A Dip in the Pool

Each week during the soccer season, millions of Britons take pen in hand to calculate which games, of some several dozen each Saturday, are most likely to end in ties. The sacred ritual can keep a devotee busy all week with form sheets and result charts, and some are known to resort to the sliderule, the abacus or even tea leaves. For a bet in the football pools is matched only by the Irish Sweepstakes as the gambling world's biggest play, bringing a lucky winner tax-free riches well worth a lifetime of concentrated, calculating devotion. A 43-man syndicate won $967,640 a year ago, and one man once took home $884,800.

Percy Harrison, who worked in a Lincolnshire fertilizer factory, was a stranger to the pools. A farm laborer most of his life, Harrison, 52, had seldom earned more than $40 a week. He and his buxom wife Maude had raised four daughters and a son, and Maude still picked potatoes to help meet the $14 a month payments on their cottage. Harrison had seldom been outside his village, and never to London --or to a soccer game. For the first time in his life, three weeks ago he took a 140 flutter. It brought him a $1.40 windfall, so he decided to use some of his winnings to try again. After all, he had a foolproof system: Maude called out numbers at random for him as he filled in the betting coupon.

Mamma knew best. Nine games ended in ties; the Harrisons picked eight of them--the only bettors in all Britain to get that many. Last week, uncomfortable in baggy suit and errant tie, Percy Harrison journeyed wide-eyed to London to receive, amid the pop of champagne corks and the glare of TV lights, the largest single win in the soccer-pool history: $947,400 on his bet of 520. "I felt a bit of a shiver come over me," said Harrison, after he heard he had won. In London to collect the money, he looked a little dazed: "I've never been the one for being away from home. I felt badly this morning on the train." Would the fortune bring him happiness? Harrison was pessimistic. "It's too late in the year for me," he complained. "I get pains in my chest and I wheeze all night long."

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