This was the regular response Jimmy the Greek would so often give after that day in 1988 when he made a few terribly careless remarks about the black athlete that prompted CBS to fire him. In fact, however ill-chosen or historically ignorant some of The Greek’s words were, his flip discourse was not meant to be noxious, or even controversial. “What he said seemed self-evident to most whites and a good many blacks as well: blacks in general are more athletically gifted than whites,” wrote Richard Cohen in The Washington Post. “He spoke of racial differences, and that is an American taboo. Never mind that there are such things.”

Nevertheless, once a public figure has been identified with one simple, notorious action, the artless anecdote defines the whole person. Did Edmund Muskie ever do anything with his life but cry one snowy afternoon? Long after people forgot what it was exactly The Greek had said, he was closeted in the public mind with all the real racist fools of our time. In fact, although Jimmy busted on the race card, it was a misdeal.

So it was that, the other day, eight years after he died, he was buried in Steubenville, Ohio, the raffish old river town where he had started out, betting.

In a way that gave him no satisfaction, though The Greek did triumph. When Jimmy Snyder started out, as a kid, in the underground hustle, running the Big Six wheel at Money O’Brien’s Academy Pool Room in Steubenville, there was almost no legalized gambling anywhere in America. Today, “gaming” is authorized in virtually every state; lotteries are a staple of the republic, the numbers called off every night along with the local weather and mayhem on the 10 o’clock news. And there’s Pavarotti himself singing at a casino at a backwater Indian reservation, while 3,000 zombies (most of them mothers and grandmothers) play the slots.

The Greek was the main crossover figure in this national moral transmogrification, taking us from the zany Damon Runyon school of gamblers-as-laff-riots through the menacing Vegas mob days to our current embrace of gambling for one and all. Suddenly, there was The Greek on CBS, with Miss America herself (Phyllis George), luminous in his gold chain, instructing the middle class when to take the points.

Curiously, Jimmy suffered some ambivalence about all this, for whereas he delighted in his newfound fame and gentility, he had his doubts about whether Mr. and Mrs. America could handle boundless gambling. “Vegas, you got to fly to get there, make an effort,” he told me. “I’m not so sure gambling should be accessible.”

Certainly, there have always been suckers, but Jimmy came from a time when, I think, the people who gambled seriously tolerated risk. “Entitlement” was not yet in the lexicon, nor was “downside” a euphemism for “tapped out.” Before computers, intuition counted more–Jimmy’s own first big national splash was betting Truman as a 17-1 underdog against Dewey because his sister advised him women were suspicious of men with mustaches and it was a time when people better accepted idiosyncrasy and exception. In those days, folks were always saying, “We’ll make an exception here.” Exceptions are not fashionable today.

Anyway, a lot of The Greek was just tough-guy, sharpie Strip-image. Actually, through thick and thin, through 44 years, the same woman stayed married to him, and Jimmy and Joan had five children. They also had three of them die of cystic fibrosis–one an infant, one a child, and then Jamie, who lived into his 20s and fancied mathematics and astronomy. The odds against this were brutal. When two CF carriers have a child, the genetic percentages are that one out of four will get the disease. The Snyders came up unlucky three out of five, and so one day there we were, in the summer desert, weaving through Vegas in a caravan of sparkling white funeral limos to lay Jamie to rest with the others.

Another time, another white limo, Jimmy and I leave the track together. To my surprise, he starts talking about his two dead girls and Jamie. It is very hard for him, but he can talk to me better because I have lost a child to cystic fibrosis myself. “How’s your boy?” he suddenly asks me. My son was our healthy child, and I say he’s fine. “It’s tough on Anthony and Stephanie too,” The Greek says. Those are his healthy children. “I know,” I say.

Without warning, then, Jimmy pulls out his big bankroll. He had hit a big exacta on a route in the last race. He peels off a hundred. “Give this to your boy,” he says.

Now, the first canon of journalism is–and Jimmy knows this – you can’t take money from someone you’re writing about; it makes you a scumbag on the take. I protest: “Hey, Greek, come on.”

But he jams the bill on me, hard, angry. “You come on,” he growls. “The kid lost his sister.” I take the money, and I buy my son a bicycle with it and get him to write a thank-you note to Jimmy the Greek. This is an exception.

Then, in the white limo, tough old Jimmy the Greek, America’s oddsmaker, loses it, absolutely. He is thinking of his children, the ones living and the ones dead, and he starts to sob so that I have to throw my arm around him and hold him.

At his funeral in Steubenville, I recalled what The Greek told me another time long ago on another occasion, some time ago: “All the best guys are dead and gone. The only reason I’m still around is because I started so early.”