Gambling, Part II<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Gordie Greco has been gambling ever since he was a kid in Detroit, but his service in the
\nU.S. Army dramatically upped the ante for him.<\/p>\n
\u201cI got into gambling big time in the service,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen we weren\u2019t fighting, we found recreation in drinking, drugging or gambling \u2013 or a combination of all three.\u00a0 We were playing games with big pots, and our squad leaders were booking bets and challenging us to bet.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gordie was drafted into the Army in June 1969, joining the 4th<\/sup> Infantry Division in combat in Vietnam. He remembers the Army issuing punch cards, a kind of an early lottery ticket. But cards and dice were also close at hand.<\/p>\n Fighting in Vietnam with incursions into Laos and Cambodia, the Army also introduced Gordie to some of the demons that drove his life for decades.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery time we went out to ambush someone, we got ambushed,\u201d Gordie told me over lunch in Las Vegas recently.\u00a0 \u201cThere were moments of silence and seconds of terror. You knew it was coming, but there was nothing you could do about it.\u201d<\/p>\n Over the course of a year, Gordie estimates that his 100-man company lost at least 25 soldiers killed by enemy fire \u2013 and another 10 to friendly fire or accidents. \u201cSeveral times we called in mortar support and air support, but they hit us by mistake,\u201d he says. \u201cYou can\u2019t believe the rage it causes when you lose your comrades in situations like that.\u201d<\/p>\n When he came home, Gordie tried to go back to college at Michigan State, but felt horribly out of place.\u00a0 It got even worse when a professor noticed that the 20-year-old freshman was a veteran and asked him, in front of the whole class, whether he was one of those baby-killers. \u201cI was stunned and humiliated,\u201d he remembers. He struggled for two years, then dropped out.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen I came back, I tried to drink myself to death,\u201d he says. \u201cI was crazy, and no one was gonna f— with me. Detroit was too tame for me in 1972, so I came to Las Vegas. The bars never closed, and the place was filled with tough and wise guys. I was at home here, fighting, drinking, gambling and making damn good money.\u201d<\/p>\n It was natural for Gordie to work in the casinos, but that also introduced a new addiction. \u201cI had dodged the drug scene until I came to Las Vegas,\u201d he says, \u201cbut the whole town ran on cocaine in those days.\u201d<\/p>\n Gordie married his high school sweetheart and gave up his drug use, but his constant gambling losses created a problem in their relationship. Finally, he and his wife Margie divorced in 1991 after 13 years, leaving all of his time free for gambling.<\/p>\n In 1993, Gordie joined Alcoholics Anonymous and stopped drinking, but his gambling went unchecked, He became an operations manager, setting up riverboat gambling operations in Chicago, Sioux City and Kansas City. And he kept gambling, by his own estimate losing at least one-quarter of his salary at racetracks or in sports betting.<\/p>\n Nearing the end of his professional career, Gordie found the biggest casino of them all, the stock market, and began betting heavily on tech stocks right in the middle of the dot-com bubble.<\/p>\n \u201cIn 2006, I negotiated a severance package with about six month\u2019s pay,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd in the first two months, I\u2019d lost about 40 percent of it so I knew I had to do something.\u201d<\/p>\n Gordie sought help from the Problem Gambling Center in Las Vegas, run by Dr. Rob Hunter, and joined a local Gamblers Anonymous fellowship. While it\u2019s a tradition in GA not to use last names, I interviewed Gordie outside the parameters of the program and he allowed me to use his last name for journalistic credibility.<\/p>\n Gordie\u2019s biggest challenge was to understand why he was so driven to gamble. Greed or wanting more was one answer. A second was that he felt invincible. \u201cI\u2019d beaten the biggest gamble of my life, staying alive during combat, and I knew that cards and dice would have to be simple by comparison,\u201d he says. \u201cYou\u2019ve never lived until you\u2019ve almost died, and after that there are no limits. You lose all bounds.\u201d<\/p>\n Emotions pent up since Vietnam also came into play. It felt wonderful to beat the system, but it also felt natural to be beaten by the system, almost like a deserved punishment. \u201cI had a lot of internal rage, self-loathing, and feelings of uselessness and shame. Everything you do as a gambler, you have to do in secret because no person in their right mind is going to make $100 bills just disappear.\u201d<\/p>\n Gambling isn\u2019t the sole problem, says Gordie, but it\u2019s a manifestation of a thinking and living problem. A recovering gambling addict needs to dig deep to isolate and correct the things that are bugging him, and then he needs to re-invent himself. \u201cYou have to change your playgrounds and playmates,\u201d he says.\u00a0 \u201cI completed my education, earning two degrees, and scratched the last thing off my bucket list.”<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the hardest things I had to do was to learn how to forgive myself,\u201d he adds. \u201cTo do that, I had to have something to live for, something positive in my life. That meant I had to change, to live a new life. As my life changed and things began to get better, I suddenly realized that I might live to see the person that I might have been if I had not become an addict.\u201d<\/p>\n Gordie hasn\u2019t placed a bet since May, 2006. Today, he\u2019s spending time with his children and grandchildren when possible, walking his dogs, riding bikes and lots of reading. He also volunteers regularly at the Problem Gambling Center and runs many of its group therapy sessions while attending GA.<\/p>\n \u201cToday I can do anything I want except use mind-altering substances,\u201d he told me. \u201cWith what it does to my brain and dopamine system, it is evident that gambling is a mind-altering substance too. So getting rid of gambling is enormously freeing for me from the self-bondage of addiction. Life is good, I live it one day at a time, and it gets better every day.”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Gambling, Part II Gordie Greco has been gambling ever since he was a kid in Detroit, but his service in the U.S. Army dramatically upped the ante for him. \u201cI got into gambling big time in the service,\u201d he says. \u201cWhen we weren\u2019t fighting, we found recreation in drinking, drugging or gambling \u2013 or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericnewhouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericnewhouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericnewhouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericnewhouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericnewhouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=246"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ericnewhouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/246\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ericnewhouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericnewhouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ericnewhouse.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}