Why was Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder really fired from his $500,000-a-year football prognosticating job at CBS in 1988?
The story everybody knows is that during an interview for Martin Luther King Day that he said a black athlete is superior to a white athlete because "he's been bred to be that way because of his thigh size and big size."
Others say the outrageous statement was just an excuse for CBS to dump him for his declining skills at picking winners. The joke around Las Vegas was that gamblers in desperate need of a big win would tune into the Sunday football pregame show, get Snyder's hottest pick, then bet the other side.
Now, in a book to be released in mid-January, a Las Vegas woman who interviewed Snyder extensively before his death last April at age 76 will reveal what she calls "the shocking truth behind the CBS dismissal."
"Farewell, Jimmy The Greek, Wizard of Odds," (Eakin Press, $24.95 hardback) will appear in the nation's bookstores after its premier in Las Vegas on a date yet to be determined.
The co-author, Ginger Wadsworth, a former Miss Alabama Teen who spent three years interviewing co-author Snyder and researching his background, will kick off the release with a Las Vegas book signing at a site to be determined.
A news release from Eakin Press notes that after Snyder was "unjustly labeled a racist" and fired, "he retreated into a world of solitude."
"The mystery behind Jimmy the Greek's instant firing and banishment from the public eye baffled his supporters until now. With the publication of 'Farewell Jimmy the Greek,' the story is finally told," the publisher said.
Regardless of Snyder's strange views on genetics or his ability -- or lack thereof -- to pick winners, he was responsible in the mid-'70s for making sports betting a highly popular form of entertainment.
Snyder, born Emetrios Synodinos in Steubenville, Ohio, became a household name before his demise, which actually began in the early 1980s when he punched colleague Brent Musburger in a bar. He later told fellow CBS "NFL Today" pregame analyst Phyllis George Brown he hated her husband.
But Snyder also entertained millions as a colorful tout -- albeit unpolished in appearance -- with the gift of gab. For 12 seasons on the show that preceded CBS-televised football games, he plied a craft he had taken a lifetime to hone. To his credit, Snyder correctly predicted the winner of 18 of 21 Super Bowls.
Snyder, who alternated residences between Las Vegas and Durham, N.C., actually was launched to stardom not by the television show, but with his sports betting column that began in the early 1960s in the SUN.
The column became nationally syndicated in a time when sports betting was taboo in most American communities. Though still illegal outside Las Vegas, sports betting now is a popular and largely tolerated vice nationwide.
The book Snyder wrote with Wadsworth, a local writer and publicist, is filled with anecdotes and tales of his adventures with such notables as entertainers Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin.
The book also addresses:
* How Snyder's gambling career was spurred by a murder-suicide in his childhood that left him motherless.
* Jimmy The Greek's conviction in 1962 for interstate gambling and how then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy tried to make an example out of him. (President Ford later pardoned Snyder.)
* How Snyder won $170,000 in 1948 betting against presidential hopeful Tom Dewey because the candidate had a mustache.
* Jimmy the Greek's three years of public relations work for reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes.
* Why Snyder became secluded in the last eight years of his life and what led to his death by heart failure at a Las Vegas convalescent center.
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