Gambling is a dangerous vice, but millions of people are hooked on it and many will suffer grievously before this holiday season is over. The traditional “Christmas spirit” runs completely against the grain of the natural laws of Gambling, which have nothing to do with silly human weaknesses like Generosity or Kindness or Carelessness.
If Santa Claus had a gambling habit, he would have been dead a long time ago.… There are a lot of criminal psychos between here & the North Pole, and they would show no mercy on a goofy old man who gets loaded one night a year and drives around through strange neighborhoods with a truckload of jewelry & furs & gold Rolex watches.
What if the Hell’s Angels got their hands on him? They would set him on fire & stuff him headfirst down a smoking chimney.… Which is not much different from how Professional gamblers treat their victims at Xmas time—which is also the end of the football season & the start of the Playoff frenzy that will build & grow & throb like a Shark’s heart for 33 more days until Super Bowl Sunday.
Yes sir, this is Harvest time for the Bookies, and Fleecing time for Rubes. When a gambler looks down on a hotel lobby crowded with whooping football Fans, he sees a flock of bleating Sheep—dumb beasts, ready for fleecing & slaughtering. It makes him crazy with hunger. He throws back his head & howls like a Jackal in heat.
There are thousands of wild whores on the streets of Nashville tonight, and not all of them are women. Many are politicians working the crowd out of habit—or pansexual pimps in high drag.… A huge football crowd has swarmed into town for the Tennessee-Dallas game & the downtown hotels are booked wall to wall with gamblers, wild rubes, and whores who dearly love Football—Especially the hometown Titans, who may soon be the champions of the World.
They are on their way to the Super Bowl & so are the gamblers & the whores & the mass of foul scum they bring with them.… A Winning Team on the road to the Super Bowl is like a traveling circus that picks up more & more fleas at every stop along the way & finally deposits the whole load on an innocent city like Tampa.
Hell, what’s a few million diseased fleas, compared to the Billion dollars or so that will pour into the local economy along with the Big Game? Any big city in America would cough up many millions to get the NFL to even consider putting the Super Bowl in their town, and never mind the fleas.
Nashville, in fact, was once the Syphilis capital of America. During the Civil War the Yankees called it the City of 10,000 Whores because of the rampant disease that plagued the Union Army as more & more Southern women turned to prostitution as the Confederacy began losing the War—75 percent of them terminally infected with Syphilis, which made soldiers unable to fight.
Al Gore is not from Nashville, & he is probably not a real Football Fan either. Gore will watch the game at home tonight, in Carthage, while he jabbers to his wife about Santa Claus & Whiskey & why his own goddamn state voted heavily against him for President.… Hell, Adelphia Coliseum will hold far, far more people tonight than Gore would have needed to win Florida. There are high school games on the outskirts of Nashville that draw 10,000 fans.
Yeah, suck on that for a while, Bubba. If your Family Dog got loose tonight, it would draw a bigger crowd than you pulled in Palm Beach.… Shame on you, Al. They chopped you up like a worm.
The Tennessee Titans will beat the jabbering slime out of the Dallas Cowboys tonight. They will whip them like baby mules & embarrass the whole state of Texas.… But not for long, and not enough to make George Bush cry.
(Which one, you ask? Hell, it hardly matters, does it? They all spring from the same root, and they all have the same greedy instincts. The only time they cry is when they lose money—and that won’t happen tonight. The Cowboys are 14-point underdogs, but the real spread is more like 33.)
It is not sane to give away 33 points in the playoffs, or even in the Super Bowl—although I did once, and I won.… It was my finest day in the gambling business. The Broncos were playing the 49ers in Super Bowl XXIV & the closing spread was 11, which I gave without hesitation in a crowded Aspen bar.… It is always a huge advantage, when fleecing people in public, to bet against rabid fans on their own turf. You want to do it in a loud, mocking voice that grates on the nerves of everybody within hearing range, so even your Friends will be infuriated & start betting rashly.
On this day the 49ers scored twice before the Broncos even got the ball. The crowd went into a funk, and bettors among them were happy to take 22 points, at only 2–1 odds. Nobody wants to Quit & slink away this early in the Big Game.
By the middle of the second quarter the score was something like 30–3. And the homeboys were getting desperate. The stakes had long since gone from hundreds of dollars into thousands—so when I offered to give 33 points at 5–1 payoff odds, they eagerly gobbled it up. Hell, they were six points ahead & the Broncos were bound to score soon. Ho ho. The final score was 55–10. It was my finest day in the gambling business.
—December 25, 2000