The Man Who Is Betting You Lose

Behind million-dollar giveaways and field-goal jackpots is Bob Hamman, who underwrites the unlikely. He is betting you lose.

- Bryan Gruley, photographs by Ben Sklar

  

Hamman bought a few truckloads of furniture this year that he didn’t want or need. “It cost me about $1.5 million,” he says with a sheepish grin. “I try to forget those details.”

Hamman was on the hook for all those ottomans and recliners because Ohio State upset Oregon in January’s NCAA football championship. His company, SCA Promotions, underwrote a contest staged by an Ohio furniture chain promising free goods if the Buckeyes won. Hamman bet they wouldn’t.

It was a rare loss for him. For three decades, he’s been figuring the odds of these kinds of things: that Serena Williams would win a Grand Slam; that an average Joe would sink a halfcourt basketball shot; that Lance Armstrong would win a bunch of Tour de France races (without doping).

A droll 77-year-old with a lumbering gait and a head of unruly white hair, Hamman is a sort of cross between a bookie, insurance executive, and math professor, without actually being any of them. Dustin Hoffman portrays him in The Program, a movie about the Armstrong scandal.

When a car dealer offers a free Camaro to the local fan who kicks a 35-yard field goal at a college football game, it takes out a short-term insurance policy to cover its potential losses. SCA Promotions is one of those unofficial insurers, weighing the chance the unlikely will happen and charging a fee to reimburse Tri-County Chevrolet if it does. Companies such as SCA are like auto insurers that collect premiums against the chance a safe driver will have a costly collision, except there’s no tragedy and the potential payoffs for the contestant are enormous: In 2014, Quicken Loans and Warren Buffett offered a $1 billion jackpot if someone picked a perfect March Madness bracket.