Bettor education.

GAMBLING IS THE DIRTY LITTLE SECRET ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES, WHERE IT'S RAMPANT AND PROSPERING. THIS SI SPECIAL REPORT REVEALS HOW EASY IT IS FOR STUDENTS TO BET WITH A BOOKIE, BECOME CONSUMED WITH WAGERING AND GET OVER THEIR HEADS IN DEBT.

The game was long over, but the action was just beginning. J.A. Davis, a 23-year-old Texas Tech senior, fought against the flow of departing fans as he weaved down the concrete aisles of Jones Stadium in Lubbock. He was in search of a better seat to catch the closing minutes of the Red Raiders' made-for-ESPN Thursday night football game against No. 1 Nebraska on Sept. 8. It didn't matter to Davis that Tech was already soundly beaten -- it trailed 35-16 with barely two minutes to play -- or that Nebraska had the ball. In his world, wins and losses are secondary to point spreads and over-unders, and on this day Davis had taken the Cornhuskers, giving 25-1/2 points.

"Two hundred bucks I had riding on that game," recalls Davis. "Lots of people had Nebraska, giving 27, 28 points -- you never bet on Texas Tech -- but I got in with my bookie at 25-1/2.'' Nebraska, with third-and-one on the Tech 30, the clock running. Davis, dying the slow, hopeless death of a gambler longing for points from a team that doesn't need any. I'm thinking, This can't be happening," says Davis. "I'm going to lose 200 bucks, 220 with the juice (the vigorish, the bookie's 10% commission on losing bets), and be down going into the weekend." Then a bettor's miracle occurred: The Huskers scored a trash touchdown, running back Clinton Childs going 30 yards on a sweep. Kicker Tom Sieler's vital PAT pushed the margin to 26, covering the spread and turning Davis into a winner.

Davis celebrated with a friend who also had $200 on the Cornhuskers, also spotting 25-1/2. "I had no right to win," Davis says, "but it gave me a jump on the weekend." College football: the color, the pageantry.

Meet the Juice Generation. For them, finance isn't a major, it's knowing how to spread $1,000 in wagers over 10 Saturday college football games and stay alive for Sunday's and Monday's NFL bets with a zero balance in their checkbooks and their credit cards maxed out. Class participation is sitting in the back of a lecture hall with Vegas-style "spreadsheets" laid out, plotting a week's worth of plays on games from Seattle to Miami. Communication is a desperate call to some 1-900 tout service in search of this week's Lock of the Year. Road trip is a drive through the desert to Las Vegas or across Midwestern plains to Native American and riverboat casinos, both of which have proliferated like Home Depots.

There is nothing in the collegiate rite-of-passage handbook about gambling. There are chapters on alcohol, drugs and sex laid out against a backdrop of winking acceptance. Kids. Society has hacked out a neutral zone of sorts and allowed undergraduates to briefly frolic in it. But gambling? Who knows from gambling -- in particular sports gambling -- on campus? It is the dirty little secret of college life in America, rampant and thriving. "It's ubiquitous, it's popular, it's pervasive," says psychologist Michael Frank of Richard Stockton College in Pomona, N.J., one of a scant few academicians who has studied the phenomenon. "Wherever you go in the country, you're going to find access to a bookmaker. It's true in casinos, it's true at the General Motors plant, and it's true on college campuses all over the country.".

Not only true, but pandemic, according to William (B.J.) Jahoda, 52, who for nearly 10 years ran a $20 million a year illegal sports-betting operation for Chicago mob don Ernest Rocco Infelice. Upon being told that SI was doing a story on campus gambling, Jahoda said, "It's about time. What's taken you so long?" Jahoda, who is in the U.S. marshal's witness-protection program after testifying for the government against Infelice and mob enforcer Robert Salerno, said, "You see gambling on every campus. It is an epidemic. It really has been out of control.".

This outbreak might seem inconsequential, considering that legalized gambling is a growth industry in the U.S. However, most of the gambling that college students do is not legal. And just as we think of colleges as institutions of higher learning, so it is with gambling. "A kid finds a bookie on campus, he learns about gambling, he gets hooked," says Arnie Wexler, a leading consultant on problem gambling. For every college kid who derives nothing but entertainment from his betting, there is another who cons his parents to get money to cover his gambling losses, another who becomes so consumed with betting that he tosses away an education and another who plunges into gambling addiction. It is far from harmless recreation.

Hard information on campus gambling -- on any gambling -- is scarce. There have been only two broad, national studies of gambling. The first, in 1974, found that 61% of the U.S. population gambled. The second, a Gallup poll in '89, raised that figure to 81% and concluded that 31% of adults gambled weekly. "I'm sure that first number is at least 85% now; gambling is growing at a phenomenal rate in the United States," says Henry Lesieur, chair of the criminal justice department at Illinois State University and the acknowledged dean of American gambling researchers.

Lesieur headed a panel that in 1991 published the only widespread study of gambling among college students. The study, with surveys at six schools in five states, concluded that 23% of the students gambled at least once a week.

That's it for numbers, because gambling, on campus and off, is difficult to quantify. "It's very hard to estimate illegal gambling," says sociologist Rachel Volberg, who has overseen several more narrowly focused studies of gambling. "We get a very low rate of responses to questions about sports betting with bookmakers. The numbers are affected by that difficulty.".

Yet during two months of research, SI found that it was nearly impossible to visit a campus in search of organized gambling and not find either 1) sophisticated on- or off-campus bookmaking operations with a large student clientele or 2) legal casinos within a short distance of the schools, easily accessible to underage students (box, page 84) -- or both. Tom Decker, a retired FBI agent who investigated sports gambling, says, "You'd be shocked at how easy it is for kids to get involved in gambling and how many of them do. You and I could go into a bar in Athens, Georgia, right now, and within minutes we'd have the name of a bookie. Within minutes." (In fact you could bypass the bar and go straight to the University of Georgia campus, but we'll come back to that.).

"It's such a hidden thing on college campuses," says Wexler, a recovering compulsive gambler for 27 years. "But if you saw what happens when I go to a college campus and do a presentation and then ask the audience how many of them gamble, it would blow your mind. One hand goes up, and then another, then another. . . .".

Occasionally illegal college gambling operations will come to the public's attention, usually when they've run afoul of the police. Since 1992 this has happened at Michigan State, Maine, Rhode Island and neighboring Bryant College, Texas, Arizona State and Northwestern. Sometimes college athletes are involved (Maine, Rhode Island, Bryant, Northwestern), which gives the incident a longer public shelf life. But college officials often dismiss the incidents as isolated and blame unsavory outside characters for corrupting their youth. The views of James Rund, interim associate vice president for student affairs at Arizona State, are typical. Of the busting of four students at his school in February 1994 for helping to run a bookmaking operation, Rund says, "To characterize it as a student gambling ring is an exaggeration and probably an inaccurate depiction of the circumstances." He says this despite the fact that names of members of 15 of Arizona State's 22 fraternities appeared in betting records seized by police.

Busting gambling rings is labor-intensive work for law-enforcement agencies, and there's little chance that those apprehended and found guilty will receive heavy penalties since much of the public considers gambling a victimless crime. "The payoff is trivial," says Frank, meaning that perpetrators seldom receive long jail sentences (or any jail sentences at all). Interest fades.

Yet consider the evidence that gambling is a booming, nationwide campus industry:.

The aforementioned ring busted in February 1994 by the Tempe (Ariz.) police was operated by a 30-year-old former Tucson sportscaster, who was assisted by four Arizona State fraternity brothers. Of the 245 betting accounts uncovered, 140 belonged to fraternity members at the university. Police suspect at least 60 other Arizona State students were also book clients. An average of nearly $120,000 a month was wagered, mostly by students, through the book between August 1993 and February '94.

Andrew Stewart, a 24-year-old senior at Georgia, ran a basketball-betting operation out of an apartment near campus until early March, when he quit because he and his two partners were owed more than $10,000 by his clientele. The operation has been assumed by two other Georgia undergraduates. Stewart, who like all the other students in this story agreed to speak to SI only if he was identified by a fictitious name, says that the operation has 170 clients, "about a quarter" of whom bet nightly. Stewart's client list was culled from the 220 names in a friend's football book. How many of them are students? "All of them," says Stewart. "I know just about all of them." He and his two partners, both students, handled roughly $4,000 on a good night in basketball business, $10,000 on a busy Saturday, up to $75,000 a month.

Brian Cole, a 24-year-old marketing major at Clemson, ran a $100,000-a-month betting operation during the 1993-94 school year, with a 54-student client list. Most of his clients carried other bettors on their accounts.

J.P. Browman, a 23-year-old senior at Florida, for the last four years operated a book that catered exclusively to students at his university. J.P. has a wiretap detector on his phone, a mnemonic phone number and, he says, $42,000 in profits. His only regret is that he can't put his bookmaking work on his resume.

Mike Tyler, a 21-year-old sophomore at Texas Tech, has contacts with five different off-campus bookies in Lubbock and estimates that at least 200 other students have contacted bookies or made bets through him. This comes as no shock to Sgt. Tom McDonald of the Texas Department of Public Safety, who can name 58 illegal bookmakers in Lubbock County alone and says, "Nearly every bookmaker in this town got his start as a student at Texas Tech.".

From the never department, on March 1 police in Nutley, N.J., busted a student-run sports gambling operation at Nutley High that took single bets as high as $1,000 and used threats of violence and kidnapping to get losers to pay up. One prosecutor said the operation was "sophisticated and exactly mirrors an adult-run organized crime bookmaking operation." This lends credence to assertions by many college gamblers that they started betting seriously in high school.

The conclusion is obvious: Gambling sells on campus like Green Day CDs. And the pervasiveness of campus gambling parallels the explosion in legal gambling in the U.S. (of which college students also partake). "How could a college kid think there's anything wrong with gambling?" asks Wexler, a tireless antigambling proselytizer. "There's legal gambling everywhere: lotteries, casinos, racetracks. Forget it.".

But if you are remotely inclined to attach some higher standards to colleges and universities, if you would like to think of gambling as an opiate of the streetwise and uneducated, the trend is disarming. SI found no shortage of savvy 22-year-old bookmakers and rough-hewn 20-year-old bettors on campus. "Their behavior is the same as that of older gamblers," says Frank, the Richard Stockton College psychologist. "They lie, they deceive, and they steal. They're just younger.".

And if you're attached to the youthful enthusiasm that surrounds a college sporting event -- the painted faces, the silly signs, the reckless support -- there is reason to pause and wonder if perhaps some small corner of Cameron Indoor Stadium, just to name one arena, is Crazy because a few of the Crazies took Duke, minus 4, for $25. And to wonder, also, just how short the jump is from student to athlete and just how thin the line between pure competition and fixed games may be. Says Kentucky football coach Bill Curry, "There's an awful lot at stake when somebody asks you, 'How's (running back) Moe Williams's shoulder?' ".

GAINESVILLE, FLA.: Lyle Ellington is a 21-year-old senior at Florida, a tall, athletic-looking fraternity kid. He has been betting since junior high, when he handicapped horse races at South Florida tracks. At Florida he became the biggest client for several prosperous campus bookies, including J.P. Browman.

"The most I ever bet on one game? Twenty-four grand. San Diego Chargers versus Miami Dolphins in 1991," says Ellington. "I took the Dolphins -- I always take the Dolphins -- and I was already up that week, like, 30 grand. Everyone's riding my coattails, so I decide to push it. I bet 24 G on Miami. Going into the fourth quarter the Dolphins are up by, like, 13. I'm staring $50,000 dollars in the face. Then Rod Bernstine ripped out my heart. Scores three ---- touchdowns in the fourth quarter. San Diego always kills me, though. I remember the Chargers were playing the Los Angeles Raiders on a Sunday night a few years ago, and I took L.A., minus 6. The Raiders were up 9-7 with less than a minute left. Ronnie Lott intercepts the ball and falls to the ground. That's the way it ended. Cost me 12 grand. I was dying because I couldn't watch the game. I was pledging my fraternity. It was Hell Night.

"October 23. I have pro bookies, one up north and one in Miami, and that weekend I lost big-time, probably about $18,000. Add this up: I took 20 grand from the joint checking account I have with my mom. I owed, like, 35 grand to Allen, our neighbor, the internist, who had bailed me out before. I owed 20 grand to another guy -- my mom still doesn't know about that -- 30 grand to another, although I've already paid him 17.".

Campus gamblers seem old in much the same sense that college football players who weigh 280 pounds and bench-press sport-utility vehicles seem older than their classmates. The college bettor speaks the language of the trade -- juice, vig, teaser, parlay, quarter ($25), dollar ($100), push -- and sometimes deals in amounts that would buy sport-utility vehicles. It seems out of place in a youthful, academic setting. Gamblers come equipped with war stories of losing money and winning money, stories you expect to hear from older, harder men. They have the ability to make a campus hangout feel like a Keno lounge or a storefront off-track betting parlor.

In one sense the young men -- and they are almost invariably men, not women -- arrive on campus predisposed to becoming gamblers. "First of all, gambling gets you high, like drugs or alcohol," says Wexler. "Second, college kids are smart, and I've never met a dumb compulsive gambler. They think they can pick winners, and in the beginning they do. There's always an initial period of success.".

The undergraduate environment is rich with enticements for the budding sports bettor -- and full of opportunity for failure. There is no typical gambler: SI found students from wealthy and modest backgrounds alike who had thrown themselves into betting. But with the exception of the Southeast, where illegal wagering on college football is especially fierce, betting patterns across the country are similar. And bettors do tend to have some things in common: a degree of sports-obsessiveness (often an athletic past cut short in college by a lack of talent), a community in which to share their betting tales (usually a fraternity house) and a little resourcefulness. They are bright, if often naive. Put simply, lots of college sports bettors are clever frat-boy jocks who like to watch games with a crowd and get pumped by betting on them. And they are often clueless about the realm they have entered.

Jahoda, the former bookmaker for the mob, sees them as pigeons. "These kids are young and often affluent and always vulnerable," he says. "They are naive. They think they can do no wrong. They think they're brilliant and they know what they're doing. When you're young, you're invincible. They're in an atmosphere where the games are important. Everyone tells them that gambling is healthy entertainment. They see the spreads on television. They think that it's healthy and legal and the thing to do.".

Alex Andrews, a 24-year-old former student and admitted compulsive gambler from Bethesda, Md., who began betting illegally on sporting events in high school and continued through four years of fraternity life, recalls that college was for him a release from the parental controls that contained his teenage betting: "There are so many things going on in high school, things that are forced on you -- you go to school, and you're expected to do well, you have to play sports, you have to do things socially -- that even if you're gambling, it isn't the only thing in your life. I don't think you'll find many high school kids who, even if they gamble, sit around all day and do nothing else. But in college it becomes your choice. You're unsupervised. You can wake up at noon, blow off all your classes, call the bookie at four o'clock, watch all the games while you get drunk and then do the same thing all over again the next day.".

On most campuses illegal sports gambling is seldom further than a conversation away. Somebody in the dorm knows a bookie. Somebody in the fraternity house knows a bookie. Somebody in the frat is a bookie. "It's so easy," says Andy Gale, who finished St. Peter's College in Jersey City last year and is now in graduate school. "You can always find one person who knows somebody. If you want to get a bet down, it's no problem.".

Often the process starts with football parlay cards, sucker sheets listing the line on an entire weekend's major college and pro football games. The bettor has to pick at least three games to win at 5-to-1 odds. The next step is making bets through a friend who knows a bookie. Eventually the bookie gives the student an account of his own and a number to use when he calls in his bets. Often the bookie is also a student, and it is common to hear college gamblers profess never to have placed a bet with a "professional bookie." Of course, a student taking bets is a professional bookie.

College kids are famously quick studies, and betting is a fascinating and tempting subject. A guy who in September of his freshman year wouldn't know an underdog from Underdog is by his junior year routinely parlaying Big Sky basketball with the NBA. Happens all the time, according to experts on gambling.

The sports-betting priorities of students mirror those of the adult public: NFL football is most popular, followed by college football, college basketball and the NBA. One exception to these rankings is the NCAA basketball tournament, which rivals the NFL in wagering frenzy.

The typical college plunger begins with $25 bets, frequently shared with friends, and graduates to $50 and $100 bets. Most of the bettors wager on far too many games, as many as 20 on a fall weekend. Given the bookie's built-in 10% edge on losing bets, this is fiscal suicide.

But no one gets into this with losing in mind.

CLEMSON, S.C.: B.J. Simpson is a 22-year-old senior at Clemson majoring in German and international trade. He sits in the living room of a friend's off-campus apartment, dressed in jeans and a baseball cap. In the background Virginia is playing Duke in basketball on ESPN.

"I started gambling in '93 when a fraternity brother was doing it," says Simpson. "Gambling just made the weekends fun. When I got back into it this past fall, I was normally doing just 25 or 50 bucks a game. There was a Thursday night game; the Cleveland Browns were playing the Houston Oilers, and I just went nuts. I had a $100 parlay on the Browns and the under, another $100 on the Browns straight and another $100 on the under. And I won everything. I was up like $420 on the night, and I was going out of my tree. I was downtown that night, going, 'I just won $420 by making a phone call.' But then I lost about $500 over the rest of the weekend.

"There was a week in late October that I just got killed on my picks. On Sunday my roommate and I went to this private club to drink until we blacked out. On Tuesday we bumped into each other at Sikes (a campus financial building). I was walking out, he was walking in. We were both there to get a $200 emergency loan.

"I was dating a girl last semester and she knew pretty much not to talk to me on Sundays or Monday nights. After a game, if I won, we'd talk for a little bit. If I lost, I'd just be like, 'Look, it's not going to be a very good week for me. I'll get in touch with you when I have time.' If I won on a Monday night, I'd call her and say, 'Hey, we're going out to dinner tomorrow night.' If I lost, it was like, 'Well, I guess it's mac and cheese for the next four nights.'.

"I work at a country club. All sorts were betting through me -- waiters, cooks, golf pros. For some reason everybody on my ticket was just getting waxed on the bowl games. After the North Carolina-Texas Sun Bowl, my ticket, as a whole, was down $10,000. I didn't even call in $3,000 in bets on the Tennessee-Virginia Tech Gator Bowl. There were people I knew that for some reason were taking Virginia Tech, and there was a total of three grand on Virginia Tech. I didn't want to call it in because I was so worried Eddie (his bookie) wasn't going to take it in the first place. I was just like, Hell with that, I'm booking it myself. It ended up paying off, thank god. Leading up to that game, I honestly had a migraine headache. I'd heard people talk about them, but I never realized what they were like. I had such a pain in my head for 24 hours a day. I couldn't sleep. My whole Christmas holiday was one constant migraine.

"After the Tennessee game I told myself I was done for good, but if I can find a bookie next fall, I guarantee I'll gamble again. I'm sure it won't be a problem finding another bookie.".

If you are 21 years old, you have been witness to the emergence of USA Today, ESPN and all those other college football- and basketball-saturated networks, picture-in-picture television, widespread use of satellite dishes, published injury reports, ATMs, the Internet, Jeff Sagarin and Danny Sheridan. In the winter of 1968 it was a wondrous achievement that TVS was able to bring Lew Alcindor and Elvin Hayes into our homes. Now we get Iowa State and Fred (the Mayor) Hoiberg, plus 8, against Kansas at Allen Field House.

Sid Diamond, the 59-year-old director of the race and sports book at the Excalibur Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, stands behind the counter. (In Diamond's business, "the counter" is more than a slab of Formica, it's the invisible barrier that separates bettors from bookmakers.) To his right is a wall of glistening white boards listing the night's games, the scores of which will be constantly updated in grease pencil. To his left are the entry cards at a dozen racetracks. Television sets abound, playing a feast of games and races for an audience that sits in lounge chairs with armrests. On one side of Diamond, the Warriors and the Sixers. Behind him, Seton Hall and Pittsburgh. On the other side, the sixth at Golden Gate.

Diamond, a smallish, grandfatherly man has been on the house side of the counter for 20 years. "Look over there," he says, pointing to the racing side of the room. "All older guys. Now look over here." He points to the seats facing the sports betting wall, even as the first-half scores on Ivy League basketball games -- "Ivy League, who knows Ivy League?" asks Diamond -- are being posted. "Young people," he says. Sure enough. To the left, Sansabelts and loafers. To the right, baggy shorts, T-shirts and cool hiking boots.

"Fifteen years ago people knew Notre Dame played college football," says Diamond. "Out here, maybe Southern Cal and UCLA. Now you can ask people and they can tell you all about Arizona State and Oregon State. These young people, they form opinions. Whether those opinions are correct or incorrect, that's not the point. They're not ignorant. They know what it means to lay 11- to-10 odds. They know the value of a point spread. You can't fool anybody anymore in this business. You can beat them, but with all these communications facilities out there, you can't fool them. Years ago you could.".

Two miles up the Vegas strip from the Excalibur, Sonny Reizner makes lines at the Desert Inn. He has been in this business for more than 20 years. "There's a young crowd in sports gambling now," says Reizner. "And there's so much information out there about betting. These kids might not have the sophistication in terms of how to bet, but they follow the action.".

Young gamblers embrace a lifestyle that revolves around, of all things, CNN Headline News's sports ticker, the scoreboard that runs across the bottom of the screen beneath images of natural disasters, global politics and O.J. The routine is simple enough: Watch a game, channel-surf whenever possible to another game and, when commercials and timeouts clog the air, fire up CNN and cruise the ticker. "My god," says Clemson's B.J. Simpson, "I knew more national and international news than anyone else in my classes." Says Ted Moone, a sophomore at Georgia, "Why do you think they run that thing, anyway?".

For study materials there is a new generation of electronic and print icons, and they're not exactly McNeil and Lehrer or the beat poets. They're anybody with a pick. Touts like the Gold Sheet and Leonard's Losers. USA Today's Gordon Forbes. And more. "Nick Buoniconti's the man, (HBO's) Inside the NFL," Conrad White, a Georgia senior, says of the former NFL star who picks the pro games each week. ESPN's College GameDay is required Saturday- morning viewing, ditto that network's NFL GameDay on Sunday. Lee Corso. Ron Jaworski. Phil Simms. Anybody with a blazer and a guess. Or a laptop and a guess. J.A. Davis and his Texas Tech housemates, college guys with a modem, peruse an on-line service for betting information.

But much of what the student gamblers study is stale information, already absorbed by the oddsmakers. "People watch ESPN and read a few newspapers and think they're informed to bet," says Wayne Allyn Root, a 33- year-old professional handicapper in Las Vegas. "It's old information, built into the point spread. You have to find something that the average person doesn't know about. I work 12 hours a day during football season, trying to get information, and I win between 57 and 62 percent of the time. How does somebody think he can win by watching SportsCenter? He's going to get slaughtered.".

Moreover, with all of this potentially useless research, there is precious little time for what the NCAA calls degree progress. "I'd say it's like another three-hour class with Sundays being the lab," says Jay Mitcher, a Clemson junior. "I sit around studying that stuff more than my schoolwork.".

ATHENS, GA.: Sonny Martin is hunched over a wobbly wooden table in the corner of a dumpy off-campus bar on Broad Street. He drinks from brown bottles of Anchor Steam and chain-smokes. Once a good high school baseball player, Martin is now a 21-year-old senior at Georgia. He has debt, a photographic memory of his betting history and a piker's vision of sports.

"I've always just liked sports a lot. Always been crazy about March Madness. Always been crazy about the NFL," he says. "I started betting when I was a sophomore here, just to be more interested in the games. It's nice to have a team to root for. Me and my roommate heard that guys in the fraternity were betting on games. It turns out their bookie was living with one of the brothers. I got in touch with him, gave him my phone number, he gave me an account number. That's pretty much the procedure.

"The two of us started out pooling our money and betting about $25 a game, total. We started out with one game, USC-Arizona. We took Arizona; the line was Arizona by three. USC won outright, so we lost $27.50. The next day we put $50 on the Indianapolis Colts. They were playing New England, and Scott Zolak was the Patriots' quarterback. New England was horrible. Anyway, that ended up being New England's first win of the year, so we lost $55 more. So we put $100 on the Denver Broncos in the Sunday-night game, and they pulled through for us. The next night we took Miami, and Buffalo just killed 'em.

"That same year me and my roommate were down $600. He had already taken out an IFC (Intra-Fraternity Council) loan for $300. We had $500 on the Rams against the Bucs on Sunday, $300 with one bookie, $200 with another bookie. Tampa Bay was up 27-3 at the half.. We were pulling furniture into the middle of the room, trying to figure out how much we could get if we sold it. Then Jim Everett came back and had the game of his life, and the Rams pulled it out 31-27. It still wasn't enough to get us even.

"I was way up this fall. I turned everybody on to the Steelers. Basketball's been rough. Four of us together, we're down about $2,000. I'll tell you, if you're losing money, watching sports is the worst feeling in the world. You hate the game, you hate sports. You can't stand them.".

This is what happens: The fan's appreciation of the game is eroded. Whatever passion the bettor may have had as a fan dissolves into a flaming desperation, tied to point spreads, over-unders and multigame wagers like parlays and teasers. We watch games in this country with blinders on anyway. We delude ourselves into believing that Dennis Rodman would rebound just as ferociously for free and that Steve Young wears denim shirts because he really doesn't care about the money he's paid. And that is absurd, because to the sports gambler the last Super Bowl wasn't Young's afternoon of deliverance. There was an 18-point spread on that game, and had the Chargers scored a garbage TD -- as Nebraska did against Texas Tech -- San Diego would have covered and to hell with Steve Young and the San Francisco 49ers. You lose.

It works no differently for the college student and his college games. At first the game is the thing. A kid grows up an Oklahoma fan, watches all the games, wears crimson on Saturdays, the whole deal. He goes to college in Norman, starts betting on Sooner games. Then Missouri games, Nebraska games and Texas games. The game is no longer the thing. The bet is the thing. Teams are like horses or numbers on a roulette wheel.

"I used to bet on Vanderbilt all the time in basketball," says Alex Andrews, the admitted compulsive gambler. "And I still don't know where Vanderbilt is. Where is Vanderbilt?".

There is a purity attached to college sports; despite the abuses of recruiting, under-the-table payments to players and the like, there remains a veneer of joy, shared by athletes and fans. That is less true in the pros. "When I was with the New York Knicks," says Kentucky basketball coach Rick Pitino, who coached in the NBA for two seasons, "I was always amazed at the people who stayed until the end of a game. Somebody finally told me why: the point spread. I believe our fans here stay because they love Kentucky basketball.".

And many of them undoubtedly do. But this is what former mob bookie Jahoda means when he says of college students who gamble, "They are in an atmosphere where the games are important. . . ." The green campus bettor is given to wagering on his own school, and the gambling lines in college towns are skewed to reflect this audience. But once the college bettor becomes seasoned, games become cold propositions. Then it's not the Wisconsin Badgers, it's Wisconsin, minus 5.

Kevin Woods, a 20-year-old junior at UCLA, likes to bet against the Bruins in both football and basketball. "They're my moneymaker," he says. "They're always a hot pick, because it's easy to identify the games they won't cover." For a February road game at Southern Cal, UCLA was playing without point guard Tyus Edney and had lost four of five to the Trojans at the L.A. Sports Arena. Still, Woods got Southern Cal, plus 9-1/2 -- "A joke," he says -- and bet $250. UCLA won 73-69, but the Trojans covered. Easy money.

A bettor turned bookie at Florida named Jerry (Slaw) Davidson says, "I went to every home game this season. I made about $400 when Auburn beat us that day, but I would have gladly traded it for a win." Be true to your school.

LUBBOCK, TEXAS: Mike Tyler, the Texas Tech sophomore, stands 6'1", 192 pounds and has the easy presence of an athlete. In fact, he was a wrestler and a football player in high school. His fraternity pledge name is Gambler. He is standing on the porch of a warehouse-cum-cowboy nightclub, wearing a denim jacket and waxing cocksure.

"First of all," he says, "I can't tell you a lot of horror stories because I have very few. The reason is because I don't lose a whole lot of money. I'm what you call a successful bettor. I know what you're trying to get at here -- some kind of pollution of innocence type story. Well, I win. I don't mean to glorify gambling, but I love it, and I don't think I'll ever be able to quit.

"My first season of gambling was in 10th grade, just small stuff. By the time I was a senior, I won $9,000 in one year. I've lost as much as $6,000 in one weekend, but I always look at that and think, Hell, I'll win it back. Last year I won about $4,500, this year I'm up $2,000. On a Saturday during the fall, I'll bet, like, 12 college games. Tech games are an easy pick. In the winter, by the way, Lady Raiders basketball is an easy pick. The Lady Raiders always cover big. A college football game I feel strong about, I'll bet $500. If I'm just curious, maybe 50 or 60 bucks. On Sundays I want to bet every one. I'll put down a grand on a big game. You sit there with the remote control, greatest thing in the world.

"Everybody gambles around here. To say it's just in the Greek system, that would be wrong. It's everywhere. I mean, god, I've probably personally gotten lines with bookies or made bets on my account for 200 people. I've probably booked bets for 50 or 60 people. A lot of my friends call me to make a bet, honestly, I just book it myself. I guess I know I have to slow down someday, but I'll always have a bookie. That won't ever stop. I don't want it to stop. I came from no income at all, and now I can buy things. If it wasn't for gambling, I wouldn't have half the things I have. I live by the stroke of luck.".

Luck is a tributary of the American Dream in the 1990s. Vast riches that can't be earned can surely be won, can they not? All You Need Is a Dollar and a Dream, as the folks at the New York State Lottery used to say. Gambling in one or more forms is legal in 48 states and Washington, D.C. This includes 37 state lotteries (plus Powerball, a multistate game, and a three-state lottery in New England), pari-mutuel wagering in 44 states, bingo in 47 states and a total of 545 casinos (Native American, riverboat and state licensed) in 22 states, with more opening all the time. Sports betting is legal in four states, although straight sports bookmaking is legit only in Nevada (and on a floating casino in international waters off the coast of Fort Lauderdale).

An upshot of this is a wide acceptance of gambling as an avocation, gambling as a hobby. "We're working with the first generation that has been raised when gambling has been seen as a positive thing," says Roger Svendsen, director of the Minnesota Compulsive Gambling Hotline, which serves a state where 17 casinos have been built on Native American reservations since 1988. "Instead of talking about gambling, we talk about gaming.".

Says Lesieur, the gambling researcher, "What you have now, among college students, is a group of individuals who have no recollection of the time when gambling was outlawed. Gambling is simply around now. It's closer than ever before, and it's continuing to get closer.".

This explosion has done more than predispose college gamblers to bet illegally; it has also given them a wide range of legal possibilities. Fraternities at California colleges have for years organized trips to Las Vegas; similar options have become available to students at hundreds of colleges. Mystic Lake Casino in Prior Lake, Minn., for instance, is just a 40-minute drive from the University of Minnesota, and several smaller colleges are within an hour's ride.

Matt Carter, a 22-year-old from Prior Lake who attended St. John's University in Collegeville, Minn., recalls that Native American casino operators would encourage students to recruit friends for bus trips. "The casinos would find a kid wearing a college sweatshirt," he says. "They'd say, 'Hey, if you want to arrange trips, we can do that.' They'll send the bus all the way out to St. John's, a big old Greyhound. They'll put beer, pop, movies on it. You get paid by the person; they'd give you $150 or $200. A buddy of mine did it.".

Riverboat casino "cruises" -- in many cases, the boats never leave the pier -- are available in five states from the heartland (Iowa) to the Mississippi Delta (Louisiana). Officials at Mississippi State and Ole Miss thought this was enough of a hazard to invite Wexler to their campus to speak on the evils of gambling, legal or otherwise.

The 1995 college student's parents and grandparents might have played bingo or bet on horse racing (at a racetrack, not at an OTB parlor or in the living room using a phone account). "Horse racing is much too slow for kids," says Diamond, the Vegas sports-book director. "Too much time between races, too little return for the investment." Casino games are lethally swift: A poor player can lose hundreds of dollars in 15 minutes at a $5- minimum blackjack table. A good -- and lucky -- player can win as much. The intoxication caused by such a pace is terrific. And then there are the women. "Video poker," says Wexler. "That's the game that started really bringing younger women into casinos." College women, too. Slots and video poker. No dealer. No other players. Nonjudgmental wagering. Vegas casinos increasingly attract young women in Champion sweatshirts, emblazoned with college names, who slam quarters and silver dollars into video poker machines and slots.

And college students' wagering can take bizarre forms. Last fall the Georgia campus was swept for 36 hours by a form of the old pyramid scheme. Eight people put up $100 each, and then each of them got eight more people to put up $100 apiece. When you reached the top of the pyramid, you "won" $800, a clear profit of $700. Essentially, you were betting $100 that the chain would last long enough for you to get your profit. It started one weekday at noon and was dead by the next night, leaving dozens of students $700 up and dozens of others $100 down. It is the nature of gambling that the simpler the bet, the more attractive. Why else would people play the lottery?

BLOOMINGTON, IND.: Steve (Lefty) McNeil, Bob Jacobs and Adam Grady are seniors and fraternity brothers at Indiana. One of them has a job for next year, one is looking for work, and the third hopes to attend law school. They sit in jeans and sneakers, recalling their nearly two-year run with a local bookie and, in particular, the weekend last fall when they lost a combined $3,500, including $2,300 on the Dallas Cowboys, who failed to cover a 12-point spot against the Phoenix Cardinals.

"When it looked like we were going to lose," says McNeil, "we drove to Lake Monroe (20 minutes away), and we wondered how the hell we were going to pay. It was the most sickening feeling I've ever had in my stomach. Eventually you pay it off with creative financing.".

"I started out so small," says Jacobs. "Everyone won with parlay cards.".

"The ridiculous becomes normal," says McNeil. "Two hundred dollars easily becomes $500 without thinking about how much money that is. I would double my bets. My rationale became: I win, we're even. If I lose, there's no way I can pay what I owe either way.".

"My mentality was that if I only bet $150 one night, I was minimizing my losses," says Grady.

"I took out $500 on my parents' credit card to help pay my debt," says McNeil, of how he paid his share of the $3,500 weekend loss -- a bailout method he'd used before. "I would tell them that I had to buy some books or that I had a project that I needed money for. Or that there was a dance. Usually I told them it was a dance. They just thought I spent a lot of money.".

To pay his third of the weekend loss, Jacobs cleaned out a savings account started when he was in his early teens. Grady? "I have no idea," he says, "how I paid any of it.".

A big part of the allure of sports betting for students is the availability of credit. For the college kid there's no pressure in making the first bet because bookies don't ask for cash up front. Everybody runs a tab, and the bookie establishes a limit at which he must pay off the bettor's winnings or the gambler must pay off his losses. Jimmy Vaccaro, director of the race and sports book at the Mirage Hotel in Las Vegas, stood in his establishment on a winter Friday and surmised, "You won't see a lot of college kids in here. Here, they've got to put up money to make a bet.".

It's all just a paper game until the bettor reaches his maximum and the bookie demands payment. "At first guys don't really think the bookie wants the money," says Timothy Mills, a Texas Tech senior who ran bets to his off-campus bookie for several fraternity brothers. "It hasn't hit them that what they're doing is real. Then the bookie says, 'Pay me, or you're not betting anymore.' That's when it hits them.".

A compulsive gambler will tell you that he bets for the rush and not for the money. The money is just the syringe that carries the adrenaline. Wexler, who hasn't placed a bet in nearly 27 years, once bet on hockey games for three months before he realized the game was played on ice. Yet, for the college bettor, money is a significant factor on two levels:.

Many of the gamblers are fraternity kids with a plentiful initial supply of their parents' funds. They are, in effect, playing with the house's money. Dad's house. It's not uncommon for a college bettor to get deep into his parents' pockets before he tells them that he's betting.

College students in general are cash poor. They see wagering as a means to a sort of postadolescent wealth. "I'm gambling to make a profit," says Michael Smithson, a 21-year-old senior at Miami-Dade Community College and formerly a student at the University of Miami. "I see my friends going out and having a great lifestyle, and I want it too.".

In either circumstance, the bettor ultimately needs money to pay off his debts. A kid with moneyed parents will eventually have to look homeward to cover debts; a kid without resources will seek any means available to pay. "It is amazing what some people do," says Debbie Frapp, an addiction counselor at Texas Tech. "I've talked to students who have gambled away financial aid money, received emergency aid and gambled that away." It's common knowledge among campus bookies that the time to collect is at the start of the semester. "That's when people get money, from their parents, from the school," says Georgia student bookie Andrew Stewart.

Then again, college kids are a lousy credit risk. When Stewart quit his book, he and his partners were more than $12,000 ahead, but they had been paid only about $2,500, cash.

College gamblers are also blind to the game's scripted outcome. As Jahoda says, "They cannot do the math, and they have no aptitude." Sports gambling isn't an issue of teams and games, it's an issue of numbers and dollars. "We have people in Vegas whose entire job is to find a number," says Diamond. The number is a middle, the gambler's promised land between two different point spreads. Gambling syndicates hire runners to canvass sports books in search of a variance in the point spread. Philadelphia 76ers versus Houston Rockets. You get the Rockets minus 9 with one book and the Sixers plus 11 with another. If it's a 10-point game, you win both bets. Anything else, you lose only the vigorish. "These guys, they don't know a thing about the teams, and they don't care," says Diamond. "They're looking for numbers. Very smart guys.".

Most college guys pick too many games, oblivious to the bookie's edge. And they wander off into parlays and teasers, multiple-proposition sucker bets that are far more difficult to win than straight bets. They are guaranteed to lose. "They do not understand (sports betting) is a zero-sum game, intentionally designed for the house to get the sum and the player to get the zero," says Jahoda.

The bookie's ledger, of course, doesn't stop at zero. It starts there and ends up with columns of numbers that add up to red ink and heartache for their clients.

It is a bizarre progression, indeed, which first brings these college customers to the counter and then keeps them there, plunging away on Weber State and whomever. It starts with the love of sports and the rush that being a fan brings them and which gambling intensifies. Then it becomes the money that they crave and desperately need. Sometimes the money and the rush and love all get together in one game, wrapped in desperation at the end of the cycle.

This was the case on the second weekend in February, when four brothers in the same Georgia fraternity found themselves down a collective $900 to their student bookie. They were deep enough in the hole that they pooled their bets into one account, the better to manage their funds and share their anxiety. This was the day they would escape their debt, by wagering $750 on . . . the NBA All-Star Game. They split their money among straight bets and parlays, concentrating on the East team ("I have a theory about the NBA," says Conrad White. "Always bet on Shaq-Fu'') and the over.

The West won and covered. The under hit. The four of them lost another $825, including the vigorish. "Wasn't even a real damn game," says JoJo Simmons, one of the beaten four.

Then again, with money on the line, it never is.

NEXT WEEK: A profile of a student bookmaker who says he made more than $40,000 off his fellow collegians.

Added Material.

RAGS TO RICHES (text not available; recounting of the bets of someone using the alias, Sonny Martin, who is a 22-year-old senior at the University of Georgia).

COLOR ILLUSTRATION: ILLUSTRATIONS BY TERRY WIDENER (man talking on phone while looking at piece of paper; above and behind him are pennants from various schools with point spreads marked on them).

COLOR ILLUSTRATION: ILLUSTRATIONS BY TERRY WIDENER Then a bettor's miracle: Nebraska scored a trash TD and a vital PAT (scoreboard showing TECH 16 NEBRASKA 42 with one lone fan cheering in the stands).

COLOR ILLUSTRATION: ILLUSTRATIONS BY TERRY WIDENER Students sit in the back of a lecture hall plotting a week's worth of plays on games from Seattle to Miami (student sitting in the back of a class looking at point spreads on a sheet of paper).

COLOR ILLUSTRATION: ILLUSTRATIONS BY TERRY WIDENER There is a reason to wonder if, for example, a few Crazies took Duke, minus 4, for $25 (fans with faces painted watching basketball game from behind backboard).

COLOR ILLUSTRATION: ILLUSTRATIONS BY TERRY WIDENER Students as pigeons: "They think it's healthy and legal and the thing to do" (pigeon with human head holding money in its mouth and a book under its wing).

COLOR ILLUSTRATION: ILLUSTRATIONS BY TERRY WIDENER With all the information out there, you can't fool young gamblers (person watching ESPN and reading the sports pages).

COLOR ILLUSTRATION: ILLUSTRATIONS BY TERRY WIDENER In Vegas there's a generation gap among bettors at sports books (old man and young man sitting back-to-back watching televisions).

COLOR ILLUSTRATION: ILLUSTRATIONS BY TERRY WIDENER For study materials there is a new breed of icons--anybody with a pick (hand dangling point spreads on sheet of paper attached to fish hook above grasping hands).

COLOR ILLUSTRATION: ILLUSTRATIONS BY TERRY WIDENER Bookies collect at the start of a semester--when kids get money (hand reaching for tuition check).

COLOR ILLUSTRATION: ILLUSTRATIONS BY TERRY WIDENER "If you're losing money, you can't stand sports" (man in GEORGIA T-shirt holding his hands over his head below point spreads written in the air).