When I was a kid in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, there were two reasons why I hated going to church on Sundays:
1.) Our church was boring.
2.) In the fall months, going to church meant missing The NFL Today.
I don’t want to say that I do what I do today because of The NFL Today, but between CBS’ Sunday pregame show, Siskel & Ebert, and Rolling Stone magazine, I became infatuated fairly early in life with the idea that people made a living just knowing stuff. And not just any stuff. This was stuff about sports, movies, music… if there’d been a TV show or a magazine back then dedicated to debating the merits of various kinds of chili, all of my true loves would’ve been covered.
My favorite segment of The NFL Today back then—everybody’s favorite segment, let’s be honest—came towards the end of the show, when Brent Musburger would sit across from Jimmy “The Greek” Snyder in front of a big analog checklist that looked like something borrowed from Classic Concentration, and the two of them would break down the week’s big games. I didn’t know much about gambling back then, and wasn’t watching Jimmy The Greek because I wanted to see where to lay my money. I just liked seeing two guys with some modicum of expertise talking with casual confidence about a sport they enjoyed. And I liked the physical presence of Jimmy The Greek, who even in the “ugly is okay” ‘70s (when some lumpy-looking folks became TV and movie stars) seemed unusually ordinary. Heck, he could’ve been a guy from my church.
But as Fritz Mitchell’s 30 For 30 documentary The Legend Of Jimmy The Greek explains, Snyder wasn’t ordinary at all. He was the best-known oddsmaker in the country well before he became a Sunday morning staple. After getting busted in Vegas for interstate gambling, he started a PR firm and began promoting tournament poker and sports-books beyond the confines of Nevada. He became famous—or infamous, really—for setting the spread in Super Bowl III with the Colts as a 17-point favorite over the Jets. The pick made him the butt of jokes, but it also got his name out. (And what a name!) Then, in his weekly appearances alongside Musburger, the bubbly beauty queen Phyllis George and the affable ex-jock Irv Cross, Snyder helped make the notion of putting money down on a ballgame seem downright wholesome.
The NFL Today increased Snyder’s fame exponentially, as much because of the behind-the-scenes drama as because of the on-screen content. Snyder berated George when the cameras were off, and once had a brawl with Musburger at a bar over his perceived lack of screen time. (The duo joked about it on the air the next week, but their relationship off the set was never what anyone would call “friendly.”) He lost three kids to cystic fibrosis and was very vocal and emotional about the ravages of the disease. He was very public about his squabbles with CBS over his contract, to the extent that he became a pain to his bosses. When he began to lose his insider edge—and when he was caught on video praising the athletic prowess of Aftrican-Americans in unfortunately insensitive terms—CBS cut him loose. He died in Vegas eight years later, practically friendless and destitute.