By the time he was 19, Spencer Goldman had racked up a debt of $5,000, pawned all of his possessions, alienated most friends, and was kicked out of his parents’ house. Spencer suffers from a gambling addiction, and he is not alone.
This year, over one-third of Americans will place some sort of wager on the Super Bowl. A Canadian adult spends an average of $424 annually on government-run gambling. Recent statistics on gambling are not only astounding, but downright scary. One study indicates that gambling has surpassed smoking and drinking as the number one addiction afflicting North Americans today. The lure is apparently becoming irresistible, and Americans and Canadians are spending billions of dollars each year in hopes of hitting the jackpot.
Only a generation ago, bingo halls and the odd charity casino were enough to satisfy the cravings of the Canadian public. But today, video-lottery terminals are being installed and casinos are being built at an alarming rate in order to meet the increasing demand of gamblers. And with the emergence of online gambling sites, the power to bet away your life savings is literally at your fingertips.
On the flipside, provincial governments are profiting more than ever from the revenue generated by gambling’s popularity. According to Statistics Canada, the total money wagered at casinos across the country-in government lotteries and at VLTs (video-lottery terminals)-has almost quadrupled in the past decade, rocketing to $10.7 billion last year from $2.7 billion in 1992. By all accounts, gambling is now a major cash cow for the Canadian government.
Beneath this sheen of comfortable profit, gambling rests on a crumbling underbelly of addiction and self-destruction. Like other social ills, such as drinking and smoking, there is increasingly little doubt that abusive gambling habits leave ruin in their wake. Jon Kelly of the Responsible Gambling Council of Ontario suggests that there are more than 340,000 adults in Ontario alone who have a gambling problem. Over 60,000 of those cases can be considered “severe.”
As the addiction proliferates, the sob stories of lost bank accounts and broken homes are no longer only associated with middle-aged men-they are now a widespread phenomenon. Housewives from Saskatoon are addicted. Senior citizens all across Québec are squandering retirement savings and losing pension funds. A 1996 article in Sports Illustrated for Kids stated that more than one million children in the United States have a gambling problem. And yes, even on the university campus, gambling is rearing its ugly head.
Take the case of Spencer*, a recent graduate of a Canadian university who admits to being a compulsive gambler, or as he likes to call it, a “sick puppy.”
Spencer, an honour-roll student who attended a public high school like any other in the GTA, was first introduced to the seductive world of gambling in 1992. It was thanks in large part to a high school football tournament he took part in, played in Las Vegas, Nevada – gambling mecca of the world. Only 16 years old at the time, Spencer was in awe of the notorious Vegas Strip. “I fell in love with the Vegas lifestyle, I saw high rollers and I wanted to be one,” he says. “Guys were rolling up to casinos in Ferrari’s, with custom-made Armani suits and six-foot blondes on their arm-what more is there to say?”
When he returned to Toronto, Spencer immediately began gambling. “Me and some buddies started going to charity casinos that were located near our high school. It got to the point that we were going at least five days a week, trying to make what we called ‘lunch hits’ because we were going during our lunch hour.” Spencer first played blackjack at the $1 tables. But he says within a year he was playing every hand at the $10 table. Soon, he was risking at least $60 per hand.
When Spencer turned 18 he started attending real casinos, like Rama and Niagara, on a regular basis. “It got to the point where I was seen as a VIP client, they’d pay for my hotel room, comp my meals, and drive me to the casino in a limo. And I was only 18!” Spencer was living the high roller lifestyle on a high school bank account.
He started to expand his gambling habits to include sports betting with a bookie that he met while away at university. Spencer started placing bets on college and pro football. “I was betting 50 bucks on that school, 100 bucks on this team, and it wasn’t like I was doing a lot research – I was more going with my gut instinct.” It got to the point where Spencer placed a $4,000 bet (his largest ever) on the 49ers to beat the Cowboys in an NFC Championship football game.
To this day, Spencer blames the backup quarterback of the 49ers, Elvis Grbac for ultimately causing his downward spiral. “If I’d won that bet, I honestly believe I wouldn’t be gambling today, because I would be all squared up [no money to owe]. But Elvis Grbac throws a lame duck interception in the dying seconds to ruin me.”
Like most gamblers, Spencer was losing more then he was winning. Thanks to bad luck at the tables and picking football winners, Spencer had accumulated a debt of over $5,000. Spencer says he was even attacked in his university residence by a bookie demanding to get paid. But the worst would come when he came back home for the summer.
Coming back from a 12-hour poker marathon one day, his parents confronted him and that’s when he lost it. “I said some things to my mother that no one should ever say, and that’s when I knew the gambling demons truly took over my brain,” he says. His parents kicked him out of the house and he moved in with his girlfriend at the time. One of the first things Spencer did after he was kicked out of his house was pack his car with all of his sports and stereo equipment and head to different pawnshops around town. He sold almost everything he owned, but he was still forced to borrow large sums of money from friends-including the amount set aside by one friend for student loan payments-in order to pay off debtors.
At the moment, Spencer has managed to pay back most of the friends he owes, and he has reconciled with his parents. He has graduated from university with a degree in criminal justice and is currently working for the Toronto Board of Education. He even lives out his dream in the summer by playing professional football in Europe. But the gambling continues.
Even though his parents think he has stopped, Spencer admits that since the age of 16 he has never gone more then a month without serious gambling. However, his outlook has changed a bit, ” It’s not even a rush anymore.” he says. “I’m just trying to crawl out of the hole that I’ve dug for myself.” Spencer says he has definitely curtailed his gambling habits, but he still strongly believes that there is one more big score out there. “One of these days I’m gonna take Niagara for a hit it will remember,” he says.
And that’s the thing that is striking. If you didn’t know about his gambling habits, Spencer would appear to be a very normal person, who leads a very normal life. But when he speaks, he uses words like degenerate and sicko to describe himself.
Sociologists point out that gambling addictions are rooted in biological makeup, social circumstances, psychological and even cultural factors-meaning just about anyone is susceptible to the pitfalls of betting. Spencer is one of those “anyones,” who finished off our interview by proudly announcing that he has never taken a drug or puffed on a cigarette in his life. “One vice,” he argues, “is enough.”
- name changed to protect subject’s identity
