VANCOUVER, British Columbia — An entire area of General Motors Place, the home of the Vancouver Canucks, is labeled the Sports Action Level. The Sports Action Lounge is on another level.
Sports Action is a British Columbia lottery game, based on multi-game parlay tickets tied to sports results — including NHL games. Monday’s choices also included major- league baseball openers and the Final Four championship game, and English soccer games also are on the Sports Action schedule later in the week.
There are two varieties:
• Sports Action Oddset involved wagers on two, three, four, five or six games, for a minimum of $2 and a maximum of $100 per entry ticket. You bet on one team or the other to win (or a tie in some sports). Each team has a coefficient based on the likelihood of it winning, and the computers do the math to figure out your payoff if you get all correct.
• Sports Action Point Spread involves conventional point spreads, and entrants can select as few as two or as many as 12 games. Bets on each ticket can be from $2 to $20. The payoffs are set for each category, and they are lower than those in Nevada sports books or in online sports books. But it’s convenient and everyone is supposed to know they’re helping raise money for the province.
I was living in the Portland area when Oregon athletic director Bill Byrne — now at Texas A&M — pushed the lottery idea, and it was implemented in Oregon for NFL games and also, briefly, for NBA games. The revenue was ticketed for athletic scholarships in nonrevenue sports.
It also was called Sports Action.
Apparently worried that I was going to try to bribe an NFL quarterback making $3 million to hit my $5 lottery ticket, the league threatened to have Congress kick Oregon out of the union. (I’m exaggerating only slightly.) Eventually, Congress banned the games in an omnibus ban of sports gambling, but Oregon, Nevada and Delaware (where a similar game had been tried) were grandfathered.
Oregon dropped Sports Action recently, in part because the NCAA refused to allow basketball regionals in the state while legal gambling — gambling! — on sports continued.
Yet the concept still works in Canada, and if Congress backs off its ban in the United States, it at least could be fun — and, if promoted right, a money-maker for amateur sports or anything else.
