The wild popularity of betting on Super Bowl props was ignited 40 years ago at Caesars Palace, where bookie Art Manteris posted a compelling proposition.
Will Chicago Bears massive defensive tackle William “The Refrigerator” Perry score a touchdown in Super Bowl 20 against the New England Patriots?
Perry scored a touchdown in the regular season but hadn’t touched the ball in the playoffs.
“Coach Mike Ditka said publicly that Perry would never carry the ball again. The media loved this team, and as bookies we were trying to come up with new betting angles,” Manteris writes in his new book, “The Bookie: How I Bet It All on Sports Gambling and Watched an Industry Explode.”
Red Rock Resorts sportsbook director Chuck Esposito, then a young ticket writer at Caesars, came up with the idea for a prop bet on “The Fridge” scoring a touchdown in the Super Bowl. Players pounded the one-way support, which opened at 20-1 and closed at 2-1. It won big when Perry plowed into the end zone late in the third quarter of the Bears’ 46-10 run.
“We lost a staggering $250,000 on a single prop, a huge amount at the time, and I was sick of it. How could we come up with such a stupid idea?” Manteris wrote. “The next day I had a really bad feeling I was going to get fired for this.”
When he got a call from Caesar’s chairman Henry Gluck, he was sure his days at the company were over. But then Gluck congratulated him.
“No casino or sports book in Vegas has ever received this kind of global, positive publicity over a single bet,” Gluck said. “We couldn’t buy the huge national and international attention we got.”
Prop bets now account for the majority of money wagered on the Super Bowl.
Manteris, who previously worked at Stardust and Barbary Coast, went on to become vice president of the Las Vegas Hilton SuperBook, now Westgate, and Station Casinos before retiring in 2021.
“It was such a fascinating ride, so much fun, that I wanted to share my story,” said Manteris, 69. “When I was a young manager at Caesars Palace and we had just hosted the Hagler-Hearns fight, I remember thinking to myself at the end of the night, ‘They’re actually paying me for this?'”
Among the other anecdotes from “The Bookie,” written by Manteris and Matt Birkbeck and available on Amazon, HarperCollins.com and in bookstores:
— Manteris sat near the late comedian Rodney Dangerfield at the Marvin Hagler-Thomas Hearn middleweight title fight at Caesars in 1985 that is considered one of the greatest fights in boxing history.
“I was sitting next to Marvin Hagler’s wife, who was holding their baby girl, and Dangerfield kept reaching over to pinch her cheek. ‘Oh, what a sweet kid. Yes, beautiful kid,'” he said as he cupped her face, a small spoon dangling from a gold chain around his neck,” he wrote. “As the national anthem began to play, I turned to see Dangerfield dipping the gold spoon into a small bottle, scooping out cocaine and pushing it up his nose, one side and then the other. Then he reached over and pinched the poor kid’s cheek again.
“I couldn’t believe what I saw.”
— Undefeated heavyweight champion Mike Tyson was a 42-1 favorite (bet $42 to win $1) when he was knocked out by Buster Douglas in 1990, arguably the biggest upset in boxing history. Boxing promoter Don King claimed Tyson’s shocking loss was due to poor preparation, but Manteris said “Iron Mike” was essentially knocked out by a sexually transmitted disease.
“Dr. Elias Ghanem, the chairman of the Nevada State Athletic Commission, who also happened to be my personal physician and friend, told me that Tyson was being treated for a severe bout of gonorrhea,” he writes. “He was secretly under the care of a doctor who had given him large doses of prescription medication before entering the ring, resulting in his sluggish performance and subsequent knockout.”
* Manteris also got a tip from a friend before the 2015 welterweight title fight between Floyd Mayweather Jr. and Manny Pacquiao that Pacquiao was wrong.
“He’s not right, and he can’t win,” the friend said. “That’s all I can tell you.”
Manteris said he was faced with the biggest ethical dilemma of his career: Protect his sports book, change the odds and say nothing, or say something publicly with the expectation that the fight would be postponed and the players would get a fair shake. He protected his book.
“I had to change my position and needed more money on Pacquiao,” he writes. “So I raised Mayweather to minus 200.”
Mayweather earned a unanimous decision.
“We did well with the book that night, but without that information from my friend we would have lost a significant amount of money. Very significant,” he wrote. “Immediately afterwards word came from Bob Arum that Pacquiao had indeed been injured before the fight.
“I especially felt sorry for those who bet on him. … I was also very angry with myself. I was a part of it. … I had never before had inside information of that magnitude, and it changed my whole outlook. The hypocrisy of being involved in sports and at the same time taking bets on it just hit me home.”
— A host of celebrities bet with Manteris, including MLB kingpin Pete Rose, pro golfer Phil Mickelson and former NBA star Charles Barkley, who often placed six-figure NFL bets at Bally’s. Former Pittsburgh Penguins star Jaromir Jagr loved betting parlays.
“But he always lost, sometimes by hundreds of thousands of dollars. He bet them in bulk, dozens of them at a time. He never bet hockey, but everything else, mostly baseball,” he wrote.
When Manteris was asked to raise Jagr’s limits, he refused.
“Jagr was so bad at sports betting, we actually felt guilty and had to slow him down,” he wrote. “I didn’t do much, but I did it for Jagr.”
Contact reporter Todd Dewey at tdewey@ theplayerlounge.com. Follow @tdewey33 on X.
