Don’t bet against him

March 23, 2008

A moving true story on how gambling can effect your life no matter who you are.

Don’t bet against him: Art Schlichter is rebuilding the life gambling destroyed

By JON SPENCER

News Journal

It was just like any football Saturday in Ohio Stadium from 1978 through 1981, when Art Schlichter had the rapt attention of his audience.

He had just finished speaking to a group of high school athletes and their parents, his riveting 30-minute address equal parts gut-wrenching and inspirational, when he reached down from the podium and squeezed my shoulder.

“This guy right here,” he said to the banquet crowd, “threatened me that if I didn’t do a good job tonight, he was going to call my parole officer.”

Schlichter still has his sense of humor.

This fallen hero, whose downturn in life would mock the title of his 1981 biography, “Straight Arrow,” has lost just about everything else because of a well-chronicled addiction to gambling.

It ruined his marriage, separated him from his two daughters for most of their lives, tainted his legacy at Ohio State, turned the once-famous No. 10 into a more infamous number in the U.S. penal system, destroyed relationships in and outside of his family and cost him his NFL career.

Not to mention at least $1 million he is believed to have squandered while swindling, stealing and conning, all to feed his addiction.

“I think about gambling every day, but the one thing I can’t do to be free is gamble,” Schlichter said, addressing the participants in the 30th News Journal All-Star Classic, a basketball game that benefits physically challenged children. “I want to be free. I want to be with my children. I lost my family and nothing can replace that. To build that back is very hard.”

On the same Wednesday that Ohio State was reeling in the nation’s No. 1 high school quarterback, Terrelle Pryor, the greatest quarterback catch in OSU history was in Mansfield baring his soul to a bunch of strangers. It’s become routine, cathartic.

Schlichter, 47, travels the country, speaking on behalf of Gambling Prevention Awareness, the non-profit organization he founded to educate others about the perils of compulsive gambling.

In addition to talking about all the wrong steps he’s taken, Schlichter enjoys talking about all the right steps his former school has taken under Jim Tressel — Pryor’s signing is the latest.

Pryor becomes the most ballyhooed quarterback Ohio State has inked since Schlichter was No. 1 in the nation at that position 30 years ago. The Miami Trace graduate would start 48 straight games and rewrite the record books. He finished in the top six of Heisman Trophy balloting three times, earned All-America honors, led the Buckeyes to a pair of Big Ten titles, within one point of a national championship and was the fourth overall pick in the NFL draft — all before his addiction overwhelmed him.

“The first thing I would tell (Pryor) is don’t believe anything anyone is telling you,” Schlichter said. “When you get all the hype when you’re young, and it happened to me, then you start believing it. You start believing you’re probably better than everyone else and you stop working.

“When you lose that edge as a college player or pro player, you can’t become the player you need to become. So I’d keep my head down, wouldn’t read the papers, work hard and believe what the coaches tell you and no one else.

“I’d assume Ohio State is going to take it slow with him. I’d hope they do. He’s probably wanting to be on the fast track and thinks he might start this year. I would encourage him to take it slow.”

Schlichter thought he was on the fast track at Ohio State, unaware that his road was leading to prison, not professional plaudits.

GAMBLING EASED INSECURITIES

A gambling habit that started at OSU with trips to the local horse track — he says he never bet on Buckeyes games — spiraled out of control. A first-round pick of the Baltimore Colts in 1982, Schlichter was suspended by the NFL for gambling one year later and was out of the league entirely by 1985.

He played for a few years in the Arena Football League, winning MVP honors in leading the Detroit Drive to the 1990 title. He also hosted a radio sports talk show in Cincinnati during the early part of that decade. But gambling consumed him.

To support his habit, he stole and conned money from friends and strangers and frequently passed bad checks. In an interview for ESPN’s “Outside the Lines,” he estimated that he’d stolen $1.5 million over the years, if not more.

Schlichter’s wife, Mitzi, left him in 1994 after FBI agents raided their home in Las Vegas in search of money he’d stolen. Between 1994 and 2006, he spent the equivalent of 10 years in 44 prisons and jails across the Midwest.

Schlichter traces the start of his problem to his glory days at Ohio State.

“When I was 18 years old, I had a lot of insecurities,” he said. “Probably the only person who didn’t want to be Art Schlichter was Art Schlichter because I was a little self-conscious. People probably didn’t know that, but I was worried about what people thought at all times and I think it affected me as I went on.

“From 1978 to 2004, I gambled nearly every day. I tried to be an athlete, but in the end gambling was my first love. I thought it was the thing that made me feel the best, when in turn it was the thing that made me feel the worst.

“I lost a wife and two daughters, who are 18 and 13 now. In 2002, my father (Max), who was a compulsive gambler, committed suicide because of his gambling addiction. A lot of people don’t know that.”

Schlichter said his life hit rock bottom when he was caught gambling in prison and spent six months in solitary confinement. He was let out of his cell, handcuffed, for five minutes every other day to shower. He was fed through a hole in the door of his cell.

“At that point, I just wanted to die,” Schlichter said. “I thought this isn’t a way to live and I’m not going to live like this anymore. I got down on my knees and talked to the God of my understanding and asked him to help me get through the night.

“I knew better. I came from a good family … good father, good mother, they cared about me and loved me; good wife, beautiful kids, but I couldn’t stop. That night I stopped. Through the grace of God, I made it through that night and about 120 other ones.”

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