet in 1948 making ninety dollars a week as a statistician. By the end of my first month, my salary was increased to a hundred. And after a couple more months, I was raised to a hundred and fifteen dollars. I had tears in my eyes when they gave me those raises, because that was big money for a twenty-two-year-old man at the time. When I got there, we expanded The Green Sheet with different features and write-ups, so that it became more of a full-service, multidimensional publication with interesting stories and analyses of games.”
Olshan says that each of The Green Sheet handicappers worked independently of one another. “We would read everything we could get our hands on—maybe as many as forty daily newspapers each day. Most of our work was done on Saturday and Sunday after we analyzed the college and professional games. On the basis of our information, we would set our own lines.
“Every Monday morning, the four of us then went into Leo’s office with our own numbers. Because we were trying to equalize or balance the public’s money on each game, we would have to carefully assess the strengths and weaknesses of the two teams and the public’s perception of the games and then anticipate how the public would bet. It was rare, if ever, that we could achieve a totally even distribution of the betting, but we worked hard to get as close as possible. Joe Katzman would compare our individual point spreads, and we would often argue over the numbers. Joe would arbitrate the differences and would make his own adjustments based on the discussion. He would then set the ultimate line that would then be distributed around the country. The whole idea was to come up with a line that our subscribers could use and profit by.”[2]
As NFL commissioner, Bert Bell began the process of calling cooperative bookmakers and gamblers, particularly those associated with the Minneapolis line, during the week before NFL games were played. His intent was to discover if there were any unusual fluctuations in the betting line.
“He took to the grave with him the names of his contacts in the underworld,” Bell’s son Upton told me. “My father had three phones. One was for regular use. Another was for the players who could call him at any time. And there was a third phone that he used for the gamblers and the people who were feeding him information about the odds or about a player’s behavior. All of these guys had a code name. And Bert Bell was the only one who had these names.
“There was a certain honor among them. They wanted the games on the up-and-up because . . . if they placed a bet they wanted to know that some guy down the line wasn’t fixing the game. They knew if they told Bert Bell, they could get to the bottom of it. If he saw any great fluctuations from Monday right up to game time on Sunday, he was right on the phone to the team involved.”
Among other bookmakers Bell kept in touch with were those controlled by Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, and the then-boss of the New Orleans Mafia, Sylvester Carolla. The three syndicate figures had agreed in 1947 to create “a national communications center in New Orleans to transmit financial information. Such a clearinghouse would, for instance, make it possible for the bookmaking syndicate in New York to know instantly if a horse, ball team, or what have you was being heavily wagered elsewhere in the nation. Any break in the betting patterns would indicate a fix or an attempt to swindle the syndicate.”[3]
Ed Curd, Costello’s personal bookmaker, set a major national line on sporting events during the late 1940s that rivaled that published by The Green Sheet. Curd told me that he had met Costello in 1946. “Costello said that he could handicap his own horses and his baseball games, but he wanted me to give him a football team or two. What was I going to say? No? He told me that if I ever needed anything in New York, that I shouldn’t hesitate to call on him.
“There wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for me. And we did business together for several years. Later on, he wanted me to go to Vegas, and he would see that I was taken care of. But I turned him down. I always thought that staying in the middle of the road was best for me. I wanted to do my own thing. I didn’t want any partners.”[4]
Operating with two Teletype machines, three telephones strictly for long-distance business, and four secretaries, Curd ran his line out of Kentucky and distributed it across the country. He also was responsible for a new innovation in gambling: 11-10, the bookmaker’s standard 10 percent vigorish on all losing bets.
“We had so much business on football that we had two ways of dealing,” Curd recalls. “We had nine to ten odds for up to fourteen points, that’s ninety cents on the dollar. And we had six to five for fourteen and over. And then we had an outcome price on every game—sometimes as ridiculous as one to twenty and fifteen to one. We had a price on every game. Well, we had control of the business. But it was getting awkward handling everything.
“So, one Monday morning, just before we sent out the line, I said: ‘We’re going to change things, and see if we can get away with it.’ What I wanted to do was get rid of the outcome prices. I wanted to eliminate them altogether. But they were being dealt all over the country. So, I knew I had to give the operators around the country something better to work with, more money. So, I made up my mind that regardless of whether there was a bet on a four-point game or a twenty-point game, I’d put it right on the spot. Let them lay eleven to ten [put up $11 to make $10], and that would be our commission.
“When we came out that Monday, each place saw it the way we saw it. Eleven to ten looked more inviting and less trouble for the operator. It was accepted because they could keep their businesses together a lot easier. And eleven to ten has been the standard ever since.”
Curd also became known for his sixth sense about how the injuries of players would affect the point spreads of the games their teams played.
ENDNOTES
[1] See William Barry Furlong’s article “Of ‘lines,’ ‘point spreads’ and ‘middles,’” The New York Times Magazine, 2 January 1977. Furlong also quotes oddsmaker Jimmy the Greek as saying, “I used to go to Chicago just to watch him [McNeil] work.” Also, the March 10, 1986, issue of Sports Illustrated featured a special report on gambling, which included a sidebar story, “The Brain That Gave Us the Point Spread,” which gave McNeil the credit.
“In 1950, McNeil suddenly quit bookmaking,” reported SFs Robert H. Boyle. “He later told a friend he did so because the Mob wanted ‘to go partners with my brain.’”
[2] Olshan peeled off from The Green Sheet in 1952 and began his own publication. In 1957, he founded Nation-Wide Football, a six-panel publication that covered college and professional football games. In 1966, Nation-Wide Football became known as The Gold Sheet, with Olshan as its publisher. It has become the premier handicapping service in the United States.
[3] David Leon Chandler, Brothers in Blood: The Rise of the Criminal Brotherhoods (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1975), pp. 181-82. Carolla, who was deported to Sicily in April 1947, was succeeded as the boss of the New Orleans Mafia by Carlos Marcello.
[4] According to the FBI, through Curd, Costello won a traceable $26,000 on football games in 1950 alone.
During the Kefauver Committee hearings, Costello slipped up and identified Curd as the bookmaker who handled his bets on football games. Curd, who owned a large horse-breeding farm in Lexington and was viewed by all who knew him as a genuine “Southern gentleman,” sold his house and fled the country before being indicted for federal tax evasion. Curd first went to Montreal but was expelled by the Canadian government. He later surrendered to authorities in Detroit, pleaded guilty, and was sentenced to a year in prison and fined $400,000. After being released from prison in 1959, Curd moved to the Bahamas.
Curd told me that he has forgiven Costello for fingering him. “I was really upset at the time, but he never dreamed that anything would come of it.”