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Jimmy Snyder
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
for the Indianapolis 500 driver, see Jimmy Snyder (driver)
Jimmy "The Greek" Snyder (September 9, 1919 – April 21, 1996) was an American sports commentator and Las Vegas bookie. He was born Dimetrios Georgios Synodinos in Steubenville, Ohio.
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As a football commentator, Snyder was controversial. He would often give his picks for winners of games and touted his ability to make the right picks, which critics claimed were indirectly encouraging gambling; Snyder countered by saying that he never gave the spread of the games, so his picks couldn't be considered an endorsement of gambling. According to the autobiography entitled Jimmy the Greek by Jimmy Greek, Steve Herskowitz (Editor), and Mickey Herskowitz, he bet $10,000 USD on the 1948 election between Thomas Dewey and Harry S. Truman, getting 17:1 odds for Truman to win.
Snyder also appeared in a cameo in the 1981 movie, Cannonball Run as a bookie. In the movie he offered 50-1 odds against Formula One driver Jamie Blake (played by Dean Martin) and gambler Morris Fenderbaum (played by Sammy Davis Jr.) winning the Cannonball coast-to-coast endurance race.
On January 16, 1988, he was fired by the CBS network (where he was a contributor to the NFL Today program since 1976) after commenting to WRC-TV reporter Ed Hotaling in a 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 he's 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. This goes back all the way to the Civil War when during the slave trading, the owner -- the slave owner would breed his big black to his big woman so that he could have a big black kid. | ” |
Snyder died of a heart attack in Las Vegas, at the age of 76. He is buried at the historical Union Cemetery in Steubenville, Ohio.
- CNN SI item on Jimmy
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- Article by Jonathan Rowe in Washington Monthly, April 1988 (Article examining the validity of Jimmy Snyder's racial comments. "Jimmy the Greek got it wrong but so did his critics")
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,966590-1,00.html
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