Authors: Jeff Benedict,Don Yaeger
“As an athlete, I had never lost, no matter what sport,” he said. “Gambling was the first thing that ever kicked my butt. I refused to believe I couldn’t win.” Art Schlichter could beat a defensive back. He couldn’t beat the odds at the track.
Schlichter’s appearances at the track became more regular. And as the popular and effervescent quarterback of the Buckeyes, he had no shortage of friends there. “Everyone was always giving me tips. If there was inside information, they wanted me to have it. People were trying to help me win, and I was still losing. I had saved money since I was five years old winning 4-H contests, and now I was losing it all.
“During the winter of my junior year at Ohio State I tore my ankle up pretty bad playing basketball, so I started spending a lot more time at home while I was in rehab. I was betting with some bookies, betting sports. I lost, in just a few weeks, about $5,000 to $6,000. That was a lot of money. The bookie called my dad. He told him, ‘Your son better pay his gambling debts off.’ My dad approached me about it and I said, ‘Dad, I’m in trouble, I need some money. I’ve got to pay this guy.’ I didn’t even know the bookie because I was betting through someone else. My dad came up, he had the cash in his hand, got down in front of me, and just shook me. He went nuts. He said, ‘You are screwing your whole life up. You are ruining everything you hope to have with this gambling. If you don’t stop now, you’re going to ruin it all and end up in jail someday.’ My mother had had a mastectomy for breast cancer. He handed me the cash and said, ‘This is your mom’s insurance money. You are taking a piece of your mom and giving it to some guy because of betting.’ I cried my eyes out. I have no idea why that didn’t stop me. I went right out and started doing it again. I wanted to go out and win the money back so I could pay my father back.
“I guess maybe gambling was my way of trying to kill pain. I was in a lot of pain, physically and emotionally. The pressure was real great being the All-American quarterback. I wasn’t real comfortable with who I was. Every time I gambled, I was away from that pressure. I never could really be myself. I always had to be on my best behavior as the big quarterback. I did everything I was supposed to do. Gambling was like my little dirty deed. My little way of rebellion against having to be that way all the time. When you’re a quarterback at a major university, the pressure is tremendous. Not only to win, but win convincingly. I was supposed to be Ohio State’s second two-time Heisman Trophy winner. That didn’t work out my junior year. So the pressure of that mounted because people started asking why. It made me feel like a failure. The more I felt sorry for myself, the worse my gambling got. Looking back, I had everything anyone could ask for. I had no right to feel sorry for myself.”
By the time he arrived in the NFL, Schlichter was hooked. If it moved, Art would bet on it. He always drew the line on betting on his own league. While playing college football, that sport was off limits. When he played for the Buckeyes basketball team, he wouldn’t bet college basketball. He brought that standard with him to the NFL. “It was my form of denial,” he said. “I knew I wasn’t addicted if I wasn’t betting on my league.”
But during his rookie season with the Colts, the absolute worst thing that could have happened to Schlichter did—NFL players went on strike. He was young, suddenly wealthy, addicted to gambling,
and sitting idle.
He filled his afternoons and evenings by going to the track. He started betting heavily with bookies. In the seven weeks of the strike, he lost every penny of his $350,000 signing bonus and his entire $140,000 salary. He started borrowing from banks, friends, boosters. He started selling his memorabilia—jerseys, game balls, even the Big Ten MVP trophy. Like the addict he was, he always believed that the next bet would cover all his losses. “I was always chasing the money that I lost,” he said. “Chasing it and losing more.”
Through it all, Schlichter was living a dual life. He told bankers and friends that he was borrowing the money for “investments” in land. While everyone knew he liked to bet, no one—not even his family—had any clue about the depths of his problems. That made the shock of what happened over the next year all the greater.
As the losses mounted, the bets to cover those losses had to become more outrageous. He started betting parlays—three team parlays, four-team parlays, you name it. The odds were like playing the lottery. He crossed his own line and started betting NFL games, laying down money on as many as ten games. “I was in so deep I was willing to bet anything,” Art said. “But I still thought I was okay because I wouldn’t bet on Colts games. That became my new standard.
“Here I was, in team meetings, in quarterback meetings, and my mind was on what I bet and lost the night before and how I was going to borrow money to gamble again. If you look at my notes from those meetings, they were terrible. My mind wasn’t there. And as I lost concentration, I lost the ability to keep up with the team. As I lost that ability, I lost confidence. I was caught in a downward spiral from before the time I was drafted. I had the skills. I had the arm. Howie Long, when he was with the Raiders, said I was the best scrambling quarterback he’d ever seen. But I had no confidence. I was thinking of myself as a loser.
“The guys on the Colts used to think I was the greatest womanizer of all time because I was always on the phone. One time, Mike Pagel, the backup, took all my stuff out of my locker and put it in a locker next to the telephone as a joke. But I wasn’t calling women. I was calling bookies.”
During one week in February 1983, Schlichter went wild trying to win “his” money back. On seven consecutive nights, he bet three-team parlays on NBA games. Each night he wagered between $65,000 and $75,000. Each night, he lost nearly every bet. In one week, Art Schlichter went into debt more than $350,000 to bookies. Over his two years in the NFL, he lost more than $700,000.
His betting out of control and with bookies threatening his life, Schlichter finally told a friend about his predicament. The friend advised him to go to the FBI. He did, and with the help of agents in Columbus, Ohio, Schlichter worked a sting on the bookies. As Schlichter sat and listened from a parking lot across the street from the Columbus airport, agents wearing microphones moved in on the bookies.
A day later, a lawyer for the bookies called the press and the storybook career of Art Schlichter was in tatters. He agreed to go to counseling for his addiction and, while Art was still in treatment, NFL Commissioner Pete Rozelle announced that the league was banning Schlichter from the game—but he could apply for reinstatement in one year. Rozelle’s timing might have been good for league public relations, but it was the worst thing that could have happened to Schlichter’s prospects for rehabilitation.
In his announcement, Rozelle referred to Schlichter as a “bad apple.” In a subsequent interview with Howard Cosell, the commissioner told the nation that Schlichter was, in his opinion, the only NFL player involved in gambling and that a harsh penalty was being levied to dissuade others from starting. “The players know that it strikes at the integrity of the game, and I don’t think there’s gambling in the National Football League,” Rozelle said boldly.
“That was so untrue,” Schlichter said. “Gambling among players is the NFL’s dirty little secret. Players gamble, and the NFL knows it. More than half of the players I played with on the Colts were gambling. After I moved to Las Vegas, I watched many NFL players come in and lose thousands in casinos. I flew back to Indianapolis a couple of years back with a leading player from the Colts, who had spent part of his off-week in Vegas gambling. The NFL has to know about this.”
The Cleveland
Plain Dealer
in an investigative story released just two weeks after Schlichter’s gambling became public, confirmed Art’s claims. The paper reported that the gambling habits of no fewer than a dozen other NFL players had been discovered by NFL security during its Schlichter investigation. Though follow-up stories confirmed the
Plain Dealer’s
accusation, no other NFL player was identified or suspended as a result. To this day, Schlichter is the last player suspended from the league for gambling.
Additionally, Schlichter’s point about the involvement of NFL owners in the business of gambling played itself out on a grand scale in late 1997. It was then that one of the league’s most high-profile owners, Edward DeBartolo, Jr., handed over control of the five-time Super Bowl champion San Francisco 49ers while under federal investigation for fraud in a Louisiana riverboat gambling project. The federal investigation stemmed from DeBartolo’s successful attempt to secure a license for a riverboat casino in Bossier City, Louisiana, site of one of three thoroughbred racetracks the DeBartolo family already owns.
Yet if it had not been for the alleged criminal activity, DeBartolo’s pursuit of a license to operate a casino would have drawn no sanction from the NFL, which must have known about his gambling-related business ventures. The league has no policy, as major league baseball does, prohibiting its owners from involvement in gambling entities.
Former Commissioner Rozelle summed up the league’s apathy toward the subject in a 1983 interview about the gambling troubles of former Philadelphia Eagles owner Leonard Tose, who reportedly lost millions at the tables in Vegas and Atlantic City. Said Rozelle: “I would be a hell of a lot more concerned if I knew that [a player] had bet at the casinos. An owner doesn’t control the outcome of a game. … Anyone close to football knows that an owner doesn’t interfere with the coaches or players. He’s not going to send in plays, except in infrequent situations.”
A
fter sitting out one year, Schlichter came back to the Colts in 1984 and started at quarterback for the team’s last five games. He was living on a $2,000-per-month budget, using the rest of his salary to pay off gambling debts. It looked like he might be over the hump when, after being named the Colts’ first-string quarterback at the start of the 1985 season, the NFL discovered that he had left game tickets for a friend who was a well-known gambler. The Colts cut Schlichter early in the 1995 season. No other teams called.
The next year Schlichter gave the NFL one more run but was cut by the Buffalo Bills, who replaced him on their roster with Jim Kelly. His last NFL pass, appropriately, was intercepted and returned for a touchdown. In the fall of 1987, he signed a contract with the Cincinnati Bengals but was denied reinstatement to the NFL by Rozelle. His NFL career over and all his money gone, Schlichter filed for bankruptcy in 1988. He played half a season with the Canadian Football League’s Ottawa Rough Riders that year, but wasn’t even good enough for that league anymore.
Schlichter slumped back into his habit of outlandish betting while playing three years in the Arena Football League. He earned $100,000 a year while leading the Detroit Drive to the league championship in 1990 and was named the league’s Most Valuable Player. Yet he was always broke. Then, in 1994, he made possibly his most fatal mistake—he moved to Las Vegas, where he became a popular drive-time sports talk show host and an even greater loser at the gambling tables. To cover those bets, his borrowing had turned to bad check writing. His promises had turned to theft.
He hit rock bottom in the fall of 1994 when his wife took their two children and moved back to Indiana. In one last desperate attempt to dig himself out, Schlichter went to the sports book and bet a three-team parlay. He took $2,000 of the $2,300 he had in his pocket and bet on Michigan to cover the spread, Virginia Tech to beat Boston College, and Louisiana State to beat a heavily favored Auburn team. If all three hit, Schlichter would have won $32,000. As the day progressed, the first two teams won. Schlichter sat in his apartment watching as LSU took a 23–9 lead into the final eleven minutes of its game. A friend called, excited that Schlichter finally was going to win. The friend said he was coming over. But it all unraveled for both LSU and Schlichter. LSU threw five interceptions in the final eleven minutes. Three of them were returned for touchdowns. LSU lost, 30–26.
“When my friend walked in, I was self-destructing,” Schlichter said. “I was pounding my face until it started to bleed. I was crying. If ever there was a day I would have committed suicide, that was it. That’s when I knew it was over for me. I think about that day every day.”
In November 1994, he was charged by federal officials with mail fraud. In the indictment, officials detailed more than $500,000 in bad checks that Schlichter had drafted. He was so good that the list of those Schlichter talked into cashing his bad checks includes nearly every big-name casino in Las Vegas. All the while, Art, his wife, and children were living in a small apartment on the edge of poverty.
Schlichter went on to serve time in federal and state prisons throughout the Midwest. He was released for a short while, but once again stole and cashed a check for cash to gamble. He signed a plea agreement in 1996 and was sentenced to as many as sixteen years in prison. The earliest Art Schlichter could walk out of prison a free man is in the year 2000.
In 1997, working with addiction expert Valerie Lorenz in Baltimore, Schlichter was prescribed the drug Serzone, which helps control compulsive behavior. “Art’s mind, before he was put on medication, used to just shoot in all directions,” Lorenz said in an interview with the authors. “He couldn’t focus. Couldn’t concentrate. Couldn’t finish with anything. Couldn’t carry through with things. And that was the result of his biochemistry. Art’s psychiatrist put him on Serzone and he was also in very intensive psychotherapy.”
Lorenz said it should come as no surprise that a top-flight athlete like Art Schlichter developed a gambling problem. “Gamblers, first of all, are very competitive,” she said. “They’re very good with numbers. They do tend to have a very strong athletic history and they’re above average in intelligence. Of course Art and many of your pro athletes meet that description.”
The NFL hired Lorenz, who is recognized nationally as one of the top five experts on compulsive gambling, to meet with its rookie class during the summer of 1997 and alert them to the addictive nature of gambling. During the session in Chicago, she polled the future pros about their gambling habits. The results? “Higher than anticipated,” Lorenz told the authors.