Scott Radley: How Hamilton’s John Levy turned a family company into a $2.4 billion business

With single-game betting now legal in Ontario, this seems like the perfect moment to talk about the guy who got the ball rolling.

OK, that's admittedly a significant overstatement. Hamilton's John Levy didn't invent gambling. He didn't design it or define it. But if we go back to 1994, his rather Kreskin-like ability to see where things would eventually go with sports betting was on full display. A bit of prescience that would set himself up for a massive payday down the road.

We'll get to that last bit in a minute.

If you're old enough to remember the days of 1990s cable TV, you might recall a channel so high up the dial you almost needed oxygen just to watch it. That was his. He called it Sport Scope.

Again, let's change our word. Watch isn't exactly accurate since there was really nothing to watch. It was a plain screen with sports scores on it. Just text.

It was internet on television before the internet existed," Levy says.

Because it had no video, it didn't require a CRTC licence. But he thought it was something so he went with his gut. Which is a recurring theme in this story.

As a high school student in the '70s, he worked for his dad's cable company. Western Co-Axial had the west end of Hamilton as its domain. During his first year of law school, Levy learned Northgate Cable could be purchased, which would allow the family business to expand.

It was about this amazing new business that was creating this new form of home entertainment," the 68-year-old says.

Trouble was, there were half a million dollars in the business's bank account but the price was a million. They'd have to borrow what was a lot of money then. So he went to his dad and explained what they should do.

To his credit, he looked at me and he said, Have you done your homework?' I said, Yeah.' He says, Is this the right thing to do?' I said, Absolutely.'"

So they pulled the trigger. That was the first. They ended up buying three others. Eventually they had 80,000 subscribers.

If investing in the cable business was the first sign he had a knack for anticipating where consumer tastes were heading, this channel was the second.

There's no lightbulb-over-the-head story to its origin. One day, one of his equipment suppliers simply mentioned he'd created this, well, he wasn't really sure what it was. It was a piece of technology that put data on a screen. Why don't you put it on one of your channels and see if you like it, he suggested. Where's the harm, Levy thought.

It wasn't exactly gripping stuff. Except it was loved.

My buddies were calling me saying, Holy s - t, this stuff is fantastic," Levy says.

Sports fans could come home from a night out, flip to Sport Scope and find out the results of the games they'd missed without having to wait for the highlight shows on TSN (Sportsnet wouldn't launch for another three years).

But there was something else on there, too.

When he was a boy of 10 or 11, he remembers the phone ringing at his Westdale home - he lives at the same address today in a home he built to replace his childhood house - on Sunday mornings. A guy with a gravelly voice would ask for his dad.

It was his bookie.

We didn't think sports betting was a bad thing," he says. What we thought was, it's part of the reason people love sports."

So when Sport Scope launched, he included betting odds. It was unique. Most places hid such information or pretended it didn't exist.

Eventually, he bought the technology that ran the data program from the creator. As the channel switched from type on a screen to one that got licenced to show highlights as Headline Sports and then morphed into theScore - a minnow competing with TSN and now Sportsnet - the odds remained part of the package. Which still might've been the end of the story if he once again hadn't correctly anticipated the direction of future tastes.

Those other sports networks were traditional. Hosts wore jackets and ties. His didn't. They joked and kept it fun. Things were intentionally irreverent. It drew the attention of a younger audience.

We said, Just go do what the hell you do,'" he says he told his on-air talent. Just talk sports like we're sitting at a bar.' And that's what resonated."

Enough that in 2012, Rogers bought his network for $167 million. All but the digital side. That he kept. Which was yet another stroke of genius, as it turns out.

A few years before the sale, he'd launched theScore app. It was similar to most of the other sports apps out there except for the fact that it included odds and information about betting.

Catching the theme here?

Anyway, it did well. Really well. Eventually it became the most popular sports app in Canada and third most popular in North America, attracting four million users a month. It had all the information a sports app would typically have. The one surprise? Many of the downloads were coming from south of the border where theScore's TV product wasn't even available. Then they noticed one other thing.

The app would get a ton of clicks at one o'clock on a Sunday afternoon. Or on a Monday night. Right when NFL football was starting. Single-game betting wasn't legal here - you had to wager on a parlay of three or more games and get them all right to win or go offshore - but there was clearly loads of interest in it from the demographic that used the tool.

When they'd look on the built-in chat feature, 50 per cent of the discussion was about wagering. What he'd thought was true so many years ago was right. Now he had the chance to go even further.

If people are watching sports on their TV or computer these days while checking updates on the device in their hand, what if the chance to wager on a game was integrated into the experience, he wondered? A one-stop-shopping tool for sports fans with a hankering to gamble on the game.

We looked at each other and said, Why wouldn't we do that?'" he says. I mean, we've done the tough part. We've collected the audience, we've got the brand, we've got people loving us, they're betting on sports. Why force them to go elsewhere?"

So he told his engineer to build that kind of app.

This kind of betting still wasn't legal in many places but he eventually did a deal with Penn National Gaming to get access to a number states where it was. And with things evolving quickly, there was reason to believe it would soon expand. And if it did, he had a goldmine on - and in - his hands.

Last summer, the ban against single-game betting was dropped in Canada. Earlier this month, Ontario became the first province to open a regulated program (you may have noticed the torrent of ads and segments about multitudinous services getting into the action). That same day, theScore Bet launched. Which was six months after the entire company was sold to Penn for an astonishing $2 billion (U.S.).

Yes, it's an eye-popping number," he admits.

He and his three sons will continue to operate it. Keep working to find new ideas and new ways to make it better. Maybe see if there's another bang-on prediction in him.

In the meantime, they'll focus on Ontario - a few days ago, theScore Bet announced a 10-year deal to be the exclusive gaming partner of the Toronto Blue Jays - and wait for the rest of Canada to open up. And then?

And then we'll see what happens."

Scott Radley is a Hamilton-based columnist at The Spectator. Reach him via email: sradley@thespec.com