Quote:
Originally Posted by M.A.H.P.'s
degen stories shouldnt have a happy ending
I've already told a couple stories about myself ITT but this "happy ending" quote made me think of a friend of mine.
I was fresh out of undergrad, in my 1st job. My boss was a new guy, young, aloof, kind of a hard ass and very serious. We became friends when he learned that we both had an affinity for gambling. With him you would never have guessed it. He was upper management and was definitely the buttoned down corporate type. I assumed he was making the g money. I had a bookie and he didn't (being new to the area he knew no one). He would handicap baseball and wanted to bet $5-10 per game. My bookie wouldn't take such small bets so I usually just bet his picks for the minimum and let the chips fall. He would bet almost every game every work day. He (we) never won much and never lost much so it wasn't a problem. Turns out he wasn't bad at picking games. I learned that he was a college athlete, having played baseball and football at a small college.
When football season rolled around this guy just went nuts. He was like a kid in a candy store. He would call me into his office on Friday and we would handicap football all afternoon. Again, he placed small bets on numerous games on Saturday and Sunday. Seldom did he lose anything significant and he was mostly being eaten up by the juice. And then . . .
In the Fall of '87 (I believe) the NFL was on strike and was using replacement players. Several weeks into the season my boss comes to me and tells me he has an inside tip on a game and wants to know how much action I can muster for him. Obviously I'm extremely skeptical as he's never bet more than $10 on a game since we started. He tells me, in complete seriousness that the New Orleans - L.A. Rams game is fixed, that he knows someone that knows it for sure and that we can bet any amount that my bookie will accept. At this point I'm sure I'm being leveled so I tell him if he wants to place a large bet I want him to front the money to me just in case. He invites me to his house on Friday afternoon after work - a payday - and says he going to have the cash.
When I get to his house it is nothing like I had envisioned for someone in his position. His house was tiny and a mess, he had 4 kids, his wife stayed home and it was obvious to me that they were not in good shape financially. We go to the bank and he cashes his paycheck (about three thousand take home) and proceeds to withdraw their entire saving account - over 5 grand and says he wants it all on New Orleans on Sunday. I'm stunned and confused but I take the cash . Over the weekend I worry about this more and more. At some point I go out and buy a preseason NFL magazine and look at New Orleans's preseason roster. I find one name that attended the same college as my boss during the same time period. I assume this is where he got his "inside info".
When Sunday comes my bookie is stunned about the amount I want to put on the game. In fact, I had to split the bet up between three different bookies to get it all down. I bet 8000+ for my boss, 4000 for myself, and another 2000 for a couple of buddies that I let in on the secret. The game went off without a hitch and we were so far out by halftime the win was a forgone conclusion. We collected the following week and celebrated and all was good.
In the weeks that followed my boss became a completely different person. He was extremely cocky and started ramping up his bets to 100-200 per game, still betting numerous games on Saturday and Sunday. He started telling everyone in the office to call him "Ice" (wtf?). And he started losing - consistently. He ran through more than $9k in losses in no time. He started acting erratic, missing work, slipping off to the horse track, showing up disheveled - but always betting games and losing weekend after weekend. It became a problem between us because I knew he was using his paycheck to pay for losses and I suspected a day would come when he would be unable to pay. I finally pulled the plug on him. He found other people to place bets through and continued to lose big week after week. Eventually he was riding to work every day with a co-worker and I later found out his only vehicle was broken down and he could not afford to have it repaired. His wife was home with four kids and no car.
Eventually I had an occasion to go by his house again and it looked like they were going broke. I later learned that his wife had actually won an inexpensive car in a drawing but that they were forced to sell it to the car dealer because they were so far in debt. He tried to keep all of this a secret but they eventually filed for bankruptcy. Shortly thereafter his wife caught him with a secretary (totally NOT hot - fat and she had 4 kids of her own). His wife divorced him, moved out of state and took three of his four children with her. He moved in with the secretary and her kids in a trailer home in a mobile home park. Two adults and 5 kids in a freaking mobile home. His behavior became more and more odd and he and I basically had nothing to do with each other. He dressed like a slob and he always had a football schedule and a racing form in his pocket for everyone to see. He had become the ultimate degenerate gambler.
He did finally lose his job too, but he did get hired somewhere else pretty quickly. He and the secretary drifted out of everyone's lives and all we knew of him were stories we heard from time to time like three of his children had never spoken to him again. He had burned several friends by not paying gambling debts. I also learned later that his father was wealthy and had expected that one day he would take over a family insurance agency but that because of the path he had taken his dad gave him nothing.
Brag: I learned from this what a dead-end career I was heading for so I quit betting games completely, quit the job, went to law school and became a more respectable
poker degenerate.
