You are not understand the the context. He was doing this 20-30 years before people knew about stuff like this. He didn't exactly have access to 2+2 in 1985.
I thought it was fascinating, especially the Truman election.

Yeah, can you imagine him coming on to 2+2 saying that he's going to bet everything he owns on Great Lakes against ND? I think Thremp would try and strangle him via the internet while inventing new insults for his lack of knowledge of the Kelly criterion.

Or being like "GUYS! Truman doesn't have a mousetache, bet your bankroll on him winning the election. I got a tip that girls don't like 'em!".

what?????

agree w/all of this. thought a lot more people that watched the program + are 2+2 members would appreciate this story more

thought the voiceover was pretty ridiculous and unnecessary, and while i dont think it was up there with the ali and bias one for me, it was def very interesting. esp the crazy stories about the plane crashes/mom dying/kids/just everything he went through.

getting all the newpapers via the railroad conductors is such a brilliant move.

I like how they pretend that he was a good sports bettor, without admitting that he ran good in many situations (betting his whole roll on many games lol?). Also his son saying he was dumb for not buying up vacant desert land before the new strip was built was pretty ridiculously results oriented. His quote was hilarious "There were just empty plots of land that could be had very cheap, what a huge blunder not to buy that" without realizing that there are still acres and acres of desert land for sale in Vegas for cheap, yet it's a horrible investment.

The guy was a huge degen, definitely a horrible representative for the "gambling community." It's funny hearing all his explanations for why one team would win, as they are basically the same stories modern day degens use. "The QBs girlfriend dumped him the night before the game, bet the farm on the other team!"

The one funny/interesting thing was the morning show having him use code to describe the betting lines because they weren't allowed to say the spread.

I always laugh when I think about how ESPN must see Hank Goldberg as the "authority" on sports betting, when he his background only includes being a radio host and Dolphins color commentator.

No one wants to hear true sports betters talk about beating off market lines or building a model so that they can pounce on openers before they move, they want to hear about guys picking winners two hours before kickoff.

The story was entertaining but I'm pretty sure its full of wild exaggerations and fish stories.

The part where they said he'd bet on every horse in a race just to be able to say he won pretty much tells you how reliable his personal accounts are likely to be.

I haven't seen it yet because my crappy Cox DVR doesn't give you the opportunity to delete a recording yet preserve future recordings of the show. Unfortunately I taught my father how to use it and he went on a deleting bender, deleted the Bias show, thus it didn't record last night.

Interesting comments so far but none address how he absolutely got boned by the PC police, so maybe they didn't address that. Or maybe I'm misremembering. Either way I'm pretty intrigued by the voiceover people keep referencing.

I thought the voiceover was a little weird, but it didn't "ruin it" for me.

And yeah, they went over in-depth how he got boned, although it didn't really seem like he got all that boned. He made really idiotic comments about how black people are athletically superior because "they're bred that way," and CBS obviously didn't want to be associated with the comments. I feel bad about the children dying and whatnot, but I have no sympathy for someone getting fired from their public role after making dumb public comments, nor do I feel sorry for people with tons of money squandering it into destitution.

But it was a good story over all. Definitely came across as a degen that luckboxed his way into being mainstream.

I thought it was good and interesting, but agreed with other posters re: the voiceover and the grainy reenactment footage of him. It was just distracting and took away from the film. They had so many people doing solid interviews, esp dan rather - the voiceover just didnt belong.

Also his reasoning for betting that Dewey would lose to Truman was that Dewey had a mustache, and women don't like mustaches.

Dewey lost, therefore Jimmy must have been right!

Sounds like the Texas Sharpshooter fallacy.

There is no way to prove that this is the deciding factor of why Dewey lost.

That model chick was tilting me. I felt like she wanted to be the story of the documentary and she was just a dmb btch. Otherwise the story was OK, but why didn't he want to own a casino lol? He admitted that his life was all about gambling several times, but didn't want to be known for owning a casino?

He didn't want to sell the rights to his name. I'm sure he would have loved to own a casino if he had the means.

Fair enough but I still think there was a high level of PC/cover their ass by CBS and that never sits well with me. Same thing with Ben Wright in the mid-90s, dude gets approached at dinner, probably a few whiskeys in, says edgy thing about dykes on the LPGA (which was unquestionably true) and BLAMMO, cast into oblivion.

Anyway, the NFL Today show in the 80s with Greek, Irv, Brent, and Phyllis George was hands-down the best of all time. They certainly didn't resort to any of the chummy BS you see on a lot of the pregame shows today that nobody should be expected to care about. Ooh, Howie Long cracked wise in Terry Bradshaw's direction. Who cares?

His comments about black athletes was dumb, but it wasn't THAT bad. It wasn't any worse than what Larry Bird said a few years ago about black basketball players. But because he was a fat white dude associated w/ gambling, OH NOES!

I lost all respect for Larry Bird when he made that comment.

Also, Michael Irvin implied that Tony Romo's ancestor ****ed a slave, because he could scramble well in the pocket.

I don't know if what Jimmy said was true or not (I'm not wont to study American slave history), but if it was true, then he probably got fired because the decision-makers have a mad case of White Guilt.

(Rich white folks don't like it when other white folks remind people that white folks did bad stuff to black folks once, especially re: slavery).

Yeah what he said was dumber than it was wrong. It's really messed up but likely true that slaveowners used to force their strongest workers to have a lot of kids. If he just clarified that it's really messed up but factual, it probably wouldn't have ended up sounding so bad. The reason he got in trouble because was because he started going off into the whole "what will white people have left" thing which is really ignorant.

He also made the mistake about doing it on MLK day and his comments were made about 6 months after that guy on the Dodgers said black people wouldn't make good managers. There was no way he was going to escape criticism.

Matt - Dodgers exec was Al Campanis.

Voice-over was bad; definitely brought down the show.

I felt that they didn't show enough of Irv Cross considering how much they showed Musburger and Phyllis.

Some of the anecdotes were really lol material. Mustache for one, and then Musburger mentioning how happy Jimmy was when he won $25,000 betting on Oakland in the Super Bowl based on a "tip" he received from Al Davis, about how much faster Oakland is. Geeeee...

Enjoyable, but could have been better.

Lol, I didn't even put two and two together with the Al Davis speed comment, but yeah, what a tip. Maybe they really were fast back then and that's why Al is obsessed with that now.

I shall rank them thus far...

1. USFL
2. Ali/Holmes
3. Colts Band
4. Len Bias
5. Jimmy the Greek

Just a reminder it is back tonight, with documentary on Miami University