When Pride Still Mattered Chapter 19 - Foot of the Cross
I don’t know if this week’s chapter just happens to be timely or if athletes betting on sports is just a timeless phenomenon. If I had to pick, I’d say the latter. Sure, a wave of NFL players has gotten busted lately for gambling and gambling-related offenses, but Maraniss shows here that football players have been betting on sports for a long time.
I say “for a long time” and not “in the past, and now recently” because, well, let’s not kid ourselves. Just because guys aren’t getting suspended doesn’t mean those bets aren’t getting placed. It’s of a kind to PEDs — just because you don’t see the needles doesn’t mean they’re not there.
Here’s the question I’m wrestling with: is it bad?
I am personally against gambling. It rarely seems like a good idea, and given its tendency to become habit-forming it feels like a bad game to start playing. But, as with many things often positioned as vices, there are ways in which it could be handled responsibly. And, hey, for that matter, there’s a lot about gambling that feels fun. I’ve looked at my own record picking NFL games before and considered what I could stand to gain if I put actual money down on my own picks. It’s alluring and potentially lucrative!
To that end, I completely understand why guys like Paul Hornung, Alex Karras, or their modern equivalents would want to bet on games. You could build a nice little side hustle if you hit your bets, and if you’re betting on your own team, what’s the real harm? You could argue that betting actually encourages you to play even harder than you would otherwise.
But from the NFL’s perspective, any bet opens an unseemly door. Yes, today you promise to be responsible. Today you say you’d never bet against your own team. But by placing bets you already admit to some kind of untoward influence from money — who’s to say you couldn’t be tempted to cross the most sacred threshold in sports and render the game unfair just for a few dollars more?
Again, I don’t know if it’s ultimately bad or not that athletes are placing bets. It’s not something I would do; though I’ve had some good runs picking games, I have far too little confidence in my own abilities to put actual money on the line. But I can’t say it’s not alluring, and that’s why I have a hard time outright condemning Hornung. Yeah, it was stupid. But I get it.
Maraniss’s skillful explanation of Hornung’s character in previous chapters also helps a lot here. Though Hornung was definitely the glamorous playboy he portrayed himself to be, there was also quite a bit of “yes sir, no sir” rule following in his character. He wanted to have fun, sure, but he also wanted to do the right thing, which is why he complied with the NFL’s investigation more than he probably had to.
I don’t know if he really had a choice. Though he did comply and though it does seem that people gave him some benefit of the doubt for doing so, I don’t know how much it really helped him to go along with the NFL’s exploration of the league’s gambling-related underbelly. He probably ran the risk of a longer suspension if he fought. Perhaps it was best to just come clean when it became clear there was no escape.
Finally, we’ve talked a lot about Vince Lombardi’s family life, such as it was. This chapter makes me wonder if Lombardi’s time in Green Bay isn’t best understood through the lens of a father-son relationship with Paul Hornung. He clearly loved his star back in a special way, wanted the best for him, and pushed him to be great. That Lombardi’s greatest rise coincided with Hornung’s seems to mean something, though I don’t know exactly what. It’s hard to extricate one from the other, and it’s hard not to see the words of a wounded father in his plea to Hornung to stay at the foot of the cross.
Interesting notes
I was very interested to see how different players handled news of the investigation. Max McGee, Hornung’s fellow bon vivant, seems to have had genuine surprise at the news, which is a surprise in and of itself. Ron Kramer made it his mission to mind his own business. Jerry Kramer was darkly amused by the hypocrisy of it all.
I don’t think we should take Maraniss’s observation that the gambling scandal paralleled the cheating scandal at West Point as any kind of indictment of Lombardi, and I don’t think Maraniss meant it that way. I think it just shows the pervasive need human beings have to try to skirt the rules, even when they don’t have to.
Maraniss drops the word “obstreperous” as a descriptor of Detroit’s Alex Karras. The word is defined as “noisy and difficult to control,” which fits everything I’ve ever read about Karras.