PRESS COVERAGE

A Lifetime of Losing
New Haven Register, Sunday, November 2, 2008
By Jim Shelton, Register Staff

Editor's note: This is part of an occasional series about people dealing with addiction.

Time was, a missed layup at Yale's Payne Whitney Gymnasium could send Leonard Grossman into a full-court rage.

It might have been understandable if Grossman was a player. But he wasn't. He was just a guy in the stands, trapped in a 50-year gambling addiction that started when he was a teenager and didn't stop until after he became a grandfather.

All too often back then, a missed layup meant macaroni and ketchup for dinner and a brisk outlay of cash to his bookie.

"I've put my family through misery," says Grossman, a 69-year-old retired teacher from Vernon, during a break at the Guilford-based Connecticut Council on Problem Gambling's annual conference recently.

"I'm powerless over gambling. I loved it too much," he says. "It's like a drug."

An estimated 2 million American adults are pathological gamblers, according to the National Council on Problem Gambling in Washington, D.C. Another 4 million to 6 million are problem gamblers. In Connecticut, an estimated 6 percent of the population qualifies as pathological or problem gamblers.

"I know of cases of embezzlement, murder - even of people who have sold their children to pay off gambling debts," says Marvin Steinberg, executive director of the Connecticut Council on Problem Gambling. "Also, a higher percentage of pathological gamblers attempt suicide, compared to those who have substance abuse problems, because there is such deep shame. You can't hide a drug or alcohol problem quite as long as you can hide a gambling problem."

Grossman, for his part, gambled on everything. He played poker and blackjack, bet on every major sport and had a fondness for the ponies. He fleeced fraternity guys at cards, wheedled info from trainers at racetracks and skipped out on countless bookies. Back in 1960, he and a buddy took $1,000 of action on whether Death Row inmate Caryl Chessman would be executed.

He led two lives. On the one hand, he maintained a loving marriage, owned a house, raised two sons and had a long teaching career in Rocky Hill. On the other hand, he did jail time, endured public embarrassment, blew through much of his parents' and wife's savings and brought himself to the brink of death.

"There were highs and lows, but there wasn't much in-between," Grossman says now, more than three years after his last bet. "The need for a fix got bigger and bigger."

AND THEY'RE OFF

Grossman grew up in a housing project in Hartford's North End. At school, he was the poor kid who liked to hang around with more affluent kids.

His father, a man of modest means who bailed his son out financially several times over the years, played penny-ante cards with friends every Tuesday. On a bad night, he lost perhaps $1.75.

But his son had his eye on bigger pots - even as a teenager.

"We'd get out of study hall in high school and play poker behind the stage, in the auditorium," Grossman recalls. "We played cards at the beach. We played at our parents' houses. At the park."

By the time he was in his early 20s, Grossman's gambling habit was rampant. It took him seven years to finish college, he says, because of all the time and money he spent at the track and the card table.

"I learned how to read the Tele (the Morning Telegraph horse racing daily), and I hung around with the right people," he says. "I went all around. Narragansett, Rockingham Park, Suffolk Downs, Saratoga. I had an appetite for it. Once, at Scarborough Downs, I was sitting with a trainer who told me, 'Number Three is gonna win the next race.' I said, 'How do you know?'

"He said, 'He's got the bug.' It was an electrical device they would hold between two fingers during a race. When the horse hits the top of the stretch, they hit the horse with this electrical jolt. I got a few winners that day."

Yet he came up empty just as often. For instance, there was the time a bookmaker sent a gentleman over to Grossman's apartment to urge him to pay on a $1,500 bet.

"You've got three days," he says.

In 1964, police caught Grossman breaking into a drugstore to steal a safe. He went to jail for a year, after which he resumed teaching and betting.

"I bet sports every single day," he says. "Football, baseball, basketball. One time, I went after a player on the floor at a Yale-Columbia basketball game. This substitute missed a breakaway layup ... Sports betting can kill you. Everything comes down to the last few minutes of the game."

HIT ME

The years rolled on, like dice at the craps table.

Grossman married in 1969, gambling away all the couple's wedding money before they returned from their honeymoon. His two sons were born in the early 1970s.

"My wife said, 'You've got to get help or I'm leaving,'" Grossman says. He would take a stab at Gamblers Anonymous several times over the next 25 years, with little success.

"My ego wouldn't let me. I thought I could gamble normally," he says. "I would gamble mostly when things were going well for me. I always seemed to want to destroy my own euphoria and couldn't live with things going well."

His sons grew up seeing their father writhe with every freak play at Dodgers Stadium, every technical foul during a Villanova basketball game and every last-minute NFL field goal. His wife stood by him whether he won $5,000 playing blackjack at one casino, or lost $9,000 playing blackjack at another casino.

Somehow, they held onto their house and put their boys through college. Grossman retired from teaching. His sons had children of their own.

And then in April 2005, his addiction finally, definitively kicked him in the chest.

Grossman lost big on the same night at both of Connecticut's casinos. First, he lost $8,500 at one casino, then he drove to the other casino to change his luck and lost $17,000.

"I came home, and the next day I had a heart attack," Grossman says.

Later, after the immediate physical danger passed and his cardiologist sat him down, Grossman confessed his long years of gambling.

"I think we talked for 45 minutes," Grossman says. "He told me, 'If you don't stop, you won't live to see your grandson's bar mitzvah.' And I finally listened."

He went back to Gamblers Anonymous on April 17, 2005.

O, LUCKY MAN

Some of Grossman's experiences, slightly altered, have found their way into "Beating the Odds," a novel Grossman self-published earlier this year. He sells the book for $10 through his Web site, leonardsgrossman.com.

He says writing the novel helped him with his recovery and reminds him that he's unable to gamble in moderation.

He hasn't relapsed since his heart attack, he notes. He's visited Connecticut's casinos, but only with family and friends, and only to enjoy a meal and socialize.

"I'm happy now," he says. "My wife and I are talking about going to Europe some day."

Jim Shelton can be reached at (203) 789-5664 or jshelton@nhregister.com.

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