Roxy Roxborough’s rise from bettor to oddsmaker to Hall of Famer

Before Michael “Roxy” Roxborough became America’s preeminent oddsmaker in the 1980s and 1990s, he was a sharp bettor who beat up Nevada sportsbooks on baseball totals.

He was getting the best of Cal Neva in Reno on a regular basis when sportsbook director Chris Andrews started asking him for his totals.

“I wanted to bet them first,” said Roxborough, 72. “But I made a deal with him that when I was done betting, I’d tell him what I thought they should be.”

Andrews eventually started paying Roxborough for his lines on all sports, and so did several other shops in Northern Nevada. Las Vegas books soon followed.

“I didn’t want to get paid because I wanted to bet,” he said. “My whole life changed when Scotty Schettler asked me to be the oddsmaker at the Stardust.

“He had just gotten the job to take over the Stardust because the mob had been kicked out.”

The Stardust was the most respected book in Las Vegas. It put up the opening lines, had the largest limits and welcomed action from all bettors, including the wise guys.

“Other people started hiring us because they figured if I was making the Stardust line, that’s pretty good,” Roxborough said. “Technology changed the business a lot. We went from phones to fax machines to online printers to online screens to the internet.”

That led to the massive growth of Las Vegas Sports Consultants, an oddsmaking service Roxborough founded and ran from 1982 to 1999 that provided the lines to more than 90 percent of Nevada sportsbooks.

“It also led to me not getting another day off for about 17 years,” Roxborough said with a laugh. “It turns out you have to work 60 to 70 hours a week to escape a 40-hour job.”

Roxborough and Schettler will be inducted into the Sports Gambling Hall of Fame on Friday at Circa with eight others in the inaugural class — including Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, who preceded Schettler at the Stardust and was portrayed by Robert De Niro in the classic mob movie “Casino.”

The Stardust put up the opening lines at 8 a.m. daily and at 6 p.m. on Sundays, when a long line of bettors would eagerly await the following week’s football spreads.

Schettler started a Stardust lottery system to determine the order of the line to give everyone a chance to bet the openers.

“It was a very fair system. You could play some games and get back in line. After about an hour, you’ve got a pretty solid number that people are betting both ways,” Roxborough said. “They did an amazing service for the state, because they would go at 8 in the morning. Most places would open at 10. So after the Stardust smoothed everything out, that would end up being the line.”

After the lines were posted, bettors would run to a bank of pay phones near the entrance of the book to share the information with other gamblers around the country.

“We had 11 pay phones outside of the building,” former Stardust vice president of casino operations Richard Schuetz said at last year’s Bet Bash at Circa. “The guy who serviced the pay phones once told me they were the highest 11 revenue-producing pay phones in the United States.”

Roxborough, who said he was moved by being named to the Hall of Fame, is credited with pioneering the use of mathematical formulas and computer models for oddsmaking. But he said renowned pro sports bettor Billy Walters, his fellow SGHOF inductee, forced his hand with the success of his famed “Computer Group” betting syndicate.

“We got dragged into it because the players, particularly Billy Walters’ group, were coming up with better numbers on college football and college basketball, where there were so many teams that we were booking,” he said. “Using mathematical formulas, they were able to keep track of all the teams better than we could. They sort of forced us to counteract that.

“Also, Scotty would make the schedule larger every year at the Stardust, so eventually we had to have computer input to track all these teams.”

Roxborough, who was born in New Hampshire and raised in Vancouver, also co-hosted the popular “Stardust Line” radio show and co-founded “America’s Line,” a daily sports odds column that appeared in 128 newspapers in North America.

“It was a great business for a lot of time, because casual fans would get the line out of the newspaper,” he said.

Always available to the media and nattily dressed in a suit and tie, the affable Roxborough acted as the industry’s unofficial spokesperson and helped legitimize sports betting.

“I don’t know if that’s true or not, but I looked a lot different than Jimmy the Greek,” he said of late “NFL Today” handicapper Jimmy Snyder. “What legitimized the industry was casinos getting sportsbooks. It’s hard to believe now, but at one time a lot of casinos didn’t think they needed a race and sportsbook.

“They used to think it was an entertainment center. I think we helped show casinos and hotels that it could be a profit center, too.”

The fun-loving Roxborough, who said he never wanted a real job, retired at age 48 after selling LVSC and other financial interests. He has since split time between Thailand and Las Vegas.

“I knew what I wanted to do. I wanted to make enough money not to work,” he said. “It just took me to 48 to do it.”

Contact reporter Todd Dewey at tdewey@reviewjournal.com. Follow @tdewey33 on Twitter.