Could gambling destroy sports? Iowa writer David Bluder's novel ponders potential for doom

David Bluder of Solon wrote a crime thriller with a sports gambling plot called "The Great Gamble."

What better day to release the novel than March 16, the day after the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament Brackets were to be announced?

“It’s the biggest gambling week of the year,” Bluder said.

That’s true — every year except this year. This year the coronavirus pandemic canceled the NCAA Tournament and shut the betting windows.

MORE:The latest on coronavirus in Iowa

The pandemic eventually closed bookstores and other retail shops.

No March Madness. No customers flipping through pages looking for a good read.

The irony is that a plot point in Bluder's book is how gambling could destroy sports. But the coronavirus has shown us all a world without sport and gambling,

A decade of research, writing, editing, revisions and seeking a publisher crashed into a wall like a pair of dice in a craps game and came up snake eyes.

But Bluder is a tough guy to bring down.

In 1997, he drove out into the country to see the Hale Bop comet. On his way home, a teenage driver crashed into his car.

Bluder smashed through the windshield. His parents found him in a ditch. They thought he was dead.

Bluder fell unconscious for three days. His wife, Lisa Bluder, then the Drake University women’s basketball coach, flew home from Cincinnati, where she was receiving an award.

When David Bluder finally awoke from his coma, he followed that with another kind of awakening. Over the next year, he decided to change his life.

Bluder had always been a finance guy and a successful one.

He worked at banks and eventually Iowa Transfer system, which became Shazam. His boss invented the ATM card which famously made its first debit transaction at the former Dahl’s store on Ingersoll Avenue, now a Price Chopper.

Bluder earned his bachelor’s at the University of Northern Iowa and master’s from St. Ambrose University.

His parents owned a Country Kitchen restaurant in Marion, where Lisa Geske, a high school senior, worked.

“My mom wrote a letter and said, ‘I’ve found a girlfriend for you,’” Bluder said. “'She’s cute and bubbly and blonde.’ My mom was like the ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ matchmaker.”

Bluder’s mother proved an ideal Yente. Lisa and David married in 1984 and have been together for 36 years.

About a year after the crash, Bluder decided he wanted to give up the world of finance to invest fully in being a dad for the couple’s children, which eventually became a three-pack — daughters Hanna and Emma and a son, David.

“We’re the Bluder Bunch,” he said.

Lisa Bluder became head coach at the University of Iowa in 2000, David found himself in the company of some of the brightest people in the world from athletics to the arts.

The ember for his book started to burn in 2010, after a scandal revealed an NBA referee shaved points for gamblers. 

Bluder thought this kind of treachery could be the doom of fan’s trust in sports. A novel began to shape in his head. 

The story involved a massive international FBI investigation, drug cartels and the corruption of sports by gambling so great no fan might ever trust any game again.

He talked to pro and college athletes in his wife’s orbit, who would tell him stories about what they’d heard.

Bluder spoke in-depth with former U.S. Rep. Jim Leach, who during his time in office backed a bill that would prevent credit card payments to offshore sports and other gambling companies.

Bluder consulted with visiting authors, teachers and others at the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop. He took a summer program there.

He learned the craft of writing and continued to whittle down sentences, create characters and build worlds that made his plot work.

All the while, he followed the Hawkeyes’ exploits through some of their best seasons and helped raise the couple’s three children.

The book opens with a half dozen pages of endorsements from familiar Iowa names such as actor Tom Arnold and wrestling great Dan Gable to former Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey, who also opposed offshore gambling.

Bluder reminds readers the book is fiction, but the way it is presented and with an epilogue about the dangers of gambling to sports and society by Leach, it could also be a work of speculative fiction.

“It’s not happening right now,” Bluder says of the gambling plot, “but it very easily could.”

Register Storyteller Daniel P. Finney grew up in Winterset and east Des Moines. He wrote his first story for the Register in 1993 at age 17. He has stacked paragraphs ever since. Reach him at 515-284-8144 or dafinney@dmreg.com. Follow him on Twitter at @newsmanone or Facebook at @danielpfinney.

Your subscription makes work like this possible. Join today at DesMoinesRegister.com/Deal.