An NFL Sunday in the Life of Vic Salerno

VIC SALERNO woke up at 5:30 a.m. on a Sunday earlier this football season, breakfasted on coffee and cigarettes and steered his Cadillac Eldorado down I-15--a route he followed in superstitious hopes of preserving his winning streak. At 6:30, he pulled up at Leroy’s Race & Sports Book.

There, he flipped on the computer in his office and started reviewing National Football League games to see exactly how much had been bet during the week.

By 8:30 a.m., the action started heating up. As his four clerks recorded new bets at their workstations, updated dollar figures flashed onto Salerno’s screen. (In the old days, bookies kept a very inaccurate running tally.)

He scrolled from team to team, looking for games where too much money was pouring in on one side. At 9:30 a.m., he noticed that $2,000 was bet on the Los Angeles Rams and not a penny on the Detroit Lions. Salerno decided to move the point spread from L.A. favored by 9 to L.A. by 9 1/2. That meant that bettors taking L.A. now would lose--not tie--if L.A. won by 9 points--a subtle change but enough to steer some money onto Detroit. He made dozens of other point-spread changes.

(Bookies don’t want too much money riding on one team, preferring instead to have the wagers evenly divided. In an ideal scenario, the losers’ money is used to pay the winners and the bookie keeps the vigorish, a 10% surcharge tacked on to losing bets.)

At 10 a.m., just before kickoff, Salerno got a computer printout of the betting totals for the morning games. Then he settled in to watch some football on his four 13-inch TVs and checked scores of other games on his Sports Page Pocket Ticker, a beeperlike device that features a digital readout of breaking sports results.

At 12:45 p.m., high anxiety kicked in. Salerno began jumping around on the computer, entering final scores, checking out his profit or loss, and trying to shave point spreads for the afternoon games. At the same time, he glanced up at the silent TVs to catch the closing minutes of the contests. Suddenly, he slammed his fist down and started cursing. San Francisco 49er quarterback Joe Montana had just cost Leroy’s $7,000 by heaving a desperation 78-yard touchdown bomb to wide receiver Jerry Rice with 42 seconds left. That pass sent the company from winning $4,000 to losing $3,000.

Salerno, trying to calm down, checked his totals; he had accepted $200,000 worth of bets on 13 NFL games. (Nevada handles about $20 million to $25 million each Sunday on the NFL.)

He spent most of the rest of the afternoon watching games and checking his Pocket Ticker for scores. From 4 to 4:30, he plugged in the remaining results, including a 17-10 Rams victory that earned him $1,000. He then scrolled to the results and found that Leroy’s had lost $5,000 on the day.

“It’s frustrating,” Salerno said. “We were ahead at half-time all over the place.”

That night, Salerno and his wife, Judy, canceled plans for a barbecue with friends. Instead, Salerno drove home, took a swim, watched a little college football on ESPN and went to sleep early about 10 p.m.

The next morning he took a new route along the Strip to work.