Jimmy Snyder (sports commentator)

James George Snyder Sr. (born Dimetrios Georgios Synodinos, September 9, 1918 – April 21, 1996), better known as Jimmy the Greek, was an American sports commentator and Las Vegas bookmaker.

A regular contributor to the CBS program The NFL Today, Snyder predicted the scores of NFL games, which sports bettors used to determine the point spread.

According to his autobiography Jimmy the Greek, Snyder bet $10,000 on the 1948 election between Thomas Dewey and Harry S. Truman, getting 17–1 odds for Truman to win.

In a later interview he indicated that he knew Truman was going to win because Dewey had a mustache and "American women didn't trust men with a mustache".

He invested money in oil drilling and coal mining, but those ventures failed.

He lived in Las Vegas after moving there in the 1950s.

He worked as an oddsmaker and gambler, at places such as the Vegas Turf and Sportsroom.

In the mid 1960s, he began a news column involving a sports betting line for the Las Vegas Sun, which eventually received widespread publication.

In 1962, he was convicted of interstate transportation of bets and wagering information alongside conspiracy and violating the Federal Communications Act (having been caught giving a betting tip over the telephone).

He was fined $50,000 and labeled a convicted felon.

He worked in public relations for a time, including a couple of years working for Howard Hughes.

In 1974, he received a presidential pardon from Gerald Ford.

The sports line eventually led to a 12-year stint on the CBS Sunday morning show, The NFL Today, a pregame show for National Football League (NFL) games, starting in 1976.

Known simply as "Jimmy the Greek," he would appear in segments with sportscaster Brent Musburger and predict the results of that week's NFL games.

While already famous in gambling circles, his rough charm made him into a minor celebrity.

He would have conflicts with both Musburger and Phyllis George, with a 1980 fight happening between Musberger and Snyder while George was brought to tears by a comment made by Snyder over her husband, then-Kentucky Governor John Brown.

While Musberger would make light of the fight (covered by the press), George would request to have Snyder tape his segment with Musberger in advance so that Snyder and George were not on the set at the same time.

As sports betting was illegal in most of the United States, and was at the time a general social taboo, his segment would not overtly mention betting or gambling.

Instead, Snyder would predict the score of each game; for example, he would say the Los Angeles Raiders would beat the Los Angeles Rams by a score of 31–21 (ten points).

This allowed bettors who knew the line of the game to be able to deduce his selection when betting the point spread: If the spread in the example game was the Raiders by five, bettors would know Snyder was picking the Raiders to beat it.

The NFL was adamant about avoiding any official connections between gambling and the league, but NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle was an acquaintance of Snyder and made it clear that his work on CBS was acceptable.

In January 1988, Snyder was fired by CBS after he made comments suggesting that breeding practices during slavery had led blacks to become superior athletes.

Snyder was born in Steubenville, Ohio.

On January 16, 1988, Snyder was fired by the CBS network (where he had been a regular on NFL Today since 1976) after making several questionable comments about African Americans during a lunchtime interview on January 15, 1988, with Ed Hotaling, a producer-reporter for NBC-owned WRC-TV, at Duke Zeibert's Washington, D.C., restaurant.

Hotaling said that he had been doing interviews with various people in the restaurant for a program celebrating the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. and what they thought the next step in civil rights progress for African Americans should be.

He put the question to Snyder.

"It was all on the occasion of Martin Luther King's birthday," Hotaling said.

"So I thought it was an appropriate, forward-looking question, and got a backward-looking answer."

Hotaling did not approve of the firing in an interview, stating, "It's outrageous he {Snyder} should be fired for exercising his First Amendment rights. Rather than silence him, they should keep him on and cover the issue of civil rights in sports."

One of Snyder's more controversial responses to the question was that African Americans were naturally superior athletes at least in part because they had been bred to produce stronger offspring during slavery:

The black is a better athlete to begin with, because he's been bred to be that way.

Because of his high thighs and big thighs that goes up into his back.

And they can jump higher and run faster because of their bigger thighs.

And he's bred to be the better athlete because this goes back all the way to the Civil War, when, during the slave trading, the big, the owner, the slave owner would breed his big black to his big woman so that he could have uh big black kid, see.

That's where it all started!

According to the New York Times obituary, Snyder expressed regret for his comments: "What a foolish thing to say."

According to his New York Times obituary of April 22, 1996, Snyder's family roots were in the village of Tholopotami (Θολoποτάμι), on the island of Chios in the Aegean Sea.

As a teenager in Ohio, he became acquainted with bookmakers.

When he was ten years old, he lost his mother when his uncle, driven mad by the loss of his wife, shot and killed Snyder's mother and aunt, who were walking home, before killing himself.

Snyder told his mother that he wanted to stay at the grocery store that his father was running and play rather than walk home with his mother, which he cited as likely saving his life but also as a reason he became a gambler.