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By John Hopkins
By coincidence a long established professional golf tournament sponsored by a betting firm took place in Britain last week. Betfred, the third-largest betting firm in the UK in terms of revenue, sponsored the British Masters, an event with a heritage dating back to 1946, for the third year in succession. It was held at the Belfry, the famous course slap bang in the middle of England, which hosted four Ryder Cups between 1985 and 2002.
This served as a reminder that in the United Kingdom golf has had an association with betting since the 18th century when clubs such as Muirfield had a Bett Book in which bets for money and sometimes drink were recorded by a person known as the Clerk to the Betts or Recorder. In the 19th century the great Allan Robertson “carried” or won so many sweepstakes in Scotland that the Fifeshire Journal newspaper later described him as “the real, legitimate and indisputable King of Clubs.”
Betting became more structured with the advent of official on-course bookmakers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries before booming when off-course gambling was legalised in Britain in the 1960s and then again with the arrival of the internet and the online bookmakers.
Betfred, founded in 1967, is now one of Britain’s largest bookmakers, part of an industry that generates nearly £20 billion a year and is growing at nearly 10 percent annually.
“Betting on golf in the UK is considerable,” Rupert Adams of oddsmakers William Hill said. “We believe that somewhere between £400 million and £500 million is bet annually on golf in the UK. It is perhaps the fifth most important sport in this country. Football is obviously the biggest, followed by horse racing and dog racing and then perhaps tennis and then golf.
“The Masters just pips the Open for the best backed tournament with £50 million industrywide bet on the 2021 Masters. Betting on the Ryder Cup all depends how close the match is but it will be in the order of half the Masters.”
For years, betting was, well, just that, a bet in the sense that you pitted your intelligence against those of the oddsmakers working for the betting firms. You decided what to bet on and how much and the betting firms decided what the odds were. It was a mental struggle. Odds on horse racing, football matches and the like were displayed in betting shops belonging to firms such as Ladbrokes, Coral and William Hill. Such shops were to be found in the high streets of every town in the country. They were as commonplace as chemists and hairdressers.
“Betting on golf in the UK is considerable. We believe that somewhere between £400 million and £500 million is bet annually on golf in the UK."
Rupert Adams
That began to change with the advent of more modern technology and the arrival of online betting with firms such as Victor Chandler, Paddy Power, bet365, Skybet and Virginbet. You still could go to a betting shop, place your bet and receive a slip, but it could also be done on the telephone or on your computer. And as it became easier to place a bet so the number of betting shops began to decline. William Hill, which once had 2,000 betting shops now has 1,400.
Another change came when the internet arrived making information freely available to everyone, oddsmakers and gamblers alike, so some of the skills of the oddsmakers used by bookmakers began to diminish in importance.
“Sometimes bookies didn’t know the time of day,” a golf writer who specialised in betting said.
As an example this same golf writer, who reckoned to have an annual turnover of £70,00 in bets and winnings, once found himself so much better informed than the company with which he was placing his bet that he was able to place a bet on a golfer to win a tournament after that tournament had finished. He regards his finest hour to be when his detailed knowledge of golf, golfers and their form enabled him to pick Aaron Oberholser to win the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro Am in 2006, Rory Sabbatini to finish second and Mike Weir third. He got odds of 33-to-1 for Oberholser and Sabbatini and 50-to-1 for Weir. When all three came in precisely where he had predicted he was a very happy man.
One of the most famous examples of golf betting involved Gerry McIlroy, father of Rory, who in 2004 placed £200 at odds of 500-to-1 on his son, then 15, to win the Open in the next 10 years. In 2014, the 10th year of that bet, Rory came through, winning at Hoylake.
“Nine times out of 10 these bets come to nothing,” Jessica Bridge, a spokesperson for Ladbrokes the betting firm, said, “but on this occasion the punters definitely knew more than we did. And we can only doff our cap to their confidence and foresight.”
Sponsorship of golf events by betting firms arrived on the European Tour with Coral’s sponsorship of the 1980 Welsh Golf Classic. Ken Schofield was executive director of the European Tour at the time and remembers how it came about.
“In 1979 the Welsh Golf Classic had been a financial disaster so I called Lord Derby, then president of the European Tour, and with a name like his and his knowledge and involvement in racing, where betting was enormous, he was very supportive of us going to a betting firm,” Schofield said. “He put us in touch with Bernard Coral of Corals, the betting firm, and they sponsored the event in 1980, 1981 and 1982.
“They had done a little sponsorship of one-day pro-ams, that sort of thing, but Bernard agreed to sponsor the Welsh Open and Brian Huggett helped us stage it at Royal Porthcawl. There was a betting tent on the course where punters could lay multiple bets if they wanted to – on Arsenal beating Chelsea the following night, for instance. The one thing that wasn’t allowed was for people to bet on one player against another.”
Soon after this, the European Tour implemented a pretty rigorous Golf Integrity Policy which forbids its members and related personnel – including their management team, caddies, coaches, backroom staff, spouses and partners – from betting or instructing someone else to bet on “any professional or elite amateur golf tournament anywhere in the world.”
The R&A’s betting policy, known as its anti-corruption and betting policy for competitors and caddies, is broadly similar to the European Tour’s GIP and was updated as recently as March of this year.
“In recent years a number of sports have experienced problems with match-fixing, betting-related corruption or inappropriate betting by participants or other people connected to the sport,” Martin Slumbers, the R&A’s chief executive, said. “We are not aware of any such issues having occurred in golf generally, or at the Open in particular. However, even if the risk is low, it exists and we must not be complacent about potential threats, in particular those posed by corrupters outside the sport.
“There is a danger in all sport of inappropriate betting whether it be by players or members of the public. I’d hate to see crowds getting overly involved in their enthusiasm for a particular player or hole or shot based on their betting position.”
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