Auburn, Ala. — A giant cardboard picture, tattered by time, rests against a wall in Joshua Adams’s home. It shows a radiant young woman with an Auburn University corsage hugging the university’s mascot, a tiger. She is Auburn’s homecoming queen — and Mr. Adams’s mother.
The university dominates this city of 60,000, with football its spiritual center. And as Mr. Adams will attest, sports competition extends beyond the field. “Betting for me started when I was 13 years old,” he said, adding that bookies were never hard to find.
Years later, Mr. Adams relished joining his college pals in Atlanta, where they would throw a modest sum of money into a pot and select their fantasy football teams for a season-long competition.