Ten years ago, I stopped watching football.
The NFL playoffs kick off this week. This used to be my favorite time of year. I’d hang on every play as the top two teams made their runs to the Super Bowl, living and dying on every down.
When I was a kid in New York, I’d root for the Giants. But later in life, the only team that interested me was the green team, and I don’t mean the Jets — I mean cash.
If I didn’t bet $5,000 on a game, it was like watching paint dry.
Some plays still haunt me: Franco Harris’ “Immaculate Reception”; “The Catch,” where Joe Montana hit Dwight Clark with 51 seconds left to beat Dallas in the 1982 NFC Championship Game; Philadelphia’s Chuck Bednarik’s crushing hit on the Giants’ Frank Gifford in 1960.
But I lost my love for football when gambling became my new mistress. Her action, her juice, her rush proved too hard to resist.
I suppose my compulsion started in the ‘50s when I was a kid growing up in the Bronx streets. There, my friends and I played poker for 2 to 5 cents a card. We’d flip baseball cards, play blackjack for pennies, play stickball for quarters. We gambled on everything.
After joining the service, I found that by reading a few books on poker, memorizing rudimentary mathematical odds and developing minimal card sense, I could make a lucrative living.
In 1966, the poker craze hadn’t hit yet. You didn’t have to be a great player to make money — just a good one. Most money won playing poker comes not from the brilliance of your own play, but from your opponent’s ineptitudes.
The following year, 1967, I went to Vietnam. Playing poker in Southeast Asia was like stealing. Due to tax exemptions and combat pay, soldiers had a lot of money. I tried to remedy that.
To a soldier returning to face the enemy in the bush, money is not a priority. Time alive meant more to him than money.
I thought I was a smart guy who played the angles. If an eyeless, legless carcass was to be shipped home in a body bag, I ensured his money, now useless to him, stayed with me.
Sounds pitiless — worse, satanic — but excessive gambling bankrupts the soul. According to the late actor Walter Matthau, “Poker exemplifies all the worst aspects of capitalism that make our country great.”
Matthau is dead on. Gambling is work. If you enjoy gambling, or play poker to make friends, you’ve lost already.
You want a friend? Buy a dog.
Poker stayed lucrative for me, but gambling didn’t. Like all compulsions, gambling narrows the world. Nothing else interested me. I herded with other gamblers only. I abandoned all interests that didn’t jackhammer my jugular or tighten my intestines. They bored me.
Wherever I couldn’t find a poker game, I’d find a phone. It was much easier to place a bet than to drive all over New York to locate a poker game.
My gambling digressed from a calling to a compulsion. The more I fed it, the hungrier it got. My family life suffered. I missed family dinners, communions and birthdays because I was totally self-absorbed in my lust for action.
Each year, my downward financial spiral continued until I borrowed to gamble. I banged out credit cards, postponed paying bills and scrambled for cash to satisfy my insatiable habit.
Despite the nightmare, I couldn’t find the strength to abandon my compulsion.
Finally, I bottomed out. I owed money to every bookmaker I knew. (And I knew plenty.)
In desperation, I hit upon a plan. No surprise that, since I was enslaved by my addiction, my solution would exacerbate the problem.
I planned to make my compulsion work for me. I’d take action instead of betting. I’d become a bookie.
For the next seven years, I booked sports. As a bookie, my financial situation changed dramatically. The results of that change and my expertise on various modes of gambling will be posted in future columns.
Although some of your instructors sport multiple degrees, my futile education was most assuredly more expensive than theirs.
In the weeks ahead, I will reminisce about the inglorious results of bad life decisions and instruct readers on prohibitive odds. My tuition was expensive. Yours will be free, so read on and profit from my mistakes.
Even if you cut the cards yourself, you couldn’t get a squarer deal.
Bill O’Connor is a Vietnam vet, former Bronx firefighter and pub and restaurant owner. He is currently a journalism major at UF and a stand-up comic. The highly irreverent and acerbic O’Connor performs free stand-up comedy at various locations in Gainesville.
