Daly, Barkley and rest of the new breed unable to see inherent dangers of gambling

My late grandfather always had a taste for gambling and was surprisingly good at it. However, when he was young and newly married he lost $1,000 playing craps.

Back then that was a fairly ridiculously high sum. Unwilling to tell my grandmother about his loss until he rectified it, he did the only thing he could think of to get the money back. He worked harder and put $3 in a drawer every day for a year. When my grandmother learned a year later that he’d lost $1,000, she was handed $1,100.

These were a different breed of people.

Today, John Daly admits to losing $50-60 million gambling, and decides to rectify it by playing less costly slots. Or Charles Barkley claiming to have lost $10 million gambling and lashing out that it’s his money and he can do whatever he pleases with it.

This is the new breed, I suppose, from a generation without a depression. But aside from the mind-shattering lack of personal discipline and disregard for money and the positive things it can do, there is another thing that gambling obscene amounts of money creates - foul play.

Daly, keep in mind, is an active golfer that has shown he can still compete with the world’s greatest golfers on any given day. Shouldn’t this raise some flags for those at the PGA Tour?

Take it even further: Should an inexplicably missed three-foot putt at the American Express Championship last October now be examined? Missing a putt like that, in a playoff you couldn’t have predicted he’d be in, against Tiger Woods?

This is by no means an accusation but these are the doors Daly has now opened. If someone can lose $60 million playing slots, then it’s safe to say they are capable of virtually anything. They need to be watched, because they obviously have lost control of themselves.

Keep in mind that no one would have imagined Shoeless Joe Jackson and Pete Rose would have thrown it all away on gambling.

Only Babe Ruth kept baseball from spiraling into irrelevancy after the Chicago Black Sox scandal of 1919. If the PGA Tour is going to have a players admitting to losing millions gambling, they better keep an eye on them. A worst-case scenario would be beyond tragic.

Again, be clear that I’m not accusing Daly of anything improper whatsoever. But when modern athletes admit to this level of gambling, they obviously can’t see the inherent dangers that go along with it.

These are a different breed of people, after all.

–WKW