Just prior to the pro football season, Wayne Allyn Root decided to drop a “sizable” chunk of change on the Denver Broncos to win it all at 20-to-1 odds.
So, if Jake “The Snake” Plummer and the rest of the Broncos hadn’t thudded ignominiously to the turf during the conference championship Sunday, Jan. 22, Root would have been a heartbeat away from pocketing enough cash to buy every drunk on the strip one of Vegas’ famous $2 steak dinners. Twice.
Well, that’s why they call it gambling.
Maybe you aren’t the least bit interested in professional football or sports betting, and couldn’t care less who Root bets his money on. Maybe. But several million people put their faith in his sports-betting prowess, so when he reveals whom he puts his own cash on — for free, no less — well, that’s something to think about.
To say Wayne Allyn Root speaks rapidly would be like calling the Grand Canyon a hole. It’s a sure bet — no pun intended — that in terms of words spoken per time expended, any Root speech will end up being the best value for your entertainment dollar this side of a Gilbert and Sullivan show. The self-professed salesman and “King of Vegas” was in San Francisco last week to address the Republican Jewish Coalition of Northern California.
He believes Jews ought to be Republicans because they don’t have moral compunctions against “gambling,” i.e. taking a risk and being your own boss.
Root, who founded Nevada’s Republican Jewish Coalition, has the energy of a Starbucks’ barista who’s been dipping into the inventory, even though he never drinks coffee. He never drinks alcohol or smokes cigarettes either, despite the fact he resides in Vegas, where both are beyond ubiquitous. In fact, his only vice — other than, perhaps, that gambling thing — may be Chinese food.
At an age when most boys in his Mt. Vernon, N.Y., neighborhood wanted to be Joe Namath, Root wanted to be Jimmy the Greek — or, as he puts it with a laugh, “Wayne the Jew.”
“I grew up in a neighborhood on the borderline with the Bronx, and kids gambled. All the kids liked to gamble. They played craps on the streets, bet on sports, went to the track if they could sneak in and, if not, bet with a bookmaker. You had to prove your manhood,” he recalled.
New York papers in the late 1970s ran features on the “betting whiz kid” who cleaned out all the other boys in his high school. (The dad of one of those kids, rather than behaving vindictively, saw a story there and tipped off a journalist he knew.)
Root graduated to Columbia University — the football team did not win a single game during his four years, incidentally — and earned a bachelor’s in political science. But, unlike his sister, who went into law, he informed his parents he was going into professional sports handicapping.
Needless to say, they weren’t thrilled. But they lived long enough to see Root sitting next to Jimmy the Greek hosting a cable news show about sports betting. He really did become “Wayne the Jew.”
Root’s success doesn’t come from a vast knowledge of the history of professional sports, knowledge of teams’ records on Astroturf or natural grass, in day games or night games or the big game successes and failures of quarterbacks descended from Archie Manning.
Instead, it’s all about seeing what everyone else thinks and then tacking the other way. Basically, Root has become a millionaire riding awful teams that manage to beat the spread against good teams. Employing his strategy, he manages to win about 55 percent of the time, a primo percentage in his line of work.
An author of five books about gambling,money and Republican politics, Root, who hopes to become the next senator of the great state of Nevada, currently serves as co-host of “King of Vegas,” a reality show airing on Spike TV.
Root serves as the Jewish Jeff Probst on this gambling version of “Survivor,” pitting a dozen contestants against each other in 10 different forms of gambling — roulette, blackjack and more kinds of poker than you knew existed. Root calls it “the decathlon of gambling,” with a $1 million winner-take-all prize serving as the gold medal.
Of the dozen contestants, four are Jewish, including an 83-year-old Brooklynite. Root’s co-host, chosen without his input by the network, is Max Kellerman, a motor-mouthed boxing expert and TV host, and also a Jewish graduate of Columbia.
“It’s like being with my long-lost brother,” Root said with a chuckle.
In fact, the show’s director, producers, probably even the gaffers are all Jewish.
“Whenever people say the TV business is full of Jews and Jews think that’s an anti-Semitic statement,” he says, before raising his voice a decibel or 12, “well, it is full of Jews! We’re a very creative and successful people!”
Other than the Denver Broncos, there’s one more bit of free advice to be gleaned from Wayne the Jew, and it’s not nearly as sexy:
“When it comes to gambling, don’t bet your house on it. Because there is no sure thing.”