How William Perry’s TD Rumble 35 Years Ago Sparked Super Bowl Prop Betting

Propositional bets, or “prop bets,” are specialized wagers you make on games, and they’re my favorite part of Super Bowl betting.

Let?s pretend you don?t want to bet on the Kansas City Chiefs or Tampa Bay Buccaneers to cover the spread this Sunday. Perhaps you?re also torn on which team is going to win and you?re really not sure if the game will go ?Over? or ?Under? 56 total points. These are big decisions after all.

Prop betting allows you to dive deeper into the game and place wagers on specific matchups, players or results. Will Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes throw for 400 yards? How many completions will Bucs quarterback Tom Brady have? How many yards will the longest touchdown be? Which team will score first? Will the coin toss land heads or tails?

One quick stroll through a sportsbook or scroll through a mobile betting app and you?ll find hundreds upon hundreds of props for Super Bowl LV. It?s like jamming a candy aisle with endless candy so a customer craving candy gets all the candy they can handle.

But that wasn?t always the case.

The first Super Bowl props started popping up in Las Vegas in the mid-1980s. There were a handful of props for a few years, but the biggest game-changer in the industry was posted in January 1986.

Will Chicago Bears rookie defensive lineman William ?Refrigerator? Perry score a touchdown in Super Bowl XX against the New England Patriots?

The prop was the brainchild of legendary Vegas bookmaker Art Manteris, who was running the sportsbook at Caesars Palace at the time. Manteris sensed the popularity of expanded wagering and decided to take a stand against the ?Fridge? scoring a touchdown.

“We put it up at 20-to-1 that he would score,” said Manteris, now the vice president of race and sports operations at Station Casinos. ?(Bears head coach) Mike Ditka said ?Fridge? will never carry the ball again. Those were his exact words. But we kept writing bets all the way down to 2-to-1.”

The bettors couldn?t get enough leading up to Super Bowl Sunday. They flocked into Caesars from all over the country to bet on Perry crossing the plane. Manteris was a nervous wreck by kickoff after checking the balance sheet and agonizing over the built-up liability.

“Then Ditka sent him in the game at the goal line,” Manteris recalled. “The Bears were up 37-3 and he comes in and scores a touchdown. I couldn’t believe it. We got killed on that.”

Caesars lost over $100,000 on Perry’s TD.

“I was pissed!” Manteris said. “Livid. Embarrassed. You name it. We lost so much money. But the next day, I got a call from the Caesars World president thanking me and congratulating me on that great idea. I didn?t understand.

“Then a little while later, the president of the Caesars Palace hotel came down and said the same thing. He said we got more publicity than we could?ve bought for millions of dollars. I was flabbergasted. The value of the exposure, the publicity, and the attention to Las Vegas and the hotel was overwhelming. It certainly opened my eyes to what was to come.”

Over 35 years have passed since “Fridge” steamrolled Pats linebacker Larry McGrew on his way to the end zone in New Orleans. It was a revolutionary moment that paved the way for the future of Super Bowl wagering.

So as you peruse through all the betting props for this weekend, you can thank Manteris for not believing in a 340-pound rookie lineman to score a touchdown.

It?s a mistake that changed the industry forever.

Check out NESN.com/Odds for all our Super Bowl LV betting coverage.