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You know, if I really wanted to I'm sure I could find a video clip of Australian amputees juggling flaming koala bears on the Internet within five minutes. But when it comes to the Greatest Moments in Super Bowl Betting History, I might as well be looking for digital pictures of Atlantis.
We all have our stories - for good or ill - involving gambling and the Super Bowl. Win or lose, it's a right of passage for players across the country. But have you ever found yourself wondering who placed the biggest bet ever on The Big Game? Has the championship game ever been under suspicion of a fix? Or what about if any professional golfer had ever correctly predicted both the Super Bowl and World Series winners, before either season had started, in the same year?
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Well, I did a little nosing around cyberspace, and this is the best I could come up with. Here, for your reading enjoyment, are three fairly interesting stories involving Super Bowl gaming:
1) The largest single Super Bowl bet on record in Las Vegas was attached to San Francisco in SB XXIX. The line was the 49ers giving 18.5 points to San Diego, but the bettor dropped $2.4 million on San Fran on the money line. The game was a farce, with the Niners winning by 23. However, that $2.4 mil paid at just 1-to-8. Meaning all of that risk only paid off for $300,000. Of course, "only" is a relative term.
The single biggest recorded Super Bowl payday was to Bob Stupak, the legendary gambler and casino owner from Vegas. Stupak dropped a cool $1 million on Cincinnati, plus-7, against San Francisco in 1989. The 49ers captured the Lombardi Trophy on the famous Montana-to-Taylor touchdown, but failed to cover the number with their 20-16 victory.
Of course, those are only the largest bets on record for the Super Bowl. I would be willing to wager that they're kid's stuff. I'm sure there is some Russian arms dealer out there, trading in nuclear warheads and baby's kidneys, that drops $10 million every year on the coin flip. He's probably the mayor of some small town in Siberia, and for the townspeople it's their version of Groundhog's Day - if he wins the heat gets to stay on. If he loses there are weekly pogroms until spring.
2) Besides some far-flung, left-wing conspiracy theories, there's never been anything in the history of the Super Bowl that would suggest that The Game had been fixed. However, the closest anything came to that was just before Super Bowl IV. Kansas City was squaring off against Minnesota, and a story broke the Tuesday before the game that linked Chiefs quarterback Len Dawson to a Detroit gambler named "Dice" Dawson (no relation).
Kansas City coach Hank Stram and NFL officials informed Dawson that he, along with several other random players in the league, was going to be summoned to testify in Detroit for a federal investigation into sports gambling. The police had arrested "Dice", and found that he was holding $400,000 and Dawson's phone number. D'oh!
The Chiefs were 12-point dogs, but Dawson quelled any rumors by guiding his squad to a 26-7 win, picking up the MVP trophy along the way.
3) You remember back when Phil Mickelson "couldn't win the big one"? In 2001, three years before he donned the Green Jacket, Lefty won the Big One. Twice.
Before the 2000-01 season, Mickelson reportedly dropped $20,000 on the Baltimore Ravens to win the Super Bowl at 28-to-1 odds. Sure enough, behind a defense loaded with murderous madmen, Baltimore destroyed the Giants 34-7. Lefty cashed in that one for $560,000.
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That's impressive, but nothing amazing. But just a few months later Mickelson dropped another $20,000 on Arizona to win the World Series at 38-to-1 odds. Sure enough, behind the arms of Curt Schilling and Randy Johnson, Arizona won a dramatic seven-game series over the New York Yankees. Lefty took that to the bank for another $760,000.
Later it came out that Mickelson was just a partial investor in each the bets, and that he brought home only about one-tenth of the actual earnings. Regardless, that's still one hell of a rush.
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