Question of the Day - 11 February 2024

We saved this question for Super Sunday. Interesting to think that way back in 1989, it was a huge deal for a single bet on the Big Game to be as high as $1 million, especially when this year, upwards of $21.3 billion is projected to be bet on Super Bowl LVIII. And the books have already taken a number of million-dollar bets, reportedly.

Here's the Stupak story. 

Gene Maday, proprietor of Little Caesars, booked Stupak's million-dollar bet on the 1989 Super Bowl. 

Maday apparently needed more money on the Cincinnati Bengals to balance his Super Bowl book that year, so he accepted $1,050,000 on the Bengals to cover the seven-point spread against the San Francisco 49ers. He gave Stupak a 50% break on the typical 11-10 vig, which is why Stupak had to pony up only $1.05 mil, instead of the standard $1.1 mil.

The Bengals lost 20-16, but obviously covered the spread, so Stupak collected a cool million for his trouble.

When Maday paid off Stupak that same Sunday, Stupak gave him a gift: an experimental sports car, which sat in front of Little Caesars for a while, taking up a parking space.

But that wasn't Maday's largest payout, not by a long shot. A couple of years later, he lost a $228,000 four-team parlay to a pair of Texas bettors for $2.4 million (though he won much of it back on their subsequent losing bets).

Little Caesars closed in 1994 to make way for Paris. When Gene Maday died a few years later, he took a lot of secrets with him to the grave, including some speculation over what might have really been behind Stupak's bet. 

For his part, Stupak insisted to us, in a long, wide-ranging, and chain-smoking (on his part) interview we conducted with him a few years later, that it was a straight-up bet with no under-the-table agreement with Maday. "Why would I do that?" he asked us rhetorically and emphatically. "Then I'd be in bed with Maday forever."

(You can read the whole story in our Stupak biography by John L. Smith, No Limit: The Rise and Fall of Bob Stupak and Las Vegas' Stratosphere Tower.)