COMMENTARY : It’s Easy to Gamble Away Life

Just for the shock of it, it’s worth our while every year or so to hear Arnie Wexler talk about gambling’s effect on sports.

“How about a baseball player who made $800,000 a year,” Wexler says, “and now he can’t pay a $25 debt?”

Once a compulsive gambler and now a counselor for those suffering the compulsion, Wexler first bet at age 7. He flipped baseball cards with his buddies. In time gambling came to own him. He made love to his wife while listening for scores from a radio under the bed. Before he could quit, he owed three years’ salary, $30,000. He thought of suicide. One night when his wife feared a miscarriage, he put her in the car for an emergency run to the hospital. “I was praying to God, ‘Let her die.’ ”

Sheila Wexler today is her husband’s partner in Arnie & Sheila Wexler Associates, a program designed to fight the compulsive gambling addiction that made their lives misery. She blamed herself for their failing marriage until learning the signs of Arnie’s addiction: “I certainly believed that gambling was something he loved, but I didn’t understand the enormity of it.”

Sheila Wexler spoke of the compulsion’s power. It also can be said that gambling itself is big and getting bigger. If only we pay a little attention, all the evidence is there.

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The last minute of the San Francisco 49ers’ victory in Super Bowl XXIX meant nothing to anyone who cared about the athletic contest. Apparently it meant enough to gamblers that ABC announcers felt compelled to crack wry, inside jokes about the San Diego Chargers’ attempts to score when victory was out of reach and all that remained to be settled was the point spread.

Maybe two weeks later, at a track meet in Reno, there was legal betting on the event. Except for boxing, which is beneath contempt in every way, the Reno track meet is the first mainstream sports event for which gambling has been legalized at the site. Chances are, it won’t be the last.

Go to Peoria, Ill., the pure heart of the great Midwest, and there in the Illinois River is anchored a gambling casino serviced by an on-shore facility with the look of a third-string Las Vegas hotel. Buses by the dozens bring gamblers down from Chicago, over from Indianapolis. This isn’t the Bahamas or Atlantic City or Monte Carlo--this is PEORIA!

By most signs, America has decided gambling is OK. Lotteries are everywhere. Point spreads appear in newspapers, some of which carry gambling-advice columns. Gamblers debate the finer points of their art on talk radio. Only rarely do we read and hear the stories of failure and grief that outnumber by thousands the stories of instant millionaires.

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So it’s worth our while occasionally to put a call in to Arnie Wexler, who at 57 has lived a gambler’s life and has seen the bright lights of exhilaration turn to a fearful darkness. He doesn’t argue morality; he doesn’t advocate repeal of lotteries, sinking of riverboats or unplugging the neon of Vegas. Wexler simply sounds a warning about a danger that is personal and intimate.

He recently resigned as executive director of the Council on Compulsive Gambling of New Jersey and now lectures about the addiction on college campuses. He did a poll five years ago of 196 compulsive gamblers that showed 79% of them bet on sports events. And in talking to college students in the last year, Wexler heard stories of . . .

--Betting on games in which they played.

--Shaving points in high school and college games.

--Running bookmaking rings, football pools or card games in college.

“It’s an explosion,” Wexler says, and what’s more astonishing than gambling’s pervasiveness is America’s casual acceptance of it. Does anyone remember the Northwestern University scandal now barely three months old? It came and went so quickly that “scandal” hardly seems the word; it was more a passing embarrassment, gone from sight before anyone outside of Evanston, Ill., much knew that a Northwestern running back and basketball starter admitted betting on college games.

Their punishments are telling. Thirty years ago, Paul Hornung and Alex Karras were suspended for an NFL season after admitting they bet on other teams’ games. In December 1994, Northwestern running back Dennis Lundy was suspended for one game; guard Dion Lee for six games.

Wexler says, “The football coach (Gary Barnett) said it wasn’t that big a deal. But I’ve heard the FBI is investigating. So it’s big.” The Chicago Tribune reported that Northwestern hired a former assistant U.S. attorney to handle the case.

Wexler provides a Gamblers Anonymous list of questions that help identify compulsive gamblers, such as: Have you ever lost time from work due to gambling? Has gambling affected your reputation? After losing, have you felt that you must return as soon as possible and win back your losses? Have you ever gambled longer than you had planned?

He knows one when he sees one. He has worked with Art Schlichter, the quarterback whose career went bust because he couldn’t stop gambling. He has read about Michael Jordan’s gambling sprees, Pete Rose’s, Lenny Dykstra’s. “Jordan’s playing baseball now,” Wexler says, “because baseball players sit around playing cards all the time. And the only difference between Art Schlichter and Pete Rose is that Schlichter is in jail and can no longer sell his autograph to write checks while Pete can. As for Dykstra, in my opinion, he’d cross the picket line because he’s lost money in Atlantic City.”

Only the most naive believe that only those we have read about are in trouble. “Five percent of Americans have a gambling problem,” Wexler says, “so it’s not unreasonable to believe that five percent of athletes have the same problem. In fact, with the ego of athletes, it’s not unreasonable to believe it’s more than five%.”