In an article for Sports Illustrated John J. Lennon explores our shared humanity — our drive to escape, to get knocked down, stand back up, and win – through an exploration of sports betting behind bars.
EXCERPT
“Just go to NFL.com real quick,” Red barks into the prison phone in the exercise yard. He’s standing in a caged dugout-like area, where 23 phones are attached to the outer brick wall of the building where Old Sparky electrocuted 614 people. Red’s likely not thinking about those lost lives, nor the two he took 25 years ago. He’s thinking about escaping. And for that he needs football stats and injury reports.
It’s Saturday afternoon, Week 11 of the NFL season, and I’m lapping the A Block yard at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison in Ossining, N.Y. Crisp autumn air whips off the Hudson River as Mexicans, Dominicans and Albanian Eddy play pickup soccer on a slightly slanted open area of cracked pavement. By the bleachers two prisoners are going at it in a game of skully, flicking upturned bottle caps caked with soap around a board that’s been painted on the blacktop. Squat, flick. Squat, flick. Razor-wire-topped fences wrap the yard, which armed guards watch from towers 30 feet above. Most of us are from New York City’s five boroughs, just 30 miles down the river. Most have been in for decades, with decades more to go—doing football numbers, as they say, serving sentences as big as the numbers NFL linemen wear on their chests.