Sentinel Staff
We`ll wager on terrorist attacks, the next pope, whether Britney is pregnant or how long Chuck and Camilla will last. And odds are we`ll keep on gambling.
Is nothing sacred anymore?
The body of Pope John Paul II was still lying in state, with 18,000 mourners an hour filing past, when betting parlors started posting odds on his successor.
Yes, not only could you wager -- in person or online -- on who would be chosen the next pope, you also could put money on what the next papal name would be.
"John Paul" was running 5 to 2 odds. "Blessed Innocent" was 40 to1. "Sixtus" was 66 to 1.
Blessed Innocent?
"Believe me, I thought some of the names had to be a joke at first," says Barni Evans, marketing director of the Dublin betting company Paddy Power. "But we didn`t just pull them out of the air. We searched back through the annals of papal history for all the names ever used by the pope."
After all, Evans insists, Paddy Power is a "good Catholic company."
But let`s say you`re fuzzy on papal protocol. Not to worry -- if betting on the next pope proves nothing else, it validates the maxim that people will indeed bet on anything.
And they apparently have since the beginning of time.
"It is sometimes called the second oldest profession," says Bill Eadington, director of the Institute for the Study of Gambling and Commercial Gaming at the University of Nevada-Reno. "There are stories of finding dice made out of the ankle bones of sheep in Egyptian tombs."
At the crucifixion of Jesus, Roman soldiers cast lots to see who would get his garments.
In ancient China, men gambled on cricket fighting, their bugs battling to the death. Weird as that may sound, it gets weirder.
Last November, police in Shanghai smashed an illegal gambling ring that took bets on cricket fighting, confiscating $220,000. The crickets were not only starved before the bouts to make them more aggressive; news reports say the bugs also were given drugs to fix the fights` outcome -- raising the prickly issue of whether they will be banned from the Insects Hall of Fame.
Pentagon tried it
Of course, bizarre, tasteless and morbid betting isn`t merely the purview of the Chinese, Romans and those fun-loving Irish. Consider the news in July 2003 that the Pentagon was setting up an online gambling parlor that would allow anonymous investors to bet on the location of future terrorist attacks or predict assassinations and military coups.
The Defense Department called it the "policy analysis market" and was seeking $3 million in start-up funds when Senate Democrats got wind of it. They, by the way, had another name for it -- the "death and destruction pool."
"Actually, the logic behind it was pretty good," Eadington says. "Betting markets tend to consolidate a lot of information that otherwise never gets collected."
Of course, the notion didn`t play well in public, to say the least. One senator called it "grotesque." Another deemed it "unbelievably stupid" and "offensive to almost everyone." The plan was killed and Adm. John Poindexter, its main cheerleader, quit.
It may prove to be one of the precious few lines not crossed -- or covered.
Thanks largely to the Internet, where wagering has ballooned in a few short years into an estimated $10 billion-a-year industry, betting has invaded nearly every possible avenue of human existence. At a parlor somewhere (most of them outside the United States), you can bet on whether Britney Spears is pregnant, on whether Charles and Camilla will last, on which politician will be caught in the next sex scandal.
You can bet on the Oscars, the Grammys, the MTV Awards, the host city of the 2012 Olympics, whether stiletto heels have peaked in popularity and, if you`d thought about it earlier, whether there would be another "wardrobe malfunction" at the 2005 Super Bowl. One man reportedly collected $100,000 when he came through on a bet that he would get breast implants.
No word on cup size.
At the University of Iowa, you can bet -- real money -- on who will win the 2008 presidential race or, if you`re a health-care practitioner, where and when the flu virus will strike the state.
"We like to think of this as a new way to do surveillance for infectious diseases," Dr. Phillip Polgreen, an associate professor of internal medicine at the university, told The Des Moines Register in November.
The university`s business faculty launched the futures market in 1988, allowing students and others to invest up to $500 in the success of various political candidates. Your profits, if any, are determined largely by whether your candidate wins or how much of the popular vote he or she gets.
It may sound one step above a poker game, but the school insists the futures market is an excellent forecasting tool, and it has proved remarkably accurate. At midnight on Nov. 1, 2004, the night before the election, it had President Bush earning 50.45 percent of the popular vote. He wound up with 51.54 percent.
Las Vegas oddsmakers, much to their dismay, can`t get in on such action -- the Nevada Gaming Control Board limits betting there to sports. So sports books have tried to overcome the handicap by adding any number of esoteric wagers beyond the mere outcome of a game -- everything from who will win the coin toss to whether, for instance, total rushing touchdowns in the 2003 Super Bowl would exceed blocked shots by Houston Rockets center Yao Ming in a game the same day. (They did, 1 to 0.)
"Really, in a football game, you can bet on anything you can break down into a statistic," says Rick Allec, general manager of Don Best Sports, a sports gaming information Web site.
The lure of betting
So is it human nature to want to bet?
In some ways, yes, says Robert Thompson, professor of popular culture at Syracuse University. Though certain people are too thrifty or cautious to enjoy gambling, the lure of getting money and bragging rights for nothing more than a good guess is too strong for a lot of folks to resist.
"And something like correctly guessing the successor to the pope carries with it intellectual cachet," Thompson says. "You know, we use the phrase `it`s like a College of Cardinals` to mean something totally mysterious and unpredictable, so if you can win on that action, that`s pretty cool."
Besides, says Cocoa Beach resident Steve Rooks, a 49-year-old respiratory therapist, placing a bet spices things up. It makes games more exciting -- or wrenching -- to watch, and it gives you a sense of participation even as a spectator.
Rooks recently ventured online to wager on a poker tournament, eventually losing $750.
"I wanted to go to the Internet and put some money on the pope," he says, "but maybe now isn`t the best time for me. It hurt to lose that $750, but what hurt more was having to explain it to the wife."
