It was 1960 when David Threlfall bet 10 pounds British Sterling at odds of 1,000/1 that a man would walk on the moon before the end of the decade. Nine years later, when Neil Armstrong took "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind," Threlfall collected $10,000 pounds.
Like Armstrong's lunar module, the era of off-the-wall, goofy, publicity grabbing wagers had finally been launched.
It took about a decade before Nevada's licensed bookmakers began leaping into the world of wacky wagering. When they did, it was with all the fanfare and flair of a Siegfried & Roy show.
In 1979, Jackie Gaughan, one of Las Vegas' gaming pioneers and the owner of the El Cortez Hotel, put up a proposition on where Skylab, a faltering 77-ton American space satellite, would fall to earth. Gaughan posted prices on all the planet's locations, including the five oceans - packaged as an entry and made the 5/1 favorite - as well as individual countries and states. One fellow wagered $2,000 and accepted odds of 12/1 that Skylab would land in what was then the Soviet Union. You could get odds of 100/1 on California or 2,000/1 on tiny Rhode Island. Gaughan even offered odds of 10,000/1 that the space junk would crash into the El Cortez.
As it turned out, Skylab fell to Earth in Australia, a 30/1 proposition.
While Gaughan's journey to the outer limits of bookmaking turned out to be a promotional bonanza, other bet makers sometimes have been grounded by the Nevada Gaming Control Board, the agency that monitors the state's multi-billion dollar industry.
A year after Gaughan's unearthly venture, Sonny Reizner, the sports book director at the old Castaways Hotel, interested bettors in the proposition "Who shot JR?" the question that was posed regarding the identity of the assailant of oil baron J.R. Ewing in a season-ending cliffhanger episode of the hit TV series, Dallas. Reizner quoted odds for every character in the nighttime soap. Since this was under the guise of a sports bet, Reizner even added Dallas Cowboys coach Tom Landry to the list of suspects.
It was only a day later, however, when the Gaming Control Board ordered Reizner to take down the bet and refund all the money wagered. The Board contended that someone had to have a script and know the result in advance, a violation of GCB policy.
Undeterred by the actions of the GCB, the late Johnny Quinn, the sports book manager at the Union Plaza in downtown Las Vegas, put up an even more outrageous proposition wager the next year. Noting that because of an ongoing controversy involving the murder of President Kennedy the grave of presumed assassin Lee Harvey Oswald was about to be exhumed, Quinn put up a proposition on whose body authorities would find in the coffin. The Union Plaza offered odds on whether the grave contained Oswald, a Soviet agent, Jack Ruby (the man who killed Oswald), or nobody. Expressing "grave" concerns about the piety of such a wager, the GCB slammed the lid on Quinn's proposition after just a few bets.
In 1987, the late Gene Maday, the owner of Little Caesars, attempted to list a price on whether televangelist Oral Roberts would raise the $8 million Roberts claimed God told him he needed if he was to avoid an imminent death.
"I would have made the over/under line at $4.6 million," said the crusty Maday after gaming officials voided the devilish wager and threw the book - though, presumably, not the Good One - at him. "We would book anything if the gaming board would let us."
Unrestrained by strict USA governmental controls, bookmakers outside American jurisdiction can offer even more wagering options to their clients. For example, here at
The Greek Sportsbook, we already have prices posted on the winners of the 2003 Academy Awards and who will be the next Pope. Odds on the winners of popular reality television shows, such as "Survivor," also are a staple at
The Greek Sportsbook.
But for sheer audacity, no one beats the British bookmakers. For example, one British bookmaking firm offered odds of 14 million to 1 that Elvis Presley would crash-land a UFO in Loch Ness, striking the Monster. Yeah, we'd rather lay it than take it too. After all, if the King does pilot a flying saucer into an emergency splashdown at Loch Ness but misses the Monster, you lose. Talk about a bad beat.
If it seems unlikely to you that Elvis would choose Loch Ness over Wembley Stadium for the start of his comeback tour, here are some other out-of-this-world propositions to whet your wagering appetite: It's 500/1 that the FBI confirms that Elvis is still alive and 500/1 that Michael and LaToya Jackson really are the same person.
UK bookmakers also have offered odds of 1,000/1 that Tiger Woods will become President of the United States and 5,000/1 that Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky will marry.
A 58-year-old man in California accepted odds of 10,000/1 that he can father a child by "normal means" at the age of 100. An Oregon couple took a price of 5,000/1 that the American or British governments would acknowledge the presence of an extra-terrestrial spaceship in Earth's atmosphere before the end of the millennium. Sorry, they lost.
Perhaps the strangest bet of all was made by London resident Matthew Dumbrell who placed a wager at odds of 1 million to 1 that the world would end before the year 2000. Well, it didn't but even if it did, assuming Dumbrell survived, who would have been left to pay him?
