Jimmy Vaccaro may be best known for taking odds on the Mike Tyson-Buster Douglas fight in 1990, but his Las Vegas legacy goes well beyond taking a risk that no other oddsmaker would touch.
Vaccaro retired in July, according to a Tuesday Las Vegas Review-Journal story, and has already left The Strip in his rearview. But sportsbooks wouldn’t be what they are today without Vaccaro’s influence — and his ideas. He opened the books at the now defunct Royal Inn, Barbary Coast, original MGM, and Mirage. He also oversaw books at the Golden Nugget, William Hill, and eventually South Point. That job is the one he retired from — and it brought his career full circle.
Michael Gaughan spotted Vaccaro $250 to get his dealer’s license in 1975, and the pair opened the Royal Inn and Barbary Coast sportsbooks before parting ways. About 10 years ago, Gaughan and Vaccaro reunited at the South Point sportsbook, where Gaughan asked him to “watch over my sportsbook” per a UNLV oral history. In between, Vaccaro worked with another Las Vegas icon, Steve Wynn.
“It’s been a great ride, but we all get old,” Vaccaro told the Review-Journal. “It was time. Fifty years is enough. I want to spend some time just doing nothing.”
The fight that changed everything
The younger brother of legendary sports marketing executive Sonny Vaccaro, Jimmy was an innovator in a different arena. While Sonny was signing Michael Jordan to the Nike contract that was the cornerstone for change in shoe and sports apparel marketing, Jimmy was on his way to shaking up Las Vegas.
Tyson, the undefeated and undisputed heavyweight world champ entering the fight, was a 42-1 favorite for the Feb. 11, 1990 bout. Douglas, six years Tyson’s senior, was ranked No. 7 in the world, and the expectation was a knockout — of Douglas. But it was Douglas who knocked out Tyson in the 10th round. While the fight and KO garnered a massive amount of attention, so too did Vaccaro’s and The Mirage’s ballsy move to take action on it.
“I opened the fight at 27-1. Within probably an hour and a half, I had the first bet. I had a guy bet me $54,000 on Tyson to win $2,000,” Vaccaro told Eric Raskin in a 2015 oral history of the Douglas-Tyson fight in Playboy. “This guy figured he’s going to put up 54 and pick up 56 a minute after the fight started. So I changed the price, I went from 27-1 to 31-1. Next guy to come in bet $93,000 to win $3,000 at 31-1. Naturally, every newspaper, everybody started to call. We had something that was going to draw a lot of attention. So more money, more money, thinking it was just like, “Come pick up your money in a couple hours.” It got to 42-1 if you wanted to bet on Tyson, and the take-back on it was 37-1.”
Vaccaro said The Mirage took so much money on both sides that the fight would be a win for sportsbook whatever the outcome. But it’s likely he could not have imagined the media frenzy and spotlight that shone on the then nine-year-old Mirage.
“After about two days of doing these television shows, my assistant comes walking in, she says, ‘Jimmy, Mr. Wynn wants to see you,’” Vaccaro said in the Playboy story. “So I walked back to Steve’s office, and he looked at me, he said, ‘What the f*** are you doing back there in my sportsbook?’ I was stunned. And then he started laughing. He said, ‘Whatever the f*** it is, keep doing it.’ So he got up, gave me a little pat on the shoulder. He said, ‘You got more publicity for me than I would get in a month.’”
Thanks for this, Jimmy
Since that fateful day in 1990, the sports betting landscape has exploded. During Vaccaro’s early Las Vegas years, there were a handful of — or fewer — places to make a bet. Since the Professional and Amateur Sports Protection Act was overturned in 2018, there are now 40 U.S. jurisdictions that offer either retail or digital betting, or both. And Missouri is set to come online Dec. 1.
But without Vaccaro — and others like him, including Roxy Roxborough and Vic Salerno — today’s sportsbooks might not be what they are. As digital platforms across the U.S. continue to craft new betting markets, it’s the bets that Vaccaro, Roxborough, and Salerno first took that laid the foundation.
Vaccaro is considered the author of the season-win total bet, which came about through a conversation with high-stakes bettor Jack Keller, according to the Review-Journal. In 1989, Jerry Jones had just bought the Dallas Cowboys and hired Jimmy Johnson. The pair ultimately won two Super Bowls together, but that first season, the Cowboys went 1-15. Keller, ahead of the season, asked Vaccaro how many games he thought the Cowboys would win.
“He says, ‘How ‘bout you put a number up there and maybe we can do some business?’” Vaccaro said. “One of the things I enjoy more than anything is stuff like this. It was creative.
“It took me about five minutes to think about it.”
Vaccaro set the over-under at 5½, and before long, he was offering season win totals on every other team in the NFL.
Homeward bound
Vaccaro left Las Vegas last month for Trafford, Pennsylvania, his hometown. It’s not the first time since 1975 that he’s left Las Vegas. In 2019, he went back to Pennsylvania to work in the sportsbook at the Rivers Casino in Pittsburgh. But the gig didn’t stick. Maybe it just wasn’t time yet.
But now, Vaccaro is headed to the tiny town — 3,317 people per the 2020 census — where he grew up betting sports, playing cards, and rolling dice. Trafford, like much of western Pennsylvania, is a mill town, and suburb of Pittsburgh, which post-World War II was the center of steel production in the U.S.
The steel mills are long shuttered and the black-gray haze that used to hang over America’s “Steel City” has dissipated. While Vaccaro seems clearly headed for a slower life, he won’t have to give up wagering — Pennsylvania has had legal sports betting since 2019.
And, he told the Review-Journal, he’s definitely not done with Las Vegas.
“Everything can change in a minute,” he said. “Who the hell knows what’s going to happen tomorrow. I might do something now and then [for a sportsbook]. I’m sure I’ll be back in Las Vegas. But it’s going to take me a while.”
