‘Every compulsive gambler thinks the one big win that will change everything is around the corner... it never is’
Recovering addict Pat Sheedy says we need to talk about gambling in sport
IT should have been one of the happiest days of Pat Sheedy’s life. Sat in the Cusack Stand among his Limerick brethren as John Kiely’s impressive young side were about to bridge a 45year gap and claim the All-Ireland hurling title. But he couldn’t enjoy the occasion. He was on edge for the entire game and it had little to do with Galway mounting their late comeback.
When the final whistle sounded on a taunt and tense afternoon, Limerick supporters cried tears of joy around him, a torrent of emotion released after more than four decades of heartbreak and frustration. All he felt was relief. Try as he might, he couldn’t truly enjoy the moment.
‘It’s hard to know what I felt in 2018 when Limerick won it. I don’t know if I felt anything,’ Sheedy reflects.
‘I was up to my neck, gambling and the whole thing nearly went over my head as I sat in Croke Park. I was on tenterhooks for the whole game, not because it was close or a tight match, but because of a bet. It totally ruined the enjoyment of what should have been one of the best days of my life.’
There’s an old gambling adage that suggests you don’t bet on your own team. But Sheedy says that doesn’t enter the equation for an addict like him.
‘I used to try and do that, tell myself I won’t bet on teams that I support. But that’s bulls**t. People who say they don’t back their own teams, they are not compulsive gamblers. When you are a compulsive gambler, you back whoever you think will make you money, whoever will give you the biggest win.’
Last July, he was back in Croke Park for Limerick’s fourth All-Ireland in a row and he says there is no comparison to five years earlier.
‘I am able to enjoy it now. There’s a huge difference in sport when you are gambling and when you are not. Watching a match without having a bet on it, you are able to enjoy it for what it is.’
As a devoted Limerick hurling supporter, Sheedy can chart through his county’s dominance how he fell into the depths of despair from gambling and rose out of it through gambling. The first All-Ireland was when his life was going off the rails, then the first three of the four-in-arow was when he was inside.
Finally last July, he sat in Croker and was able to savour the occasion.
‘I watched three of the four-in-arow from my cell and I suppose it served as a reminder of what you had done. I would have been on the phone with friends on the morning of the matches and they were getting ready to get the train or drive up and I was ringing them from a prison phone on a six-minute call. You’d hang up, thinking ‘f***ing hell, what have I done?’ But those were the lessons I needed to get, the things I needed to go through.
‘And from watching them in Portlaoise to being there last July, it was incredible. And I was there, able to enjoy the moment, totally unencumbered from years of self-abuse and that is what it was – self-abuse,’ Sheedy says with a sigh.
We meet in one of the more famous GAA pubs in Limerick, not too far from the train station. Like most Irish pubs on an afternoon, there is racing on the telly. Sheedy doesn’t mind. He’s in a good place, at the moment, and can come into this place, his local, and have a quiet pint without worrying about what is on the screen in the corner.
Sheedy’s memoir, ‘A Hundred to One: 100 Convictions, 1 million Euro’, will be released in the coming weeks. Through the educational unit at Portlaoise prison, and the tutelage of Shauna Gilligan, he discovered a talent for writing which comes across in the book. He tells his extraordinary story very well – from his first time in a bookies at 12, putting a bet on for his dad, to winning a couple of grand on a yankee with the local barman as a teenager to what his gambling addiction led to – a prison sentence for defrauding people in various scams, including getting money under false pretences when tricking rugby clubs into giving cash over for Six Nations tickets.
‘I’ve hurt a lot of people,’ he says at one point.
‘I have apologised to some of those who I have hurt, and there are some who won’t talk to me and that is completely understandable. I always justified what I was doing to myself in that I wasn’t doing that much damage to other people, and that was how I was able to clear my conscience, that I would always pay them back. And that the thing’s with addiction, it leads to lying and your life just becomes one big lie. You become delusional, you lie to yourself and your whole life is just a complete denial of reality.
‘Every compulsive gambler thinks the one big win is around the corner, the big win that will change everything and clean up all the messes. But it never is.’
Some might wonder why Sheedy is on the sports pages if his only connection to sport is as a fan, like thousands of others. But he is here as a warning sign. The language of gambling has now become baked into the everyday coverage of sport.
The favourite for the next Ireland manager is decided by the fluctuating odds. Every major sporting event – from World Cups to European Championships to Six Nations – begin with various bookmakers announcing offers. Last week’s Super Bowl – the annual highlight of the American sporting calendar – was even held in the capital of gambling.
Even when all the dangers are known, and more stories like Sheedy’s become public, the link between all sport and gambling seems to be getting more powerful, rather than weaker.
In his book, Sheedy highlights how bookmakers hook prospective gam
blers in on a humdrum Tuesday watching the Champions League with a first goal-scorer offer. And sometimes, addiction can happen with something as mundane as that.
‘I do feel quite strongly about the marketing campaigns and the advertising. They banned tobacco advertising in the 1990s because they knew of the damage it was doing, and this is the same, the damage it is doing to mental health for some people.
‘If you look at the statistics, a betting company gets advertised over 170 times during the course of one Premier League game and the worrying thing about it now is you have kids who are 14 and 15, who think that’s okay and for whom that language around sport has been normalised and they base their knowledge on sport now by what price they are. Liverpool are going to win because [Mo] Salah is favourite to be first goalscorer – that is becoming the mentality among kids.
‘I have spoken to kids around 14 or 15 whose knowledge of football is based around the price, that Salah is 3-1. And that is just wrong; And I can tell you if that technology was around when I was 14 or 15, I guarantee you I would have been locked up by the time that I was 18. That’s why I fear for the future generation.’
As his life was spiralling out of control around 2018 and 2019, Sheedy was making the most of all the new technology.
He would be up at four in the morning, on two i-phones, a laptop and an i-pad, gambling on table tennis in Vietnam, basketball in Costa Rica and football in Mexico. He even remembers gambling on his phone during a funeral. That’s why he thinks it is important that the gambling regulation bill is signed into law soon and that the gambling regulator is given powers to deal with a growing scourge in society.
‘Everybody thinks the big bad regulator is going to come in and going to ruin it for everyone. They are not, they are good people and they just want to do it for the betterment of everyone, they are going in to try and make people aware of their rights and to stop these big companies from doing what they are doing. But in a way, it is like coming up against big oil.’
Betting companies have made a big display of trying to show they care in recent years, with ads telling people to stop when the fun stops. But Sheedy isn’t convinced that they actually care.
Nobody from any of the big gambling firms has made contact with him and asked to sit down and talk about the issues that he had.
‘If I thought that they cared, and if I thought they would take on board what I had to say, I would be interested in sitting down as something maybe the regulator could set up – an advisory board. But I can’t see it happening because it would mean them taking an honest and hard look at themselves and why would they kill the golden cow?’
Ironically, one of the scams that Sheedy got done for was against one of the bigger bookmaking firms who, rather than try and get him some help for his addiction insisted that he was charged for the stroke that he pulled, which would again indicate an uncaring industry.
‘If they reached out and asked me what can we do to make the industry safer, to make sure that there aren’t more Pat Sheedys, I would sit down with them and give them a million and one ideas because gambling has taken everything from me, it has taken friendships, it has taken relationships, it has taken money and it has taken my freedom, because it had. It has hurt my family and I am not looking for one bit of sympathy for what I have done, I stand over it because I have to but these people, as far as I am concerned, have a moral responsibility and ethical responsibility to the people that they take money from and they don’t care.
‘I would love them to prove me wrong, would love them to sit down and say “right Pat, based on your experiences is there anything we can do or should be doing?” But you won’t see that happening.’
But we need to talk about how the language of gambling is now baked into sport. That is why Sheedy’s story should be on the sports pages.
Funnily enough, it is somewhere he found himself before. In the mid-1990s, when rugby was taking its first uncertain steps into the professional era, he helped some players from Limerick deal with their initial contracts. It got to the stage where someone in Saracens suggested he should go into sports agency, but he had to take a step back because
I wasn’t capable of tying my own shoes straight without putting on a bet
his employer at the time wasn’t happy.
Given how the professional game exploded, he might have regretted that decision but Sheedy reckons it was for the best. ‘I don’t think it is a regret because I have no doubt if I did go into it at that time, I would have seriously f***ed it up because I would have been responsible for myself and running my own business. I wasn’t capable of tying my shoes straight without putting on a bet, when push came to shove. Eventually I would have destroyed it for myself and for other people as well, so I am glad that it didn’t work out that way.’
Perhaps, there’s something for the gambling industry to learn from Pat Sheedy’s experiences. Whether they want to or not is another question. But he stands as another example of why it is time to break the link between sport and betting. The fear, though, is that the genie has strayed too far from the bottle at this stage.
● A Hundred to One: 100 Convictions, 1 Million Euro by Pat Sheedy, published by Gill Books