Sporting News, The: It's almost harvest time for bookies

It's a waste of breath to rail against gambling on sports. The great newspaperman Jack Mann once said, "Don't think the world's ever going to be what you want it to be. Deal with the world that is." The world that is, alas, is a world in which sports gambling is an industry moving billions of dollars among millions of people, some of whom read and respond to gambling

So says Arnie Wexler. "Football people hate me when I say this, but I'll say it, anyway: Hockey's about fighting, baseball's about seeing a game, and football's about gambling," he says. "If you take the gambling interest away from the NFL, you know what you'd have?"

No.

"You'd have soccer."

Wexler says there are 5 million compulsive gamblers in the United States with another 15 million at risk, 48 percent of them betting on sports. Callers to his national hotline (1-888-LAST BET) "owed more than $40,000 at the time they called for help."

He believes Pete Rose, for one, is a compulsive gambler, and so "testified" in ESPN's mock trial asking whether Rose should be eligible for baseball's Hall of Fame. After a jury decided in Rose's favor, Wexler says, lawyer Johnnie Cochran wrote a letter of thanks for his testimony, suggesting baseball should give compulsive gamblers a second chance just as it does drug abusers.

Well, we could go on about that, couldn't we? There's a ton of hot air to be wasted in arguing for the thousandth time that the games matter, not the point spreads, not the runs, not the money won or lost.

Instead, one gambler's story.

He was 17. He came up against a day when there was no football, baseball or basketball games to bet on. So the kid asked his Brooklyn bookmaker,

"Matty, whatcha got?"

"Hockey," the bookie said.

"I don't know nothing about hockey," the kid said. "How do I bet it?"

"Pucks," the bookie said.

"What's a puck?"

By then, the kid was a thief on behalf of his gambling habit. He stole comic books from the local candy store for money to play cards. He stole from his family's wallets. He bet on flipping baseball cards, pitching pennies, shooting marbles. At 14 he won $54 on a night's harness races an imagined himself king of the world.

He was hooked.

So, pucks? The bookie explained: a puck's a goal, and that's how they keep score, and that's how you bet it, a goal here half a goal there. Pucks.

Three months after his first hockey bet, to quote the kid, "I finally saw a game and realized they played on ice."

They could've played in bare feet on spiked beds for all he cared. The game didn't matter. Only the action mattered.

He was a sick puppy.

This sick: During his wife's 37 hours of labor for the birth of their first child, he went to the racetrack twice. His first question after the birth was not about his wife's well-being; it was, "What's the baby weigh?" He used the numbers, 7 pounds, 1 ounce, to bet 7-1 on that night's daily double. He won. He figured: God loves me.

Yeah, right.

Soon enough, he stole from the shipping department of his company to pawn the stuff for gambling money. In time, he owed three times his annual salary to 32 lenders. He considered suicide. When his wife suffered a miscarriage, he took her in the hospital, "wishing and praying she would die," so he wouldn't have to tell her of his addiction. He went to the track that day, too.

That was Arnie Wexler's life. By 1970, so sick that even he finally recognized the sickness, Wexler happened on treatment for compulsive gambling. He escaped the sorry life he'd created, and now helps people who feel trapped in their lives.

They're out there. Wexler says bookmakers tell him that this is their favorite time of the year. "If they have 100 regular customers most of the year," he says, "when football season starts they'll have 500."

DAVE KINDRED

dkindred@sportingnews.com