Jamie: Hey there, and welcome to the After Gambling Podcast. My name is Jamie, and the last time I gambled was July 15th of 2010. Now, my guest today is celebrating a massive milestone in his recovery. Yes, today is 25 years—25 years clean for Tom from his gambling addiction. So after you listen to the episode, you can reach out to Tom on Twitter. Tom, congratulations. And if you’re interested, you can check out the links to his new novel. He’ll talk about his previous novel and his new novel, both of which deal with gambling addiction, in this episode.
So without further ado, here’s the chat that I had with Tom Brew.
Jamie: So I guess, Tom, a good place to start… I know you’re an author, and we kind of had that in the intro, but tell us a little bit about the first book. Because it’s a novel, which, when I saw that, I thought was kind of interesting, because we’re so used to people sharing their own stories. But if you want to share a little bit about how you got into the novel, share a little background, and we can go from there.
Tom: Sure, I’d be happy to. I was a newspaper reporter and editor most of my life, and it was always on my bucket list to write a novel. About five years ago, I first had an idea to do something that included telling a novel but also dealing with gambling addiction and its effects on people, because I didn’t want to write my story quite yet, because, quite frankly, it’s not over yet. So I thought about being able to reach out… In my 20-plus years of going around the country talking about gambling addiction, the group of people that’s always scared me the most are young kids. You know, college kids who get severely addicted to gambling at a young age and pretty much, you know, can ruin their lives when they’re 20 years old.
So I decided to… I had a good idea for a story, and I decided just to do that in a fictional format. And obviously, Nick Vincent, who’s the character in the book, he’s a big-time college football player. He gets hurt, and then while he’s, you know, dealing with all that, just goes from being your regular, everyday gambler to being someone completely addicted and over the top. A lot of what he goes through in the novel is based on a lot of what I went through in my 30s, when I had my year of just crazy, off-the-charts gambling.
And so I was able to sort of tell a little bit of my story, I guess, in a bit of fiction. I decided to do that in a fictional format, really being able to focus on how quickly and easily it is to become addicted to gambling and become a compulsive gambler out of control, even though you’ve gambled for long, long times prior to that recreationally and without hurting anybody or anything. And so that was sort of the story, and once the idea got down, it all started to flow and put together a really, really nice book. It’s called The Ties That Bind, and it came out November of 2015.
Tom: So it was right about three years ago now, and it did really well. I’ve been able to travel the country quite a bit, talking about it and doing a lot of public speaking at colleges around the country. I’ve also done a lot of speaking about it, and of course, my own story, to treatment professionals around the country. It’s been very good and very well-received, and it’s been just a lot—it’s been a lot of fun for me to do.
Jamie: Yeah, and we have a lot of shared connections. And I will mention right up here up front that we’ll put links to the book and to all your contact information in the show notes. So if anybody wants to go check that out, definitely highly recommend checking out Tom’s book. And we’ll talk about there’s actually an upcoming book as well.
But I guess share a little bit about, because we do have kind of the common interest of sports and that connection with sports and then gambling. And like you say, the book was kind of a way to tell your story through characters, through a novel. And like I said, that’s fascinating to me. I guess if you want to share a little bit about your background with sports and then lead into sort of how you got into gambling.
Tom: Absolutely. I’d be happy to. I was a journalism major in college at Indiana University and started to make my first bets when I was in college. But they were obviously very, very small at the time—five dollars here, ten dollars there. And I gambled just recreationally, very much off and on, for the better part of 15 years.
Sometimes, and I was… my only gambling was on sports. I never went to casinos or anything like that. And if I went to the dog track or the horse track here in Florida for an event or an outing one time, I might throw a few dollars on a race back then, but I never really cared about it. Everything was always recreational and under control—never an issue, never a problem.
But then when I was about 33 years old, I was in between my newspaper careers, and I was selling real estate at the time. I started gambling on sports again a little bit, and it got to the point where it started to get a little bit more often and a little bit more serious. And really, I’m sort of the odd bird in this a lot of times, in that my gambling addiction, quote unquote, was really very short-lived. I mean, it took over my life and kind of wheeled me out of control, but it was only in about a nine or ten-month window where it just went from being totally fine and no big deal and never affected my life in any way to completely destroying my life just that quickly.
In ‘93, I had, you know, it’s just a sports bettor. I had… I was living in Clearwater, Florida, at the time. I was married, I had three little kids—six, four, and two—had a very successful real estate career going. And I had bookmakers here in Tampa; I had other guys around the country that I would place bets with, you know, the old-fashioned way, pre-internet days, just dealing with your mafia-connected bookmakers. And in March of ‘93, I met this guy in Tampa who was a bookmaker, a local guy. So I started to bet with him, and he paid me 15 weeks in a row, and I was always winning.
Tom: I did very well on college basketball in March, did very well in the NBA playoffs. I used to bet baseball—it was my sport of choice when it came to gambling, and I always did very, very well in baseball. The whole summer was good and everything, and so because of that, then the amount of my bets started to grow. And of course, with baseball, it’s every day. It’s not just Saturday or Sunday, so the amount of money I was gambling got to be at a little bit higher pace.
And then, of course, when September rolled around, football season started, then, you know, I was gambling at a higher pace, and I had a lot more to bet on, too. So I had pretty much by then stopped working—not intentionally, but just didn’t even really realize that I was so focused on my gambling all the time that my real estate sales business was just literally falling apart around me. And, of course, I just blamed that on a bad market; I didn’t blame it on the fact that I was pretty much either gambling or preparing to gamble pretty much most of my waking time.
And so there were a few weeks where I won and a few weeks where I lost, but, you know, for the most part, I was pretty anal about keeping track of my bets. I mean, I was still up several thousand dollars for the year, and what kind of makes me, you know, kind of rare in the people that I’ve run across in 20-something years too is, you know, a lot of compulsive gamblers are reluctant to use their gambling money for everyday expenditures. And I was exactly the opposite. If I needed $2,300 a certain week to pay my mortgage or to pay car payments or things like that, if I was up $2,300 on Thursday, I’d quit for the week. I wouldn’t make another bet. I’d tell the guy, “Hey, I’m not going to bet any more the rest of the week; I could use the money for the mortgage. Can we hook up?” And we would.
He liked me. I sent him a lot of business and people who lost a lot of money, so he liked me a lot. And, you know, I could do that. If I was up and I had the money I needed, I went a weekend without gambling. It was no big deal to me, and I could do that. But as the year progressed, then I started to have some misses, and because I wasn’t making any money the way I used to make in my career, money got to be tight, so I was starting to chase. And, you know, it was basically, you know, robbing Peter to pay Paul a lot, and all that was going. And if there were weeks where I’d lose a couple thousand dollars, I would just borrow the money, win it the next week, and pay it back, or then I would find another Peter to pay Paul with.
And that cycle was just, you know, from really like November to about January—a two-month window where my life was just kind of crazy. And like I said, I was winning some and losing some during that, but every day was just a disaster. And then finally, on January 23rd, 1994, was the day of the AFC and NFC Championship football games. I was firmly convinced, of course, that I’d make it.
Tom: I was going to make it. You know, I made thousands of dollars on Joe Montana through my life, and he was quarterbacking the Kansas City Chiefs at the time, and they were playing the Buffalo Bills. And I was firmly convinced there was absolutely no way the Buffalo Bills could go to four straight Super Bowls, so I had a lot of money bet on the Chiefs that day. And I was also convinced that the 49ers were ready to be better than the Cowboys, so I bet them too. And then, of course, missed them both and lost about $2,500 that day.
And I just didn’t have it. And I ran out of friends named Peter I could borrow money from, and there was really no other way to get it. And I ran around for a couple of days afterwards, begging and pleading with a lot of people. But by then, a lot of my friends just knew how sick I was, how out of control I was, and they all just basically started telling me no. So when Thursday came, where I knew I was going to have to pay my guy, and, you know, remember now, this is a guy who paid me on time, every time, all the time when I was winning. There was just no way I could pay him.
I was just—I had reached a panic mode. I was in a panic mode where I just couldn’t do this anymore. I was just so stressed out. I was only sleeping a couple of hours a day, yelling at my wife all the time, totally ignoring my kids, and it just was a mess. So I just—I just couldn’t do it, you know. And so I wrote a goodbye letter to my wife on my computer, and I grabbed some clothes and stormed out of the house.
She saw me as I was heading out the door, and she didn’t understand. She didn’t understand the extent of what I was going through, but she knew something was up. And she was just yelling to me, “You know, please don’t go. Please don’t go. Whatever’s wrong, we’ll fix it.” And I just stormed right past her, threw my clothes in my car, and took off. And I started heading south towards St. Petersburg and the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, which connects St. Petersburg to the Bradenton-Sarasota area. And I was going to stop my car and, you know, do the dive off the bridge and end it right there.
And I got to U.S. 19, and I pulled in the right-hand lane to turn south, and the light was red. So I was sitting there waiting for the light; I waited for it to turn green. And for some reason, through no control of my own, when that light turned green, I drove across five lanes of traffic and drove north instead of going south. And I drove about four hours in my car, just crying the whole time. And I stopped at a rest area in Lake City, Florida, way up in the northern part of the state.
Tom: So, I stopped at a rest area in Lake City, Florida, way up in the north part of Florida. I sat at a picnic table with a revolver next to me, just trying to figure out what the heck was going on in my life. And at that point, I sat at that table for about three hours. And it was cold—you know, it was January in north Florida. I just was sitting there kind of freezing and shaking, and I told myself, I said, you know what? I really don’t want to die, but I just can’t live like this anymore. I was just that far out of control.
So, I threw that little $10 gun I had bought at a pawn shop into a trash can, and I drove my car back to the corner. And there were these things back in the 90s called pay phones, if you remember them. But I stopped there, and I called my wife, and I said, “I need help. I’m just out of control, and I need help. This gambling has just gotten me into a mess.” And she’s like, “You know, come home, and we’ll get you help.” And I decided to do that. I drove home, and when I got there, there was a gambling treatment professional named Tom Talley in my living room when I got there.
And we had a long talk for several hours, and that was that. And that was the start. It was the end of my gambling and the start of my recovery that, thankfully, nearly 25 years later, I’m still here to talk about it. Thank God.
Jamie: Yeah, and first of all, obviously, congratulations. I know you’re coming up on a 25-year anniversary here in January, and that’s just—that’s a big thing.
Tom: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it’s incredible.
Jamie: We’ll get into more of kind of your day-to-day in the last 25 years, but I want to just kind of focus on—you said this all happened in the span of like eight or nine months, correct?
Tom: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, all my gambling prior to that was just, you know, smaller amounts, kind of when I wanted, kind of when I didn’t, you know. And just, there was no, there was none of the addictive stuff to that at all. But then once, you know, once I kind of got rolling, it just became—it became, you know, it became more and more of my day every day. And it just—it got to the point where it was, you know, 24/7, all-consuming. I was either gambling or preparing to gamble or hanging out with other sick gamblers, you know, all the time.
Tom: And it was… you know, I became a horrible father, horrible husband, horrible friend, horrible real estate agent to my clients—everything. I just had that quickly become that worthless of a person to everybody.
Jamie: Yeah. And, I mean, like me, I imagine you kept everything in secret. Nobody else knew. I mean, they probably had an inkling that something was wrong. I mean, obviously, your personality had changed, like you say—you were being mean and aggressive and those types of things. But I mean, that’s the other part of this addiction, which is always just kind of frightening to me, is that we’re able to hide it and isolate so much. And yet, like you said, the moment you talked to your wife, she said, “Come home,” and she’s there with all this support and help.
Tom: Yeah, it’s… I don’t know. I think it’s always great to share stories, and it’s always fascinating to me just to kind of hear because in that moment, we don’t see it, right? And, you know, it’s like when someone is an alcoholic and they drank way too much one day or night, you can see that they’re drunk. And if someone is a drug addict and they’ve taken too much cocaine or heroin or whatever, you can see how screwed up they are because you can see it. Well, when someone’s in the throes of a gambling addiction, you can’t see it.
You know, a lot of people—I know I was, and I’m sure you were too—are really, really good at hiding it all. And it’s like, like I said, as long as I had, you know, robbing Peter to pay Paul stuff going where my world didn’t collapse, I was fine. You know, and it’s just like… you know, money was… when my money problems were prevalent and my wife could see that, you know, I just blamed it on a bad real estate market. I didn’t blame it on the fact that I had lost four games that Sunday by half a point, you know? Those types of things—like that was never a conversation.
And it’s like, I never gambled in front of her. Like, for all of… all my stuff I did at my office, you know? I kept incredible data on teams and stuff like that, and it was all in my office and all on my computer. It wasn’t like I sat around the kitchen table saying, “I really need the Bears and the Packers to win today,” or stuff like that. I just—it was never part of the conversation. You know, obviously, I was a sports writer for a while, so sports was always on TV anyway, and I was always… you know, it was always on. But while I was watching a game and she was there in the house or whatever, if I had, you know, $3,500 on the Patriots one Monday night or whatever, I was watching the game—she had no idea that was going on.
Tom: But, you know, towards the end, that’s the way it was. I mean, I had gotten to the point, you know, near the very end, where during the course of the week, I was betting as much as 15 or 20 thousand dollars a week. It had gotten that far out of control.
Jamie: Yeah. And like you say, with your, I mean, sports writing… I mean, your profession is to study the sports, write about the sports. I mean, and that’s where I think obviously, that combined with those early wins, I mean, I’m sure you felt like, “Hey, I’m on top of this. I’m on top of the world. I mean, this is easy.” I mean, that span—because it was your bread and butter, right?
Tom: And I’m one of the few, you know—I’ve… we’ll talk more about my recovery here in a bit, but I mean, in my 20-something years of going to Gamblers Anonymous meetings, I am one of the very, very few people I’ve ever met who actually won more money than they lost gambling. But that didn’t matter, because what it did was completely change my life.
I used to… I’ve told this story, you know, in thousands of meetings and speaking engagements all the time, that because I was really anal about keeping track of my bets, in that last year that I gambled, I finished about $8,500 ahead for the year. But my real estate commissions went from about $140,000 a year down to about $50,000 a year. So I could brag all I wanted about being ahead $8,500, but in reality, you know, because of my gambling addiction, my income dropped by $90,000. So it’s like… you know, I can’t pat myself on the back too much for winning more than I lost gambling, because it’s what it does to your life, and it’s what it does to your personality, and what it does to your motivation.
I just, you know, I was really good at what I did. I’ve always been very good at what I’ve done in any kind of business. But, you know, I just stopped. I just didn’t care. What mattered to me was making sure I had the right teams every day or every night. And, you know, I would sit at my desk at my real estate office for hours on end, going through stuff, studying, being prepared, calling bookmakers, and playing lines all over the country, doing what I had to do. You know, it’s like, I should have been out working hard.
I mean, there were… and, you know, even worse, on Thursdays, when I would settle up with my bookmaker, we met at a strip club called the Dollhouse in Tampa every Thursday. You know, here I was, a married man, three young kids, barely keeping my lights on. If someone wanted to see me to show them houses on a Thursday afternoon, forget it. I would always tell them some lie that I already had an appointment or something like that. I would never… even if I could go make five, 10, 15 thousand dollars or whatever, I wouldn’t even think about it, because I loved my Thursday afternoons at the Dollhouse too much with my bookmaker and all my other gambling buddies, settling up. “Settle-up Thursday at the Dollhouse” was my thing, and that’s how stupid my life had become. It was just completely out of control with basically no good decisions being made.
Jamie: I’m so glad that you shared all that because it is—I was just on a podcast recently, and I was asked, “Can you be a problem gambler without having a financial problem?” My answer was, “Of course,” because looking back—and I’m sure you can appreciate this as well—you said you were one of the few people that won. You lost, but it’s all the other stuff. I mean, every month paying off debts is the easy part for me. I mean, looking back, it’s the lost time with family and friends and all those other things. I mean, trying to rebuild those character issues, that’s the part that stings more and a whole lot more than the financial loss.
Tom: Yeah, because you can always… I mean, I’d be the first to admit, financially, I’m still struggling 24 years later. But, you know, you can always find a way to make a living somehow, some way. And obviously, like now, when you don’t have those big debts hanging over your head or you don’t have that craziness of lack of self-control and everything, you can be successful in other parts of your life again.
And I’m very grateful that I’ve had that opportunity to have a good, successful life since then. And I owe it all to the fact that I don’t gamble and that I’ve worked hard on my recovery and I’ve changed the type of person that I am. And that makes a big difference.
Jamie: Yeah. And let’s talk about your recovery, because obviously, 25 years—you’re doing a lot right to get to that number. And it’s a day at a time, but I guess walk us through, what are some of the things that you’ve done in recovery that you continue to do? What are your thoughts there?
Tom: Well, a lot of… in the early going, a lot of it was just simply surviving. When my wife made that call and then got a guy there, I went to my very first meeting on Super Bowl Sunday night. So it would have been Super Bowl 28—Cowboys-Bills. It’s the only Super Bowl I’ve never seen in my life. I went to a meeting with… there were four people there. There were two women in their 50s—I was 35 years old—and there was a kid. He was in college, 19 years old at his very first meeting, too.
When I went to that meeting, the only reason I was going to that meeting was because my wife told me I had to go. I wasn’t ready to do that for myself yet, even though I had just been through what I had been through a couple of days earlier. But I went, and I had an open mind. I read our little yellow book and listened to these people talk. And in a matter of minutes, I realized I was in the right place. You know, that my life had spun out of control, and I needed to turn my life around and turn it over to a higher power and be involved with some people who could help me end this craziness.
Tom: And I gained a lot out of that. And, you know, we’ll talk about that more when it comes to the book, but that was kind of the impetus. That kid who was there, we never saw him again. He went to one meeting; he had been stealing money from his parents to support his gambling and stuff like that. He was a mess, and we never saw him again. I always wondered what happened to that kid. He would have been about, like, you know, 43 or 44 years old now. I hope he had a good life, but we never saw him again.
But one of the women in that group, she used to always get mad at me when I would talk about my first GA meeting at meetings. I would always say that it was just me and this kid and these two old lady bingo players. And she always got mad at me for calling her an old lady. But we went to meetings a lot for a long, long time down here, and she’s still my friend. I still see her now and again.
But I went to 56 meetings in 90 days. I had a treatment professional down here named Rick Benson, who had a recovery center called the Algamist Recovery Center down in Anna Maria Island, just south of me here. And he and I spent an enormous amount of time together. And I was just… just like I was addicted to gambling, the OCD in me is what really helped a lot, as then I became addicted to recovering. I totally embraced the 12-step program. I totally embraced that I could fix my life pretty well if I stopped gambling and worked on things, and that was the goal.
And I was given the opportunity to really do that, thanks to my wife in a different kind of way. Because about 10 days after all this, there was a guy getting his one-year pin, and he was a doctor, and his wife was there, and his two little kids were there too. I saw all of me in him. While we went through that meeting, I was thinking, “I can’t wait for a year down the road for me so that I could have all that normalcy back in my life again.”
But on the way home, my wife told me that she wanted a divorce. And the reason for that, she said, was that there were three things that were really important to her. One of them was that I fix my addiction problem and fix the type of person I was. And two was to be the best father that I could be to my three little kids. And the third most important thing to her was that I be a good husband to her. And she didn’t think I was capable of doing all three of those things at one time, so she wanted to take that off my plate.
Tom: And so, we did. I moved out the next day, and I worked real hard on being a father all the time to my kids, and I worked real hard on my recovery. But, you know, we got divorced a few months later and went through a few hiccups, you know, that first year. But, you know, since then, we’ve been really good parents together. And she’s—you know, 23 years and change later, we’re still the best of friends. My birthday was Sunday, and the very first phone call I got on Sunday from anybody was my ex-wife of 24 years. That, you know, those types of things. That first text was from her that morning.
At the time, that was it. The first year, I just grinded and grinded. I had to switch professions because I just couldn’t—I didn’t want to be in that position anymore where I was working on a commission-only job. I needed to pay bills and switched around what I was doing. I had a lot of free time, so I went to a lot of meetings and spent a lot of time with Rick and some of the other people in the program and just sort of embraced it all and got through all that.
And about after 14 months, I decided to take another job back home in Northwest Indiana, outside Chicago, just to try to get some stability going in my life again, and lived up there for three and a half years. But did the same thing—went to three or four meetings a week for all that time. I missed my kids a lot, though, so right about five years into the program, I moved back to Florida and, more or less, bounced around a little bit here and there, back and forth, depending on where jobs took me. But I’ve either lived in Florida or Indiana the entire time.
And so, like I said, I’m coming up on 25 years clean. So it’s important to me to do that. But, you know, the biggest thing at the time was to just not make a bet. It was just, you know, finding a way to not gamble that day, because I knew I was just—I had just this fear factor. I was always scared to death that if I relapsed, you know, that I came close to death the first time, that I was sure I would kill myself the second time. And so, it was just this sort of fear factor, and then we worked from there.
Tom: And then right after my one-year pinning, Rick and I really worked a lot. You know, he told me he was proud of me for getting through my first year, but I was doing it for all the wrong reasons. You know, the only reason I was abstaining from gambling was that I was just afraid of what would happen if I did gamble. And he said I really needed to work hard on fixing me, too.
And that’s sort of… we worked on some specific things, and that just sort of became my mantra—that I’m not going to make a bet today, and I’m going to work on being a better person. Because those things go in a full circle. You can’t do one without the other. So I worked really hard on becoming a better person, too. And I’ve always worked hard on being as good a father as I can, and, you know, doing what I can.
It made it easier by having the right thoughts in my head every day. It made it easy to not gamble, which—well, “easy” is the wrong word. I mean, it was not easy at the beginning, but it’s made it easier through the whole journey. I just don’t need that in my life. I can enjoy watching a football game now on a Sunday and not have to be panicking about the end result. I can just enjoy it for what it is. So it’s been certainly an interesting journey, that’s for sure.
Jamie: Yeah. And, I mean, I think you’re right. “Easy” is not the right word, but I understand what you’re saying, because over time, as you get time—and I think some of the other things, like the fact that you see yourself developing as a person—you see, “Okay, hey, there was a lot of bad, obviously, that comes out of anybody’s gambling addiction. If you get to GA, there’s a whole lot of bad days that are there in your memory.”
But with time, I found that it seems like you also realize and kind of appreciate, “Hey, any time you go through struggle, you come out the other side a little bit better.” And I think it sounds like that’s kind of what you’re saying as well.
Tom: Yeah, absolutely. Because it’s just… today is better than yesterday. You know, and I’ve said that for many, many years. I used to have people I knew who did gamble, or whatever, and they would ask me something. It’s like, to me, every day was—I was plus-zero every day, because the fact that I didn’t make a bet was a positive. It wasn’t a break-even thing; it was a positive that I wasn’t gambling, because it was amazing how much time I had to focus on things that mattered again.
Tom: And, you know, to spend two hours at a GA meeting three or four nights a week was nothing compared to the eight or ten or twelve hours I was wasting, you know, gambling or preparing to gamble before. So, it was something that I could embrace too. And like I said, part of my addictive personality—I think, you know, I firmly believe that helped me recover the way I did because, you know, it just became my thing. I liked being a part of it.
I spent a good bit of time in year two training to be a gambling treatment counselor too. I thought maybe that might be something I might want to do for a career. So, I did a lot of that. And of course, as part of that, I’ve worked with—between 12-step meetings and that—hundreds and hundreds of compulsive gamblers and families and stuff like that. And all of that just made it more meaningful to me to be in a position where this is the life that I’ve chosen to live now, and I’m grateful for that.
Jamie: Yeah, and that’s—I know I’ve personally experienced that, that helping other people… I mean, there’s nothing like it. And it’s amazing that you don’t even need to do anything. Like you said, you did some training on it, but literally just sharing your story—it’s amazing what that does to help somebody else, and the feedback that you get is incredible.
Tom: Yeah, and I’ll be the first to admit, I don’t go to meetings nearly as much as I used to, nor probably should, just by the nature of… for a long stretch there, I was working two full-time jobs. You know, once my kids came back and lived with me for four and a half years, so to make that happen, I was working like crazy. Getting to meetings became less and less important to me. I’d still go every once in a while, and I still do every once in a while.
But what I’ve kind of learned from that is that when I’m there, and when I talk and share my stories, a lot of people who know me are like, “Tom, you know, you need to be here more often. Not just for you, we need you.” You know, it’s like that new person who walks in the door—they need you. And I know, I know. And that’s true.
Tom: So, actually, that’s one of my goals for 2019, too, is to try to be more involved again and have that be a little bit more of a priority in my life, to get back to meetings and to spend more time with those friends. I still spend a lot of time on the phone with people most of the time and stuff like that, but I haven’t gone to the meetings nearly as much, and I need to do that. So it’s on my list of 2019 goals, but we all need to have goals every year.
Jamie: Absolutely. And in this day and age, I mean, there are definitely many other outlets. I mean, there’s Twitter, there’s Reddit, there’s all sorts of online things. Like you say, you’re doing other things; it’s getting that mix and what’s right for you.
And so, I guess let’s segue into, obviously, the book and the writing. Tell me a little bit about the upcoming book, how that plays into your story, recovery, what your goals are for it, etc.
Tom: Yeah, the next book is a sequel to the first, and it’s called Darkness. It basically picks up where the first book, The Ties That Bind, left off. Without spoiling the story of the first one too much, I won’t go into the real specifics, but basically what the second book focuses on is relapse. It focuses on what happens when you quit working hard at your recovery.
Basically, the lead character in Darkness, that’s what happens—he sort of stops going to meetings, stops being around, stops caring about what anybody thinks. And all of a sudden, he starts doing things that he didn’t do before. He was basically a sports bettor like me prior to that, but then he started playing poker, thinking, “Oh, that’s a game of skill,” and it’s not really gambling, it’s not something he was ever addicted to before, and that would be okay. But then, you know, one thing after another happens, and his life gets really crazy and spins out of control even worse.
And the goal of that story is to tell people—and you know this from living it and seeing it—that when people relapse, it’s always worse the next time around. No one ever relapses easy. It’s always worse.
Tom: And, you know, in this book, the goal is to show that it’s so easy to fall right back into that trap if you’re not careful. There’s lots of action and drama in this book too, like the first one. Quite frankly, the story in the second one—I love it even more than the first because a lot of the characters are already known to the reader. So, there’s a lot of drama in chapter one of the sequel, and I’m excited about that.
It’s something I wanted to write sooner, but once I started writing other books on other topics and then started my book publishing business, things got put on hold. I’ve always joked with people that as the owner of my publishing company, the writer that I treat the worst is me. I’ve written four books total and edited and published eight others in the last three years. So, this sequel has been dragging, but it’s basically done now. I’m going to release it on January 23rd, which is the 25-year anniversary of my clean date. So that’s the day it comes out.
Literally, like I said, I’m just putting the finishing touches on it right now and looking forward to a big release in January.
Jamie: Yeah, and I really love the title, first of all—Darkness. That’s one of the best ways, I think, to describe any addiction. Like you say, it kind of brings out the fears that all lead into that imagery. But then, in hearing you talk and kind of drawing on some of the things we talked about earlier, it’s almost like this book is sort of revealing some of your fears, right? That, “Okay, if I don’t go back and…”
Tom: Yeah, it’s… granted, obviously, a lot of it is just displayed to the drama of the story. But, yeah, what the character goes through next is something that could have happened to me, could have happened to you, and could have happened to hundreds of people we know.
Now, obviously, he really goes off the rails, and it’s huge. He just really becomes a horrible person, doing horrible things. And that’s what happens. I want to show that and share that. That’s important to me because a lot of times, people look at me and say, “Ah, you don’t gamble anymore, that’s great.” But I tell them, “If I did, this is what would happen, and it would not be pretty.”
Tom: And, you know, that’s part of it. Like I said, the story itself, it starts right here in Clearwater, Florida, and then it plays out—the middle chunk of the book is all set in Biloxi, Mississippi, where I have some experience as well. Then the last of the drama plays out in Las Vegas, in what would be the equivalent of a World Series of Poker kind of craziness. So, it’s all that.
I think anybody who’s had any sort of gambling issues will probably see a little bit of themselves in this character, or they’ll be grateful that they don’t. And like I said, it’s been good because what I’ve really appreciated about the first book is that people who don’t know a thing about gambling addiction and don’t know what can happen just appreciated it for the story and the quality of the writing. That always meant a lot to me. I’m hoping that everybody feels the same way about the second one.
Jamie: Yeah, and I’m definitely looking forward to catching it on January 23rd when it comes out. And I do think it’s an incredible way and a cool platform, like you say, to have a novel to tell the story of gambling addiction. It’s just another way—any way that we can kind of get people up to speed because so few people truly understand it. And like you summed up very eloquently, people don’t understand. They look at you and say, “Tom, you have 25 years clean; what do you have to worry about?” Yet you and I are sitting here saying, “I worry every day.”
And so, it’s cool to hear that this is going to highlight some of those thoughts and fears, but also tell it in a different way through a novel and through fiction to introduce more people.
Tom: Sure, yeah. And what’s always been really important to me is to just continue the conversation. I tell people all the time, “I’m not anti-gambling in any way. I’m just anti-gambling for me.” My brothers and I, and a bunch of friends, go on a golf trip every year. It started as a way to celebrate my youngest brother’s 40th birthday. We go to Biloxi, Mississippi, in March every year.
People have always asked me, “You don’t gamble, so what’s it like for you to be around a casino?” I always say, “It doesn’t bother me one bit because I never did any casino gambling.” It doesn’t attract me in any way; I don’t have any addiction issues when it comes to that. I know who I am, and I just let them have their fun. They’re all good about it, and I play golf, have nice dinners, and have a drink with them now and again. It’s one of my favorite weeks of the year, and it all takes place in a casino, and I never think twice about it.
Tom: And, uh, but what’s funny is that this year, when we’re going, I was reminded by one of my brothers that the casino we stay at now in Mississippi has—they do have a sportsbook now. You know, it was legalized this year, and they have one. He’s like, “Is that going to be an issue for you?” And I’m like, “No, I know what I am.” And I know what I always tell people is that I’m a recovering compulsive gambler, and there’s nothing wrong with that because I know who I am and I know what I need to do to deal with it.
So it doesn’t matter to me. I mean, I could gamble on sports, you know, while we’re on the phone here if I so chose. I mean, it’s just that easy anymore. But the fact that there’s a sportsbook there doesn’t bother me one bit. I’m going there to hang out with my brothers and my friends, play golf every day, eat nice dinners every night, and just have a really good time. That’s what the joy of recovery gives you—you can do that and live a good, fun life again.
Jamie: Absolutely. And I’m glad that you found that freedom. I just want to say thanks for coming on.
Tom: Oh, it was my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Jamie: Absolutely. Now, I really hope you enjoyed today’s episode. As I said in the intro, if you want to reach out to Tom, tell him congrats or check out one of his books, you can do so by looking in the show notes. And then, also, I just thought it was interesting to have Tom on with his background in sports and sports betting, given all the change we see here in the United States.
Hopefully, you got something out of it. Hopefully, you found it interesting. And, yeah, just really appreciate Tom coming on and sharing his story because that’s what it’s all about. Now remember, I’m not a doctor, I’m not a lawyer, I’m not an attorney. Please seek out professional help to deal with your gambling addiction. We talk about this stuff because we want to raise awareness for it, but gambling is an addiction—it’s a severe addiction, it’s a severe disorder. So please reach out and get the help that you need.
And finally, the music for the show is Something Elated by Broke For Free and is licensed under the Creative Commons license. My name is Jamie. The last time I gambled was July 15th of 2010. Thank you for listening, and I will see you in the next episode.
