by Dave Tuley, ESPN
LAS VEGAS – Sports bettors take a lot of things for granted these days.
Talk to an old-timer who was betting sports back in the 1960s or 1970s (and even into the ’80s and ’90s) and they’ll regale you with stories about how they had to call their bookie to get a rundown of the betting lines. In Las Vegas, tickets were handwritten, and you had to go around town into a brick-and mortar casino to compare lines and place your bets.
Since the turn of the century, dozens of websites have cropped up to show updated odds from every book in Vegas (as well as the offshore books), and bets can now be made in seconds on websites or — as is the case in Nevada — (legally) on smartphones.
There’s one man who bridged that gap: Michael “Roxy” Roxborough, who founded the world’s top oddsmaking firm, Las Vegas Sports Consultants, in 1982 and ran it through 1999. He soon found out that while he thought his main job was as an oddsmaker, he had to spend half his time getting the information to his sportsbook customers and dragging them into the technology age.
Roxborough had a great run and was pretty much the spokesman of the industry during the 1980’s and 1990’s, helping to put a professional, corporate-type face on the business to replace people’s stereotyped ideas of bookies as cigar-chomping mafia types. He appeared on all three major network nightly news shows (as well as “Nightline,” “Crossfire” and “The McLaughlin Group”), and in 1999 he was No. 2 on the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s list of the most influential sports figures of the 20th century, as well as one of GQ magazine’s “50 Most Important People in Sports.”
I caught up with Roxborough over the summer to discuss his roots, his career and whether he sees sports betting being legalized on a national level anytime soon.
Rest is here
