.jpg "Tocchet and Jones - gambling partners")
“BETZKY” screamed the inevitable New York Post headline, seemingly minutes after word leaked out that none other than the great Wayne Gretzky, his troublemaking big-haired wife Janet Jones, and Phoenix Coyotes assistant coach Ric Tocchet had been inveigled in the latest major gambling scandal to rock pro sports.
The abbreviated version of the scandal goes something like this: Tocchet, Gretzky’s assistant on the Phoenix bench, had organized a betting ring that raked in some $1.7 million in the weeks before the Super Bowl. According to the New Jersey authorities investigating the case, Jones bet up to $500,000 in the ring without Gretzky’s knowledge. Mike Bennett, Gretzky’s former agent and the general manager of the Coyotes, also allegedly bet with the ring — without Gretzky’s knowledge. When the scandal broke, Gretzky himself followed the same playbook he’d used following the fraud arrest of Bruce McCall, onetime Los Angeles Kings owner and Gretzky’s close friend and business partner (the two once co-owned a Honus Wagner T-206 card): he gushed about what great guys his arrested pals were and expressed astonishment that such a thing could have happened. If you think it’s unlikely that a husband could not be aware of a wife betting a half-million dollars on sports through his assistant coach, you’re not alone; Gretzky’s “innocence” in this affair seems to smell worse by the minute.
After the scandal broke, for instance, Gretzky made a call to Tocchet proclaiming his innocence and asking if anything could be done to keep his wife’s name out of the scandal. The call, as a self-interested person might have guessed it would be, was wiretapped and its contents made public — which was, needless to say, very convenient for Gretzky. As for his chivalrous defense of his wife, Gretzky quickly lost his patience and threw her under the bus as well, telling reporters a few days back to “go talk to the people who were involved.”
Big gambling scandals are like Category Five hurricanes; you can’t predict when they’ll come exactly, but you can predict that they’ll occur with a certain statistical regularity. They come in all shapes and sizes, but they most commonly involve fading ex-stars laboring in a state of unseemly physical decline — with huge beer-inflated necks, pattern hair loss, and bulging Harvey Keitel midriffs. The scandals involving Belushoid quarterback mega-bust Art Schlichter, ex-greats Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle, leather-faced manager legend Leo Durocher, and even Pete Rose fall squarely within this model.
Gretzky doesn’t quite have the saggy alcoholic neck of those other famous gamblers, but he and Tocchet both fit as ex-greats busted a decade after their glory years. Another feature common to all of these stories is that they start out as scandals involving relatively minor sums, only to have news of truly Olympian debts and losses slowly leak out to the public in the months after the scandal first breaks. The patron saint of that of sports gamblers was Leonard Tose, a man who was forced to give up ownership of the Philadelphia Eagles in the mid ’80s after it came out that he had “significant” debts to Atlantic City casinos for sports betting. “Significant” later turned out to be upwards of $50 million.
