Who remembers Jimmy the Greek? He had a 12-year stint on the CBS Sunday morning show, The NFL Today, a pregame show for National Football League games. Known simply as Jimmy the Greek, he would appear in segments with sportscaster Brent Musburger and predict the results of that weeks NFL games. While already famous in gambling circles, his rough charm made him into a minor celebrity. He had fairly major conflicts with Musburger (whom he once punched in the face at a bar when the show anchor basically called him stupid) and Phyllis George (whom he once brought to tears before a show by making an ugly comment about her husband, leading to a scenario where Jimmy would tape segments in advance with Musberger so that he and George were not on the set at the same time), but the core group was able to overcome them and continue CBS massive Sunday ratings success for a long time. As sports betting was (and remains) 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, Jimmy the Greek would predict the score of each game; for example, he would say the Los Angeles Raiders would beat the Los Angeles Rams 31-21. 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 Jimmy was picking the Raiders to beat it. The NFL was adamant about avoiding any official connections between gambling and the league, but Pete Rozelle was an acquaintance of Jimmy and made it clear that his work on CBS was acceptable. ........but like so many in the limelight....his downfall came when he opened his mouth and sounded like Archie Bunker....... On January 16, 1988, he was fired by the CBS network (where he had been a regular on NFL Today since 1976) after commenting to WRC-TV reporter Ed Hotaling at Duke Zeiberts Washington, D.C. restaurant 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 hes 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 hes bred to be the better athlete because this goes back all the way to the Civil War when during the slave trade … the slave owner would breed his big black to his big woman so that he could have a big black kid …
Posted on: Mon, 01 Dec 2014 03:38:30 +0000
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