The madness of addiction

Declan Lynch’s tales of addiction

When we were being interviewed about our book,

Tony 10, there would come a point sometimes when Tony O’Reilly would be questioned about the obvious madness of some of the stuff he was betting on, and the colossal amounts he was betting on them. Towards the end, it was not unusual for him to have 30 or 40 grand on tennis matches involving players who most normal people had never heard of, competing in front of ‘crowds’ of about five people in real life, rising to maybe five million gamblers online.

Leaving aside the fact that Tony was using money stolen from his employer, An Post, to fund the madness, there would be this incomprehension on the part of interviewers that any human being could somehow have found himself wagering real money on these ludicrous propositions — leaving aside another fact: that, for Tony, this didn’t seem like real money any more, it was just a number in the top corner of his Paddy Power account. There was an interview on TV3’s The

Tonight Show in which Ivan Yates said that he found it a great read, but that some of these crazy bets had made him angry — that they went against all the basic advice that you’d give to a punter; the rules about not chasing your losses, and so forth.

Then again, if we all took the good advice that we were given, and didn’t start to stray into areas of foolishness, there wouldn’t be many books written about anything, let alone people being interviewed about them on television. And we’d be reluctant to wait up for

The Tonight Show if we were told they’d have this chap who has a few bob on the racing every Saturday, and maybe a small interest in the golf from time to time, who never chases his losses, because there’s damn all to be lost in the first place. And he’d like to share his story, for what it is worth.

Which is not much really, because somehow the dispensing of sound advice by sensible and blameless individuals has very little merit for anyone who might be vulnerable in these areas of addiction.

Nor would you be reading this column, in all likelihood, if I was just offering you a series of ‘pointers’ on how to stay out of trouble, telling you to stick to the pints and stay away from the shorts, and all that folksy stuff that doesn’t work.

Everybody knows those lines, including all the people who cross them to the point of terminal addiction. But knowing it seems to make no difference; these things are not controlled by the intellect, otherwise all those alcoholic winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature would not have been alcoholics. They would have realised that they were drinking too much, and, with those great brains of theirs, they would have decided to stick to the pints and stay away from the shorts, or even to stay away from the pints, too — which, for people of their disposition, would actually work a lot better. Indeed, it is probably the only thing that would work.

And they’d know that, too, and still they would not listen to this excellent advice, even when it was coming from themselves.

Concepts such as intelligence and rational analysis will never be entirely useless, yet they seem to be particularly unhelpful in this domain. And even more so, perhaps, in the area of gambling, in which there is that set of wiseguy ‘rules’ which, if followed, will supposedly steer you away from the 40-grand bets on bad tennis matches. At least if Tony O’Reilly had become an alcoholic, they’d hardly be asking him why the hell he was drinking all that whiskey every day, when he must have known it was bad for him.

No, there are no ‘rules’ that will save you, there is no reasonable explanation. And you only start to understand it when it’s over. But if you stay away from the pints…

“Stick to the pints and stay away from the shorts, all that folksy stuff that doesn’t work”