The means and the motive - Part two

"Three may keep a secret if two are dead" - Ben Franklin

What leads an athlete to gamble? Is it greed, a mad desire for money? Is it for power - the same kind they once had on their field of play? Or is it something else, something to fill an empty void in their lives?

Pete Rose, like Wayne Gretzky, was not just an athlete - he was an artist, a virtuoso at third base. He was better then anyone before him and he remains better then anyone still. He started in professional baseball in 1960 as a minor leaguer and played his first major league game in 1963 - and won the award for Best Rookie in the National League. He played professional baseball until 1986, when he dropped himself (he was by then also the manager for the Reds) off the 40-man roster.

By 1989 he was banned from baseball.

With Wayne it was a similar story: he started for the Indianapolis Racers of the now-defunct World Hockey Association in 1978 at the age of 17 and retired 21 years later at the age of 38 in 1999 - he had spent the majority of his life, like Pete Rose, playing and perfecting the sport that he loved.

When a person, such as a watchmaker, retires after many years of working, they often find that they are restless - in Japan, this has a name: Retired Husband Syndrome. In this, the husband, is unable to cope with life at home with the kids and the wife - he's so used to working that he is unable to handle all the free time - and the wife ends up suffering.

Maybe this could explain Janet's involvement in the gambling ring - maybe not.

But what about Wayne? Like that fellow artist, Pete Rose, Wayne had spent the majority if his life playing a game he loved - and a game that had now passed him by. Like Rose, Gretzky went to work for hockey - first for the Canadian National Team, and later as a coach for the Phoenix Coyotes. But the competitive streak in him was left empty...

It can be assumed that this could have been what led Pete Rose to gamble - as he got older, he was no longer able to compete at the level he once was... By the time he was a manager, he was unable to compete in the same way that he has before. And, so my reasoning goes, he turned to gambling - it allowed him to compete as he once did, thus filling his void - but the stakes were higher then he realized (he perhaps he did - and it raised the competition higher and higher for him) and the same thing happened to him that happens to anyone who gambles with large sums of money for an extended time: the house won. And, to boot, he was kicked out the game he loved so much; the game that he had been a part of for over 25 years.

Perhaps that is why allegedly Wayne could have started to gamble. With his hockey career over, he still felt a need to compete. And, unlike other athletes who return to their sport because of that urge (Michael Jordan, Bo Jackson, Mario Lemieux) he knew that he was unable to play as he once did - and perhaps gambling offered him the same thrill that he craved. Perhaps it was small, a minor bet on a football game on ProLine - or a major sum invested in a March Madness pool. It doesn't matter; it's all moot. What matters is that once somebody starts, they're not going to stop until the fire within them is extinguished (either by debt, fulfillment or by being caught).

But somebody close to him did start -they played with fire and it burned them - badly. And now one question remains: Did he gamble?

Nobody knows for sure, other Wayne himself, but almost anyone can make an uneducated guess...

(Continued...)