Jimmy Snyder

There's your boyfriend up there, James.

Jimmy Snyder, that auto racing fellow, is up here in the booth with us.

We were down having a chat with Pepper Martin, who's a big midget owner himself.

Davis throws the first one to Martin, and it's inside across the chest for ball one.

I just don't think that

Jimmy the Greek and Irv Cross went on

that.

Probably just a

bottle of scotch in front of Jimmy the Greek.

Let me tell you about it.

That's not a sponsor, Jimmy.

I don't care.

Right.

Like Jimmy and Goat's Cigar Store, the Palais Royal, the Oliver Hotel, the University of Notre Dame Archives have these incredible records of hundreds of people standing shoulder to shoulder on the sidewalk, freezing, just staring at a storefront window.

Just waiting for a guy with a piece of chalk.

Literally, inside the cigar store, a telegraph operator is hunched over a machine.

He joined CBS Sports in 1973 and took over the NFL today in 1975.

A huge deal at the time.

For 18 years, alongside colleagues like Irv Cross, Jimmy the Greek Snyder, Phyllis George, and later Jane Kennedy, Musburger made the pregame show a cultural institution.

He was the ringmaster of a national event.

There's your boyfriend up there, Jim.

Jimmy Snyder, that auto racing fellow, is up here in the booth with us.

We were down having a chat with Pepper Martin, who's a big midget owner himself.

Davis throws the first one to Martin, and it's inside across the chest with ball one.

I mean, I grew up with it all.

I mean, I grew up with Jimmy the Greek.

Yeah.

He was handicapping games, but God forbid he mentioned a point spread.

In effect, Martin's legal Las Vegas operation quietly became a kind of successor to the old illegal wire services, a single trusted source that an enormous informally connected national network of bookmakers, legal and illegal alike, relied upon to set their own prices.

Another figure who embodied this same transition and who became far more publicly famous doing it was Jimmy Snyder, universally known by his nickname Jimmy the Greek.

Snyder came up through exactly the same world of illegal bookmaking and wire service culture we have spent this episode describing, working as an oddsmaker with deep connections to organized bookmaking networks before eventually relocating to Las Vegas and becoming one of the most recognizable public faces of legal sports betting in the country.

In a development that would have been almost unthinkable a generation earlier, Snyder eventually became a national television personality, appearing for years as a football commentator and betting analyst on a major American television network, casually discussing point spreads and betting lines on air to millions of viewers, an extraordinary bit of cultural laundering for a set of skills and a professional vocabulary that had been developed almost entirely within an illegal underground industry only a few decades before.