During one Twelve-Step meeting at an Alcoholics Anonymous gathering, I had the audacity to tell my fellow recovering alcoholics—of whom I am counted—that I didn’t need them. “As long as I can get to a racetrack, I don’t need you guys.”
They said to me: “Eddie, do you realize what you are saying? You have replaced one addiction for another, and it’s worse than being an alcoholic!”
“Usually I win,” I boasted, “and God is rewarding me for staying sober.”
I didn’t understand at the time why they were wagging their heads. They didn’t feel like verbalizing a truth that I wouldn’t learn until I finally realized how much gambling had its hooks into my very soul and was destroying me bit by little bit with each bet I made. Now I thank God that I was able to reverse my passage towards self-destruction before I took that last step into suicide and oblivion, which many gamblers have done and still do.
I realize that to the novice or the beginner or even to a person who is not familiar to horse racing, many of the terms that I will use in this book will be unfamiliar. Therefore, I am appending two appendices at the end: one on the racing form and one on racing terminology and their meanings.
Horse racing is almost as old as the first time the horse was tamed by man. Modern horse racing has lost, perhaps, a great deal of its gladiatorial aspect. Some of the greatest horse races in film have been the chariot race in MGM’s 1959 remake of Lew Wallace’s Ben Hur (of course), the 2004 Hildago race across the deadly Arabian desert, the 1979 movie (based on Walter Farley’s 1941 novel) Black Stallion’s Run, the horse race in the 1952 Quiet Man, and many more.
Horse racing is a brutal sport, but to the gambler, he doesn’t care about what happens to the horses. He only wants his horse to win. I have included in Appendix III a distillation of a report by PETA of the cruelty dished out to horses that are used and abused at the racetracks around the world.
Betting on horses, games, sports, and the like is not necessarily bad or evil. What is destructive is when one’s entire life is caught up in the win-lose cycle whereby nothing else matters—friends, family, the job, and the like—anymore. What is evil is the fixation the mind experiences when it is all wrapped up around the success or failure of a single bet that obliviates everything in life around it. I call it the gambler’s insanity, and as a recovering gambler (as well as a recovering alcoholic), I cannot believe how much I was caught up in the insanity. What’s more, I couldn’t see or understand just how deep into the insanity I had fallen.
And the depravity! I almost committed suicide because of my drinking, and I caught myself just in time from committing suicide because of the depression I succumbed to while gambling.
I will never forget the comment a fellow New York expressed to me in a restaurant on Singer Island while I was so fixated on a racing form: “I thought gamblers didn’t gamble.” It woke something up in me, but unfortunately, it wasn’t enough—not yet—to deter me from gambling. For that, I needed that final moment of clarity, which came in due time. Thank God!
Edward Plunkett