Betting has always been with us, even going back to marbles

The New York Post had the best headline: “All Bets Are On,” with the subhead, “Sports Will Never Be The Same After Supreme Court OKs Gambling On Games.”

That nailed it. Sports will never be the same. And Pete Rose may get a plaque in baseball’s Hall of Fame beside his records after all — and in his lifetime.

It’s bad news. Right away, in the aftermath of the high court’s decision, various big league commissioners are advancing plans to protect “the sport’s integrity.” I want to examine, carefully, what they come up with, when they come up with it.

Of course, we have all grown up with gambling. Remember, before you were even in knickers, the games of marbles? And the kid next door, the little cheater, won half of them away from you. You may remember an old lullaby called “Little Man, You’ve had a Busy Day.” It was about a father saying Goodnight to his little boy. One of the lines was, “Johnny won your marbles, tell you what I’ll do; Dad’ll get you new ones right away . . .” The shaver in that tune had apparently experienced his first gambling setback.

Though we lived in the country, some of the guys from Burrville School would meet with our bags of marbles after the school day ended in early summer and Miss Cleary had locked the doors and walked down the hill to catch her bus back to Torrington.

We’d draw a circle in the road, load the marbles into it, “knuckle down,” and fire away. Everyone had a “shooter marble,” which was a touch larger than the ordinary marbles. I don’t remember all the rules, but I remember that when a guy knocked another guy’s marble out of the circle with his “shooter,” he kept it.

I recall losing a good number of my marbles to a little short guy we called “Jules the Ringer.” Jules had an educated thumb and an unerring eye and boy-oh-boy, could he ever knuckle! It was said he had tons of (our) marbles stored in his house.

Gradually, we realized gambling was all around us, everywhere we went. When we began to caddy at Green Woods, we immediately discovered that betting on matches, or side bets in friendly games, was as much a part of the game as clubs and golf balls. It was not always friendly and sometimes downright ugly. There were card games in the clubhouse and those gentlemen didn’t play for matchsticks. There was always a Daily Racing Form available and many a trek to one of the New England or New York Tracks originated at the club.

Four years in the military taught me plenty about gambling. A thousand painful examples still haunt my dreams, but the lessons remain. My favorite reminder is of a young man, right out of basic, who looked and acted sort of eighth-gradeish. Immature, wide-eyed and wondering just what this U.S. Air Force thing was all about, anyway. His name was Finch Stubbs, from Indiana.

A few days after he arrived at our base in St. Albans, Vermont, he wandered into the Day Room. A couple of guys were playing

pingpong and two more had a pool game going. Finch sat down and started reading a magazine. “Want the winner?,” a pingponger asked. Finch shook his head. “How about over here?” asked a pool player, whose name was Kroyden and who played expertly.

Stubbs hemmed and hawed and finally said he’d be right back and went out and returned with a long leather case. From it he pulled a pool cue in two parts. He screwed them together, chalked up and said in a very mature and manly way, “let’s play.”

They played. Finch Stubbs took Kroyden for whatever money he was carrying. And then he did the same to me. Soon the Day Room was half full of soldier boys with various sums of money in their pockets, dying to show this whippersnapper a thing or two about money pool.

Yeah, right. Stubbs walked with full pockets, headed for the Mess Hall.

All that money-winning makes a kid — rather, a man — hungry.

Yes, all of us know that gambling’s been with us since Cain bet Abel he could beat him to the apple tree.

Gambling’s been here all along. Let’s wait and see what Connecticut does with it now that the Supreme Court ruled that anything goes.