LAS VEGAS, NV—There’s a saying in sports, especially if you’re a cocky bastard: “Don’t call it a comeback, ’cause I never left.â€?

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what Vegas, the American goddess of Fortune, announced to me last Sunday between 3:00 and 4:00pm Pacific Standard Time as the NFL’s late games were concluding at the Las Vegas Hilton’s Sportsbook.

After three days of low-stakes blackjack and craps on my annual trip to America’s hedonistic playground, I was down about $250 to her Vegasness (although she had mercifully allowed me to escape from a $350 hole with an inspired run of good luck at a blackjack table on Saturday morning at the Hard Rock Hotel). After dropping $100 in about six hands to a tall, blonde, slightly grizzled dealer named Lisa, I got up from a table that soon re-formed to contain five of my best college friends.

It was the first time they’d all sat at the same table all weekend, and even though I’d hit my maximum loss figure for the morning, my buddy Max bullied me into sitting back down to the six-man table, which was clearly the right thing to do. Blackjack is a game of karma and runs, and suddenly I was hitting blackjacks left and right, winning the double-downs I’d been missing all weekend. When Lisa got up and a beefy guy named Sean stepped in to deal, I mentioned to him that Lisa had been dealing me a lot of first-card aces. “Let’s see if we can keep this going, Sean,� I told him. Single women, if you’re reading this right now, call my dealer friend Sean in Las Vegas — he’s a great listener.

Where Vegas really hurt me last weekend wasn’t at the blackjack or craps tables, though. Ever since my cherry-busting trip to Vegas three years ago, when I picked five or six NHL games right and came home with some much-needed Christmas shopping money, I’ve been a sucker for action in the sports book, especially on underdogs. (I don’t know if you know this, but betting on sports is legal in the state of Nevada. Seriously. I’m not making this up.)

Clearly, I had a heavy wad of cotton substituting for grey matter in the part of his brain dedicated to sporting intuition last weekend, because from the outset I was doomed by a series of betting gaffes and bad luck. After winning my first two bets on Friday night behind the Devils and the Celtics — giving a mere three points to a terrible Miami Heat team (mindblowing, really) — I followed up with two losses and then got sucked into what Malcolm Gladwell would call a blink moment of inspiration.

Sitting at a blackjack table, I inexplicably recalled a pre-game TV shot I’d seen several hours earlier during the Celtics game, of Kobe Bryant strutting into the dressing rooms at the Salt Lake City arena wearing a flamboyant leopard-skin pimp jacket — not something you see every day in Utah. “Wait a minute,� the cerebral cotton wad deduced, “Kobe’s looking bad-ass tonight. He’s going to drop 70 on the Jazz.� The game started in four minutes, so I picked up my chips, sprinted to the sports book and layed money on my man Kobe to win outright on the road against one of the league’s top teams. Final score: Jazz 120, Lakers 96.

I blew all three of my Saturday bets as well, including an annual tradition of losing money on my favourite NCAA football team, the Hawaii Rainbow Warriors, who overcame a 21-point deficit against the Washington Huskies to complete their first-ever perfect 12-0 season, but failed to cover a 13.5-point spread when a defensive back took a knee on a late-game interception return that would have pushed the margin of victory to 14. Vegas is a fun place to be with your friends, but it’s better when the goddess isn’t handing it to you on every bet you make. By the time we hopped in a cab on Sunday morning to head to the Las Vegas Hilton, I was feeling rather ambivalent about a whole day’s worth of betting on the NFL .

We laid our bets in the Hilton’s sports book, but didn’t actually stay there to watch the games: Football Sundays, with 11 screens and two levels of seating, is in fact hosted in the the hotel’s 1,700-seat event theatre. By 9:30 the place was nearly packed — we were in the Pacific time zone, so the NFL’s early games start at 10am local time — with mostly middle-aged male fans in team jerseys downing $1 hot dogs and beers for breakfast.

A man with a ridiculous pencil-thin moustache welcomed us to the theatre by informing me that we were shaking hands with history: this was the room where Barry Manilow performs 37 shows a week to sold-out crowds. “He did a show last night, in fact,” he told us. “I was here. Amazing!â€? (To this day, I still haven’t washed the pants that sat in Barry’s theatre chairs – not for any mystical, obsessed-fan reason, but simply because I’m lazy.)

With my bad luck over the first three days a known quantity to my comrades, I did the honourable thing and stayed away from several consensus pick games, hoping not to jinx my friends’ wagers. And then a funny thing happened: we hit on almost all the early games. It started out slowly, as all football bets do since games are sixty minutes long and early leads can evaporate quickly. But the Jets, Vikings and the Rams turned early margins into blowouts, and even my picks of the Titans and the Jaguars came through with big plays in the late going. Things were going so well for us, not even exchanges like this could cripple our final outcome…

Max (who’d also bet on the Jaguars): Did you know that the Jags’ quarterback hasn’t thrown an interception all season?
Me: I can’t believe you just said that out loud. What’s wrong with you?
David Garrard: [Throws first interception of the year on very next play.]

In all, my five-man crew went 11-2 in the early games. Finally, we were sticking it to Old Lady Vegas! High fives were in plentiful supply, we doubled down on $1 hot dogs, and we were already calculating what our revised loss totals for the trip would be after we swept the afternoon slate of games.

This overt expression of pride angered Vegas.

In retrospect, it was insane for us not to see a huge reversal coming. Despite the morning’s success, I kept a level head and stayed away from everyone’s Lock Of The Week game, with the Cleveland Browns everyone’s cinch pick to win at Arizona. Who was I to jinx the game ESPN’s Bill Simmons called “My favorite game on the board and my single favourite pick of the season other than the Pats over the Chargers in Week 2. In fact, I’m making this my Alcoa Gambling Lock of the Year. The Browns are going to win and cover.â€?

So what happened? The Browns went down 14-0 in 10 minutes and never recovered. The Bears (who I backed) blew a nine–point lead in the final seven minutes to the New York Giants and Eli Manning, my most hated team and quarterback in the league, respectively. The disappointing Saints (who I also backed, because I’m a dummy) blew a winnable home game against the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who started their backup QB, after Reggie Bush lost a fumble on a botched reverse late in the game with the Saints leading. Even Denver fell to a 3-8 Raiders team that had lost its last five games to the Broncos. I couldn’t make this stuff up.

And when the smoke had cleared, our crew had gone 1-9 in the late games. The only winning bet? Our friend Rob, who put money on the Giants before skipping out for his flight back to North Carolina, and wasn’t even around to savour the adrenaline rush of an Eli Manning’s late-game comeback in Vegas — he left the wager stub with our friend Matty, a huge Bears fan from Chicago who actually had to take Rob’s bet to the ticket window to cash it. (The best analogy we could come up with: if Al Gore had to personally drive Tipper to the White House to be the “entertainmentâ€? at George Bush’s inauguration after-party.)

Yes, it’s one of the great sporting burn-lines, and we heard it loud and clear last weekend. “Don’t call it a comeback,� Vegas announced over the sports book’s PA system, in her most petty, vengeful voice. “I never left.�

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Posted on Monday, December 10th, 2007 at 6:21 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.