Hal Rothman says whether NFL likes it or not, Super Bowl, betting are linked

Sunday, Feb. 5, 2006 | 12:30 p.m.

It is almost as hard to remember a time when the Super Bowl was not a national event as it is to recall a time when Las Vegas was not chic.

The NFL would deny this, but the rise of the Super Bowl and that of Las Vegas are different sides of the same coin, evolutionary processes that are closely linked as gambling became gaming and the United States devoted itself to leisure and self-indulgence.

Gambling built both - not the NFL, you say, but it's true - and both have become post-modern entertainment. When Mick Jagger shakes his grandfatherly backside at halftime after a full week of all kinds of entertainment in midwinter Detroit, what was once a football game has become more than a sporting event.

It is a popular culture icon, a star that burns brightly in the American sky. This year's Super Bowl even touts an environmental program, to keep the event "cleaner and greener, and to lessen the impact on the local and global environment."

It wasn't always so. The first Super Bowl, in Los Angeles in January 1967, was not even a sellout. Only 61,496 people watched the Packers demolish the Chiefs in the 100,000-seat Los Angeles Coliseum. As late as 1972, you could walk up on game day and buy a ticket. The league has come a long way.

But not so far that it doesn't fear its roots. The NFL was always a gambler's league. The great names, Tim Mara, Art Rooney, Charles W. Bidwill, who owned the then-Chicago, later St. Louis, and eventually and pathetically, the Arizona Cardinals, Sonny Werblin of the Jets, Carroll Rosenblum of the Colts, and others all had ties to the world of gambling. Such figures are so far in the past that you would think no one cares ... but the NFL does.

For my money, this explains why the NFL is so consistently and fundamentally hostile to Las Vegas. It won't broadcast our commercials, it went out of its way to mess with Super Bowl parties here - and nowhere else - and it even challenged the right of satellite owners to broadcast the game. This hatred is pathological.

The NFL sees in its past the only conceivable threat to its future. The league has been dogged by betting scandals since the 1940s: Frankie Filchock, Paul Hornung and Alex Karras, and Art Schlichter stand out, but they are only the tip of the iceberg. There have certainly been plenty more. Betting is the lifeblood of football. Gambling maintains the fever pitch of fan intensity. Do you really think that grown men would paint their distended bellies in their team's colors and stand in subzero weather without their shirts if they didn't have money riding on the game? There isn't enough alcohol in the world ...

The flaw in the NFL's logic is that betting on its games everywhere but here feeds the coffers of all kinds of illegal enterprises. For all its money and power, the league always has one eye on the point spread. It has no idea what kind of influences its players are subjected to.

At least now, players make enough money that they're harder to buy than in the past, but wealthy young men still have their problems. It makes a lot more sense to embrace legalized sports betting operations like we have in Las Vegas than to tacitly condone an illegal infrastructure with tentacles throughout the nation.

But the NFL cannot stomach this because it refuses to recognize that Las Vegas and the league are twins, mirror images of one another. Both rose from tawdry obscurity to the limelight as culture loosened and as they successfully negotiated the changes in American society from deferred gratification to instant adulation of the self.

When players say NFL stands for "No Fun League," they are usually complaining about edicts against flamboyant celebration. But they've hit the NFL's problem on the nose: the league wants the money, power and fame that comes with being the nation's premier sport, but it fears precisely the attributes that won it that exalted position.

Even though NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue would turn pale at the prospect, the league should look to Las Vegas to see how to handle that double-edged sword. Since Wall Street has funded Las Vegas hotels, they've become the only thing in America more expensive than an NFL franchise.

Hal Rothman is a professor of History at UNLV. His column appears Sunday.