Roxy Roxborough’s life changed on Christmas Day 1983.
That’s the day Scotty Schettler, who at the time ran the Stardust sportsbook on the Las Vegas Strip, asked Roxborough to meet him at McDonald’s to discuss joining the property’s oddsmaking team.
“I don’t even know if you got the check,” Roxborough joked to Schelttler on Sunday afternoon at The D Las Vegas, where the two took a trip down Memory Lane with their former boss, Richard Schuetz, during a Bet Bash 2 expert panel discussion. “That Christmas was the last day I had off for the next 19 years.”
The Stardust’s bettor-friendly approach to bookmaking — a stark contrast to many operations then and now — made Schettler, Roxborough and their team heroes in old-school Vegas gambling circles. That’s why, almost 40 years later, a few hundred Bet Bash attendees packed the Detroit Ballroom at The D to hear stories about what was, at the time, the most influential sportsbook on the Strip — and beyond.
Schuetz, the Stardust’s former vice president of casino operations, served as moderator and told a few stories of his own.
“The two gentlemen on my left I probably respect more than any two people that I’ve been able to associate with in my tenure in the industry,” said Schuetz, who started in the casino business in 1971.
Schettler said his philosophy as the Stardust’s sportsbook director back in the late 1970s and early 1980s was simple: set clear limits and take big bets, even if his customers were long-term winners. That made the Stardust the go-to sportsbook for serious sports bettors and turned the shop into an attraction for novices. They wanted to go where the pros played.
“We didn’t treat the players as the enemy,” Schettler said. “We wanted the players. Bring your money. Come on.”
Life Imitates Art
Schettler took over the Stardust sportsbook after the regime of Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal, whose ties to organized crime and its casino skimming operation were immortalized in Martin Scorsese’s 1995 movie Casino (though the film used aliases for Rosenthal and the Stardust).
“The year before [I arrived], the Stardust had only written $72 million in the book, which I guess is OK,” Schettler deadpanned. “The next year, I doubled that. But I didn’t really double it. I just counted all the money.”
Leaning on the expertise of Roxborough — the founder of the Las Vegas Sports Consultants oddsmaking service — the Stardust set opening lines for every game, and those numbers became the standard across the country. Day after day, bettors formed long lines in front of the counter early in the morning, hoping to get the first crack at the opening numbers. When disputes consistently bubbled up regarding customers’ places in line, the Stardust instituted a lottery system to determine the order.
As soon as the lines hit the betting board, many bettors would jot them down, then run to a nearby bank of payphones to share the information with other bettors, Schuetz said.
“We had 11 payphones outside of the building,” he said. “The guy who serviced those payphones once told me they were the highest 11 revenue-producing payphones in the United States.”
‘Crying Kenny’ Takes Impromptu Bath
Roxborough, Schettler and Schuetz also shared anecdotes about some of the characters who roamed the Stardust book during their heyday. One such character — a guy who routinely bet Unders in basketball games and complained after every made basket — earned the nickname “Crying Kenny.”
One day, Schettler said an anguished Kenny jumped into the fountains at Caesars Palace and was arrested with $8,000 in his pockets. As he was taken into custody, Kenny gave police a phony name.
“When he sobered up and they let him go, Kenny forgot the [fake] name,” Schettler said. “So he had a hell of a time trying to prove that that was [his] money.”
Schettler also recalled one time when a big bettor needed to pull some money out of his account. “We gave him a half a million. He put it in a cardboard box,” Schettler said.
Added Roxborough, “Nobody wanted to be identified back then.”
“Maybe we weren’t the most diligent tax filers, as casinos or individuals,” Roxborough said. “But today, they take a photo of your license plate when you pull in to park.”
As the panel continued to spin stories about a long-gone era in the Las Vegas bookmaking business, Schuetz frequently returned to the same punchline.
“Did I mention that I spent a lot of time dealing with the Nevada Gaming Control Board?”
