Maryland students find ways to gamble: Ban on betting unlikely to affect U.S. campuses

Benjamin Grove

Friday, April 6, 2001 | 5:01 a.m.

COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- Meet two seniors at the University of Maryland: Kristy Ball and Johnny, 22.

Johnny declined to give his last name because he was a regular sports bettor in illegal gambling rings on campus last year.

He quit after $100 and $200 bets on professional and college football games and "a few NBA games" began to eat away at his budget -- and his peace of mind.

"I didn't like the sick feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you have a couple of hundred dollars on the spread," Johnny said. "I got to where I just wanted to watch the game with nothing riding on it."

Ball, who is in student government, is a good student.

She had no idea that gambling on campuses was a big enough problem that even Congress had taken notice. She has never made a high-dollar wager.

"I'm a tightwad," Ball said. "I'm afraid of losing. I don't have any friends who have a lot of money to bet."

Interviews with students and university officials this week at the University of Maryland revealed a complex picture of college sports gambling by students at one Division I school.

A few said they gamble with bookies regularly. Others use the Internet. Still more were not aware that an ugly underworld of illegal gambling exists at all on their rolling green campus with red-brick buildings and white-column facades.

A look around this university offers a glimpse inside the issue of sports gambling by students -- and steps behind the rhetoric in Congress over how to stop it.

Few have a firm idea of exactly what percentage of students gamble on sports. Arnie Wexler, a nationally recognized gambling counselor and former addict, called it an epidemic.

"Las Vegas is not the problem," Wexler said. "The problem is on campuses. Early intervention is the ballgame, and no one is doing it."

Jake Peterson, 25, a recent graduate, was a regular gambler at the University of Maryland. He often gambled on sports during his college years using local bookies -- "friends of a friend of a friend," he said.

Peterson got in over his head once during a two-week stretch of pro-football bets, running up a $1,200 tab he couldn't pay off. But he didn't sweat anyone breaking his legs, he said with a grin.

He placed more bets. He made some of the money back.

"Yeah, they (bookies) pressure you, but you just get your fraternity brothers together," Peterson said.

"They'll give you more time. They want you to keep playing, so you make more bets. The more games you bet, they give you better spreads."

Last Saturday Peterson was swilling beer with his friends at the Santa Fe Cafe, a popular college hangout, awaiting a broadcast of the Maryland-Duke University Final Four basketball game.

Peterson's friend Ron Miller, 25, a senior, gambled regularly on collegiate sports during his university career but doesn't bet much anymore.

Miller and his pals regularly wagered $200 to $400 a weekend on NFL games, he said. He's been burned, too.

"The house always wins," Miller said.

Sports betting is simply a part of the college culture for some guys, Stosh Bruch, 25, said. Gambling on professional sports is just as popular as betting college games, he said.

"You bet the one o'clock games, then the four o'clock and the seven o'clock games," he said. "Then you bet Monday night. Every weekend."

By midafternoon, the Santa Fe Cafe was packed with beer-and hormone-fueled students sporting bright red T-shirts that read "Fear the Turtle" and simply, "F--- Duke."

Many of those interviewed claimed to be gamblers.

Matthew, 22, a student at Cornell University, was visiting the Maryland campus to be part of the Final Four revelry.

"I'm addicted to gambling, to be honest," he said. He uses bookies on campus to place bets on college basketball, professional basketball, hockey and baseball, he said.

His bookie collects bets from maybe 20 other gamblers on campus, then places them with another guy who runs the operation. Matthew doesn't know who is at the top, but it's not someone in Nevada, he said. It's strictly a local network.

Matthew loves to bet on first-round NCAA Tournament games.

"I bet on Duke every time," he said. "They always say Duke is going to be a 20-point favorite. But when Duke plays a team like Monmouth College, they are going to win by 40 every time. I've made a lot of money off Duke."

These are the students who are at the heart of a high-stakes debate in Congress: What's the best way to stop illegal gambling by college students?

The National Collegiate Athletic Association's answer -- at least a small part of its solution -- is in the form of a bill introduced last week in the Senate by John McCain, R-Ariz., and Sam Brownback, R-Kan. A similar bill was introduced in the House last month.

These lawmakers, working on Capitol Hill, a half-hour train ride from the Maryland campus, propose to curb betting by college students by outlawing wagers in Nevada sports books. They say their bill will close a Las Vegas "loophole" that offers campus bookies an opportunity to place bets in Nevada.

"We haven't said -- ever -- that this bill is the be-all, end-all (solution)," NCAA spokeswoman Jane Jankowski said. "It is one part of a multipronged attack for us on this front."

"Fundamentally, it has always been our position that it is inappropriate for adults to bet on young people," said Bill Saum, NCAA director of agent and gambling activities.

Saum added that the NCAA has an aggressive program of warning athletes to stay away from gambling and bookies. It ran anti-gambling advertisements during the national basketball tournament, among other initiatives, he said.

In the end, NCAA officials and supportive lawmakers say the bill would send a clear message to students: All gambling on college sports is illegal now -- even in Nevada -- so don't do it.

The bill "combats the corruptive influence of legal gambling" on college sports, Brownback said Thursday.

But Nevada lawmakers and gaming executives say universities should do more to police and prevent gambling on campus. They say banning bets in Nevada won't curb gambling at Maryland or anywhere else.

"The NCAA is a multibillion-dollar-a-year industry that is shirking its responsibility and hoping to blame Nevada for their inaction," Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., wrote to House members in a "Dear Colleague" letter last week.

Many students who gamble on college sports seemed to agree. They had never heard of the NCAA-backed legislation.

"That won't do a damn thing," said Anthony Rupolo, 23, who graduated last year. "More guys will just open up shop here."

Rupolo said he had never seen an anti-gambling message on campus or TV.

"I didn't even know the NCAA considered it a problem," Rupolo said.

Several student bettors agreed on one other point: Campus bookies are a dying breed. The future of bet-making is in cyberspace, they said. McCain's bill won't touch that, they said.

Mike Cocozzo, 22, is another senior who started making sports bets online two years ago. He netted about $420 during the NCAA Tournament, he said.

"It's just a lot easier to do it online," said Cocozzo, sitting on a picnic table outside his fraternity house. "It's legit, and you don't have to worry about a bookie folding on you."

Still, for every campus gambler, there are a number of students at Maryland who don't bet at all.

"Honestly, outside of NCAA Tournament pools, I don't know a single person who bets regularly on sports," said Drew Burach, one of numerous goateed Greeks who live on Fraternity Drive, a near-perfect U-shaped road with identical red brick houses.

Beth Greenberg, a 21-year-old junior, was shocked to hear her friend Seth Mirowitz, house president in the Alpha Sigma Phi fraternity, tell a reporter that campus bookies operate below the surface of daily life at the university, but that "if you want to find it, it's there."

"I didn't know that," Greenberg said during a chat at Stamp Student Union. "It's something that a lot of students are not even aware of. I thought the extent of it was March Madness pools."

There is also sentiment in other corners of campus:

* Junior David Malitz, 20, was busy one afternoon last week at his arts editor's desk at the Diamondback, the university student-run newspaper. Student gambling is not an issue the paper has covered, he and two other editors said.

"It's not quite an epidemic yet -- you don't hear about students dropping out of school or getting their thumbs chopped off," said Malitz, who said campus bookies are pretty rare. "I think that's probably mostly due to Internet gambling."

* University student counseling director Jonathan Kandell offered a seat on a worn couch and listened intently to a few questions.

Kandell helps students work through a host of problems: depression, academic stresses, relationship woes, even compulsive Internet use, he said.

But gambling problems? Only "every so often," Kandell said.

If students are in debt or in trouble because of betting -- and Kandell is sure that there are some out there -- they don't seek help from him, he said.

* From their perch on the second floor of Annapolis Hall, associate director of resident life Jan Davidson and his staff oversee Maryland's 8,325 students (of 24,500 total Maryland undergraduates) who live in university housing.

Not one dorm-floor supervisor has ever come to him with concerns that student betting is out of control, he said.

The university doesn't run any anti-gambling programs in the dorms.

"We don't hear anything about it," he said. But maybe campus police do, he suggested.

* University Police Capt. Don Smith, the unit's public relations officer, had his hands full this week after drunken students trashed and burned several areas of town in the hours following Duke's victory over Maryland, causing an estimated $500,000 in damage.

Some criticized the cops for slow reaction and making no arrests.

No students have been arrested for bookmaking or betting, either, Smith said.

"I've been here 24 years, and I'm racking my brain and I can't think of even one (gambling case)," Smith said.

Nor have students been punished by the university administration for gambling operations. The school's Office of Judicial Programs, responsible for student discipline, hasn't dealt with a gambling case in the 12 years that program director John Zackler can recall.

One man at Maryland who has spent a considerable amount of time thinking about gambling is Criminology Department Chairman Charles Wellford. He also acts as the university's representative to the NCAA and has served as part of a recent National Academy of Sciences study on gambling.

Wellford said the NCAA has done a good job of warning Maryland athletes about the dangers of gambling.

"They've gotten the message," Wellford said.

And Wellford said Maryland is ahead of other schools in proactively attacking gambling by students in general.

Maryland last year held a seminar for university leaders on the topic. School officials have considered making "facilitating gambling" a specific grounds for punishment under the school's student code of conduct, Wellford said.

Wellford pauses when asked if the NCAA-backed bill to ban betting in Nevada would be another way to curb gambling by students at Maryland.

"It can't hurt," Wellford said. "And it probably would lead to some decreases. It eliminates some availability. One thing we know about gambling is that the more available it is, the more people will take advantage of it."

archive