Saturday, February 21, 2009
थे माउंट कैमेरून रस ऑफ़ होप १४थ Edition
I left home around 5.15am in the morning and arrived at the Molyko Omnisport Stadium about 6.30am. The national anthem was played at 6.45am and the race started as scheduled at 7.00am. The athletes total around 800 divided into the category of adults,junior and veterans. The mountain is about 4090metres high,the highest peak in West Africa and it is quite a challenging climb. I have attempted the climb twice at a leisure pace and made it up to hut two.So you can imagine how tough it is to got up and down in competitive running.I went to a cyber cafe just close to the stadium to to do some work and it was from there that the first person arrived just about 4.24 minutes in total time. The second and third persons came shortly after.So the race for the top spot was very competitive with the top three runners making it in under the 4.35 minute mark. The runners appear in very good condition and they look like they could go on for some time.For the ladies,the winner came in at 5.23 minutes,the second around 5.39 and the third at about 5.41. So the winner of the ladies race won it by a clear margin compared to the men.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
Fighting for survival
On the first week of October 2003 I quit my job at AT&T wireless due to too much harassment. Enough was enough, I was going to just leave the place and at the time I did not care about the consequences. I had come to work early in the morning and I was just getting a very tough time with the customers. I walked into the Managers office and told him that I was gone. He must have been anticipating this for he did not put up an argument. He said okay, I fill out all of the necessary paperwork and headed out of the door. At the time I had no idea what I was going to be doing afterward to make a living. Prior to quitting, I had applied for jobs at different places but nothing worked out. I got into my max and headed home. I was going to do all the reflections afterwards. I had about $5000 of cash in the bank plus about $17,000 in 401k that I had been saving since my days at Circuit City. I figured that by the time I run out of all this money I would have found something to do. At the time I had to deal with the following monthly expenses;$1085 for the rent,$520 for car payment,$130 for car insurance,$150 for credit card bills,$85 for electricity and light,$20 for internet subscription,$65 for cable plus money that had to be allocated for gas. All the expenses came to about $2,000 monthly. I had been working since 1986,about the time that I got into the US and this was the first time that I found myself without a job. I have also being living independently for about 5 years now and I had forgotten how to go live in somebody’s couch. I continued to stay in Laurel, Maryland and spend most of the early months keeping track of world events. Winter was around the corner and I had planned to just spend most of the time being indoors.
A lot of things began to go wrong at this time. First of all I lost my driver license and there was no way for me to get a replacement. I went to the Department of motor vehicles a lot of times but could not figure out a way to get a replacement. So up to the time that I left for home I was driving without a license. How is that possible? You learn to keep to the speed limit, obey all the traffics lights and signs and just drive safely. I did that for close to two years and was lucky not to have been stop at all. Until the time that I abandon my apartment, I had a total of just one other job that I did for about a monthly. I worked in a furniture company in laurel called Marlo Furniture and got paid about $1,000 for the month of work. I had kept a copy of both my missing driver license and social security card. I used that to get the job. I did not stay there for long though. I believed that I was just burned out. Going to work is something that I have been doing for quite for time now but all of a sudden it had become such a burden.I had earlier talked to a former co-worker at AT&T Wireless and he had asked whether I ever filed for unemployment benefits?I told him no and said that I should look into it.I did call the unemployment office and was given information on a website that I could get everything done on.I followed the instructions,did all the paperwork and in two weeks time I got the first check of $600.I received two more checks of $600 before my former employer intervened and said they were not liable to be paying me unemployment benefits.Unemployment benefits runs for 26 weeks before stopping.The case with AT&T wireless went to arbitration in which they had a mouth piece and I did not have one.I lost the arbitration and forget about the whole unemployment deal.
October 2004 had past and I did not pay my rent for the month.I was beginning to get worried about my property and I decided to rent a storage area to keep some of my things.The storage space was going to cost me $85 a month.At the time my plans were that I would make the payments and hope that things get better to enable me get my property.November came and this time there was a notice from the Landlord lord saying the Sheriffs will be in to throw me out in case I did not settle my account by the end of November.I knew I was not going to settle my account, so I starting making plans to get the things that I could carry around in my car.I would be leaving the apartment before dawn on the 1 of December 2004.I got some things into my car and was gone on the morning of December 2004.I would end up traveling all the way to Florida in my quest for a different place to live.Nothing did work out at all and I would end up heading to Atlanta,Georgia where my elder brother,a medical doctor lived.In Atlanta,I spend a total of six uneventful month before deciding to head home to Cameroon.Traveling arrangements were made and I arrived Cameroon sometime in June of the year 2005.
A lot of things began to go wrong at this time. First of all I lost my driver license and there was no way for me to get a replacement. I went to the Department of motor vehicles a lot of times but could not figure out a way to get a replacement. So up to the time that I left for home I was driving without a license. How is that possible? You learn to keep to the speed limit, obey all the traffics lights and signs and just drive safely. I did that for close to two years and was lucky not to have been stop at all. Until the time that I abandon my apartment, I had a total of just one other job that I did for about a monthly. I worked in a furniture company in laurel called Marlo Furniture and got paid about $1,000 for the month of work. I had kept a copy of both my missing driver license and social security card. I used that to get the job. I did not stay there for long though. I believed that I was just burned out. Going to work is something that I have been doing for quite for time now but all of a sudden it had become such a burden.I had earlier talked to a former co-worker at AT&T Wireless and he had asked whether I ever filed for unemployment benefits?I told him no and said that I should look into it.I did call the unemployment office and was given information on a website that I could get everything done on.I followed the instructions,did all the paperwork and in two weeks time I got the first check of $600.I received two more checks of $600 before my former employer intervened and said they were not liable to be paying me unemployment benefits.Unemployment benefits runs for 26 weeks before stopping.The case with AT&T wireless went to arbitration in which they had a mouth piece and I did not have one.I lost the arbitration and forget about the whole unemployment deal.
October 2004 had past and I did not pay my rent for the month.I was beginning to get worried about my property and I decided to rent a storage area to keep some of my things.The storage space was going to cost me $85 a month.At the time my plans were that I would make the payments and hope that things get better to enable me get my property.November came and this time there was a notice from the Landlord lord saying the Sheriffs will be in to throw me out in case I did not settle my account by the end of November.I knew I was not going to settle my account, so I starting making plans to get the things that I could carry around in my car.I would be leaving the apartment before dawn on the 1 of December 2004.I got some things into my car and was gone on the morning of December 2004.I would end up traveling all the way to Florida in my quest for a different place to live.Nothing did work out at all and I would end up heading to Atlanta,Georgia where my elder brother,a medical doctor lived.In Atlanta,I spend a total of six uneventful month before deciding to head home to Cameroon.Traveling arrangements were made and I arrived Cameroon sometime in June of the year 2005.
Monday, February 2, 2009
The Economic Crisis
This one started in the United States in the form of bad mortgages and spread
gradually to the rest of the World. The banks that are usually on the side of caution moved aggressively in the game and got burn big time. You look at some of the numbers and they are just staggering. The Dow has tested the just below 8000 mark. In the late 90s the Dow was at 12000.The NASDAQ is now just around the 1500 mark. In the era of the dot-com boom is was at 5000.The US economic shrank 3.8 percent for the fourth quarter of 2008,though for the year is grew slightly. The US government and other countries around the world are throwing the concept of pure capitalism down the drain and going for bail out packages to rescue the situation. There was the 700billion dollar package to bail out Wall Street and the 787billion dollar package for the whole economy which was a hard sell to the Republicans in both house of Congress.The bill did pass though with few republicans voting for it. Throughout the developed world there has been similar packages to help out thought not in the scale of that of the US. Some of the countries that have been hit hardest include the nation of Iceland that now has a female Prime Minister at the helm. She is also of a different kind of sexual orientation and she is opened about it.This situation has been compared to that of the late 1920s and early 1930s,the great depression in case you missed it in your history lessons.Other countries that were suppose to pick up the slack with a US slowdown are beginning to feel the pinch also.Recently about 26million migrant workers in china lost their jobs.There is something that took place with the price of oil that completely changed the manner in which this crisis was going to play out when it started in late 2007.The price of old was rising and peaked around the 147 dollars a barrel mark.High oil price was a big boost for oil producing countries such as OPEC countries,Russia,Brazil,China which have very large oil reserves.Oil prices went down in a hurry though and the above countries did not get as much benefit from the oil prices as I though they would.This is why the crisis I believe has hit a global scale now.The rest of the world now has to watch closely what is taking place in the US because just like in the part I believe that is the country that is going to either take the rest of the world under or pull us out of the current economic crisis.Latest figures show that the US economy shrank by about 6.2 percent during the fourth quarter of the year 2008.General Motors has been in trouble for some time now and the government is taking a different approach after giving it a lot of bailout money.There is take of a bankruptcy filing which will be major news if it actually happens.That fact that the government is letting GM go this direction is prove that they have figure out that not all the companies could be bailout.
Chrysler was the first of the major automobile companies to declare bankruptcy with the barking to the federal government.GM might not be too far behind.Ford seems to be weathering the storm pretty well.So far they have been the lone company out of the big three automakers not to have taken government money.
General Motors is expected to file for chapter eleven bankruptcy on Monday the first of June 2009 at a time when their stock price is down to less than a dollar a share.At its peak the stock price was at 93 a share back in the year 2000.The plan is for them to reemerge as a much leaner and more efficient company.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
Selling
Selling is the way that I ended up making my living while in the US and it started with Radio Shack as a commission sales person.From there,the selling experience continued with Circuit City,Sprint Pcs and lastly with AT&T Wireless.I must admit that when I started it was not easy at all.This was because I was doing sales in the electronic industry in which I was not very familiar with the products.That is the first learning in the act of selling.You have to know the products that you sell.The knowledge could be obtained through reading the owners manual,product demonstration on the sales floor,attending scheduled training sessions and asking questions to colleagues that are more experience in the sales floor.Asking colleagues for assistance is probably the best of the above mentioned options because not only are you creating a bond, you are getting first hand knowledge for somebody that has been selling for the longest of period.This is the method that I used to gain must of my product knowledge.Reading the owner's manual is also a good option,but at times the explanations on the owner's manual are not clear cut.You read something on the book and you try it out and it does not work out as the manual had explained.That is when you talked to an experience sales person and they say OK forget about the book,this is what really works.This reminds me of a scene is the movie "bonfire of the Vanity"in which the attorney that McCoy hires tells him to forget about all that they taught him in law school and concentrate on the real life experience.What he was implying is that in law school,they give you all the theory and when you get to real life you have to learn the reality of what actually takes place.
Approaching customers is a key in the act of selling.You have to be aggressive in how you do this.This is true especially when there are a lot of sales persons in the floor and traffic is a little bit slow.It thus becomes a numbers game.The more customers that you can approach,the greater your chance of making a sale.
Presentation is also important.This is product presentation.If you want to sell something,you have to know where to start the presentation and where to end it.You are going to give a complete demonstration of the product,so there has to be some kind of a game plan.Take for example that you are going to sell a bomb-box.You might want to start by demonstrating how the radio works,then you move to how the cassette player part of the unit works and lastly you get to demo the Cd part of the unit.Three parts to the demonstration and the presentation is all complete.
Approaching customers is a key in the act of selling.You have to be aggressive in how you do this.This is true especially when there are a lot of sales persons in the floor and traffic is a little bit slow.It thus becomes a numbers game.The more customers that you can approach,the greater your chance of making a sale.
Presentation is also important.This is product presentation.If you want to sell something,you have to know where to start the presentation and where to end it.You are going to give a complete demonstration of the product,so there has to be some kind of a game plan.Take for example that you are going to sell a bomb-box.You might want to start by demonstrating how the radio works,then you move to how the cassette player part of the unit works and lastly you get to demo the Cd part of the unit.Three parts to the demonstration and the presentation is all complete.
Monday, January 26, 2009
The Beach
It did a little bit of swimming in my youth while growing up in Ndongo,Tiko.There was a river called Ndongo water that we used to go swim in.It was a stream,the water was not that deep so there was no fear of one drowning.I loved getting into the water while I was young and I deep a bit of that in my youth,paying good attention not to get into very deep water.I did not know how to swim in an early age so you have to be careful.I had almost drained in a river in Likomba at one time but I was saved by my friends with whom we were playing soccer.My love affair with the beach started when I reached the US.During the weekend,especially during the summer period a lot of people are always heading to the beach.While working at Radio Shack in Maryland, an Indian friend of mine told me there was a beach that I should visit.I female friend of mine was visiting from New Jersey and I needed a place to take her to.Steve John,that is the name of my Indian friend drew directions for me to get to Ocean City Maryland.My friend from New Jersey was coming with an SUV that she had recently bought.So driving there would not be a problem.To drive from Silver Spring to Ocean City is about a 3 and half to 4 hour drive.Once to you into the Beltway drive to route 50 north and just keep going.It takes you right into Ocean City.The city is build alongside the the Atlantic ocean so there it is a dead end once you get there.
Wednesday, January 7, 2009
Gambling
This is probably something that you never want to do in your life because of all the problems that it would cause you. A lot of lives have been destroyed by it and it will continue to destroy a whole lot more. We are talking here though about sports gambling. I was working at Circuit City at the time and a guy named Robert Johnson (I have changed the name of the person to protect his identity) was responsible for introducing a lot of us into the affair. We started with placing little bets on college football games and it stretched later into the professional football games. It was the beginning of the 1995 college football season and I was working in the ACE department at the Circuit City in Beltsville, Maryland. The University of Maryland was playing against Tulane University and Robert came up with football lines for the College football games that weekend. At the time I knew very little about the gambling part of sports. I had been watching college football games for maybe a decade now and never knew a thing about how the lines work. There were quite a few people in the store though that was into gambling, they knew about the lines, odds and effects of gambling. Robert explained to us how the lines work and being the adventurous person that I was at the time, I decided to give it a try. Our store Manager at the time definitely was not aware of what was going.
The first bet that we placed for the game was $25 each person. We ended up loosing that weekend though, because although Maryland won the game, they did not cover the spread. Robert by the way was not the main bookie. He was just the intermediary guy. The name of the real guy was Sid and I got to meet him twice. The first time was when he came to collect $5000 from Johnson(Robert had gone through a terrible week and lost all that money on a bad loosing stretch).The second time was about a year later when I went on a good winning stretch and Sid had to come make sure that I actually exist.
At first what we did was place our bets through Robert Johnson but later on he gave us a direct number through which Sid could be reached and we starting calling up Sid directly to place the bets. Robert collected any winnings for us and we also paid whatever we lost to Sid through him. After the Maryland game, I was mad for having lost $25 and I started making serious plans to make up for my losses the following weekend. I got a copy of the Saturday Washington Post and the lines for the weekend college football games where all there. I wrote down a long list of games and called Robert up that he should place those games for me during the weekend(9/16/1995).The bets were mainly $25 and $50,but added up to a potential lost of close to $900 dollars. I did not know the strength and weaknesses of some of the teams. I was just going by current record.
Anyway, I called up the bets and Robert was real surprise but took my bets though. I remember one of the games was Tennessee versus Florida in Gaines Ville, Florida. Tennessee was the higher ranking team though the Florida Gators were favored by a touchdown. All these bets where place early in the morning before I headed to the store for work. The games we could follow from various television sets that we had in the store. It was raining heavily at the "Swamp"(the swamp is the home of the Florida Gators and always a dangerous area for visiting teams),Steve Spurrier(nicknamed Coach Superior) was coaching the Florida Gators and at halftime his team was down to the Tennessee Volunteers by 34-17 on their way to losing their homecoming game or so we thought. In one of the great turn-around stories of the early season (week three) the Gators would respond in style, scoring 44 straight unanswered points, beating Tennessee 62-37.Tennessee managed just 3 second half points. I had $50 riding on this game and the bad news was just beginning. At the end of the playing Saturday I was down $700 to my bookie. This was my take home pay for two weeks at my job as a sales person for Circuit City. Some two weeks I did not even take this amount home. After the initial shock and talking to Robert, he agreed to cover it with his bookie and I would just pay him over time.
The experience of losing this amount of money did not stop me from further gambling though, I just cut down drastically on the number of bets to place at once. I believed I paid the loss that week over a period of about a year (some of it through future winnings) and about $150 was forgiving. I was hooked though to sports gambling and so were the majority of the store employees. We had some great fun and one of our favorite team that we followed was Ohio State throughout their magical run in the 1995/1996 season for the first 10 games before they eventually lost to Michigan. Ohio State had star players in their team in Eddie George, Terry Glenn, Bob Hoying, Shawn Springs and Orlando Pace. Eddie George would end up winning the Heisman trophy for his performance that season, Terry Glenn won the Biletnikoff award for the best college wide receiver and Orlando Pace won the Out land trophy for being college football's best lineman. He (Orlando Pace) finished the season without allowing a quarterback sack on his side of the field. By the fourth week we were (about six or seven of us) all putting money on Ohio State and they just were having a great season. They were blowing teams away and covering the spread at the same time. Some of the games would be close in the first half, but by the time the second half comes around, the other teams just seemed to get tired and Eddie George would just run over them. He would finish the season with 1927 rushing yards (scoring 24TD for the season).The Buckeyes crushed teams like Boston College, Washington, Notre Dame and Illinois. We were enjoying all the victories, especially the margin of victories. The magical run came to an end though at Michigan, where Ohio State played their last game of the regular season. It was the Tim Biakabutuka show as the Michigan's star running back ran all over Ohio State for 313 yards and led his team to a 31-23 upset victory of Eddie and Company. I have to mention that Michigan is always a difficult game for Ohio State no matter what the current records of the teams is. Not only did Ohio State not cover the spread, they lost the game.
While college football was where we made some money, the NFL was where we were getting hammered. The guys at Vegas sure know how to set those NFL lines. With the NFL you can pick four teams and lay money on them and you would be very lucky to come out with a single team covering the spread. Bad teams would let you down as well as the teams that are enjoying a fine season. For some reason though we kept playing with the NFL.There were the regular 1pm and 4pm games, later on the Sunday night game and lastly the Monday night football game. What usually happens for me is that by the end of Saturday I would be ahead by about $125 won on the college games. Instead of waiting for Tuesday to pick up the winnings, the compulsive gambling drive in me would have me placing bets on the professional games on Sunday. By the time that the Sunday night game comes around, I would already be in the negative. I remember a typical such week in which a lot of us in the store had to depend on a Monday night game involving the Detroit Lions to come out of the hole. I was actually down by $200 before that game and I thought for a while about waiting to pay the debt or risking going down by $400 at the end of the week. Imagine the type of effect losing that type of money would have on somebody that does not make much money to begin with. I did call in the bet for $200 and I held my heart in my arm as the Lions pull off the offset, thanks in large part to their star running back Barry Sanders to cover the spread and make me and a few of my co-workers even for the week.
The extend of my own gambling problem was huge in terms of how much time that it took from my engaging in other activities. When you are involved in sports gambling, there is lot of things that you do. The first one is go out and purchase all types of magazines that give you analysis of the games and the trends. There were publications such at the sporting magazine. At times I would purchase and take them home to read, at times I would just go to the stores that sell them, Safeway stores, Giants food stores, People Drug store, all had a section for magazines and you could go to the stores and read out the analysis. Once in a while, there is a good pickup, but the majority of the time, all you get was information that is based on history that has nothing to do with what will actually take place on game day. Another information source was through the television channels. I had paid cable for most of the time that I was gambling and on Saturday and Sunday mornings, there would be all types of people claiming to be experts at picking games. They had names like "big game" Tony, or "Big game" Wayne and they would say they have a sure thing for about $50.So the problem of gambling gets couple with that of people trying to sell you games that they claim are sure things. I did pay about $25 and $50 for about 5 games sometime during my gambling period and find out that there was nothing like a sure thing in sports.Also, once you call one of these numbers, they now have your contact information and you would be getting strange calls from different sources trying to selling you inside information that they claim to have. I remember at one time using one of my credit cards to try and buy a sure thing, but the credit card was maxed out and the person on the other end of the line said not to worry, that I have another credit card on their radar and they would just use that instead. Fortunately for me, that one was also maxed out. It did not end there though, about two weeks later, I got on my answering machine, a strange voice that when like this "Hey big guy, I got a play on the Texas A&M game, just give me a call back”. I was lucky in that I did not have any money to spend on the games at the time of the call.
I tried out just about every sport at one time or the other. After football, there was basketball, baseball, soccer and Ice Hockey. The soccer I still remember because this was during the Fifa 1998 world cup that France hosted and won. The game was Germany versus Croatia and I think the money line had me placing $90 to try and win $30.Croatia was a huge underdog on the game and as you can see from the lines, everybody was putting their money with the Germans. During this period of time though, sports gambling had become something that you could do over the internet. You no longer needed a bookie. All you needed was a credit card to set up the account for immediate action or you could go to one of the money transfer channels and send the money to your account. Anyway, big surprise for me in this game. Before the game, I had talked to one of my co-workers who worked in the video department named Bruce and boosted on how the Germans have a reputation for coming up roses on big games. He was surprised on my confidence on the Germans. I did not let him know though that I had money riding on the game. I left the store after work and headed home in time to catch the beginning of this 1998 world cup encounter. Croatia came up big in the game avenging a Euro-1996 lost to this same Germany team. I remember the game vividly with Croatia scoring two goals that look almost like an instant reply form identical sides of the pitch. Final score was 3-0 Croatia. Later-on, soccer games that I placed bets on did not come out any better, so I do not think that this is a good way of making money. For Basketball, the Pros games are a killer. The lines are almost impossible for you to cover. Robert Johnson used to place money on the pro-basketball lines and he would tell me that he had gone at times 0-11 which is the worst possible outcome for even those that know nothing about the sports at all. In my early days, I stayed off the pro-basketball game but did try it later-on using the money lines. Money lines is when you place say $10 on a team to win say $15.You do not get to lose money like in the lines spreads, but I did not win any money at all. A sure killer is to pick the higher money teams. It seems like each time that you do that the team loses. I did place some bets on the NCAA games and both regular season and playoffs pro-basketball games and got a little bit of success with the NCAA tourney games.
Baseball though is strangely an area in which I had quite a bit of success. It was a surprise thought because I was not following the sports a lot. I had to call in the bets to some 1-800 numbers that I got, I do not remember where and I starting calling in the bets on the underdog’s teams. The way the money lines on the underdog teams work is pretty good. You get to risk less money for a greater reward. If you are going to do any gambling on baseball, for me this is the way to go. The bets were money line bets and I remember the Chicago Cubs coming out smelling like roses for me during this stretch. I won in like three different occasions $500 and the feeling was such an uplifting one because this money made up for the loss that I had suffered in the past. The money itself took sometime to get to me. I had to call on about three different occasions before I would get a number from a lady on the other end of the line saying that the money would be coming from this person in this part of the country. Out of these three winnings I ended up losing $300 on a strange night out in the streets on Washington DC. Do not ask me what I was out doing at the time.
I tried some Ice hockey games and winning money gambling on hockey games was just as hard. After all these sports gambling my final conclusion was that you do not make money gambling on sports. I have watched a sports gambling documentary in which a guy was interviewed who made about $50,000 a year on sports gambling. I do not doubt his claim, but his story is the exception and not the rule according to my own personal experience.
I finally just stopped sports gambling after I left Circuit City in 1998 to join Sprint PCS in early 1999.This was a good thing because I was making much more money at Sprint PCS, but my experience in the past had taught me that sports gambling was not the way to go. Once in a while, I did go to the Casino but this was usually with money that I could afford to lose.
Why do people gamble their money away in the first place?
Part of the reason is that you have this belief that you could beat the odds, which is not true at all. Also, once you get into it, you are hooked and a lot of people find it very difficult to get out once this happens. Another reason is the thrill of winning. You ask any sports gambler and they would tell you about the high-lifting feeling that they get from winning one from the boys in Vegas. The problem with this is that you completely forget the loss that you have encountered in the past. My advice for the to be sports gambler is that if you need the thrill, there are a lot of places that you could place bets of about $5 and $10.This does not seem like a lot of money at all, but the advantage is that when you are winning, the feeling is just as good as winning a lot of money and if you lose, the pain would not be too bad. There is such a sinking feeling when you drop a big one on a game. The feeling hits you once the game is over and it carries on for quite a while. Your spirits are down at work and you would have some of your managers and co-workers asking you what is wrong. It takes some time before you get over it. What used to happen to me is I would go for a period without any sports gambling, then all of a sudden, the feeling would come back and I would be back in action trying to win some money. NCAA football bowl games was one of such period and what would happen, is after all the games are done I would tally everything up and find out that there was no money won at all. This was after I had some experience and knowledge about the different sports. I believe a legislation was passed by Congress(around 2006) banning sports gambling, even online in the US except of cause when you are in the state of Nevada where all types of sports gambling is allowed. This is good news because I had such a fear of what bookies could do to me if I lose and could not pay up my debts. There are a lot of movies that chronicle all the dark sides of sports gambling, including people losing body parts because of none payment. When I started sports gambling, I had such a fear of Sid(the bookie) and though when I did meet him he was not very scary at all, there was a certain loneliness in the way he looks and I got the feeling that the life of a bookie could not be such a glamorous one at all.
The good side is the amount of knowledge that you collect about the sports. You asked me any star sports personally around the mid-1980s through the year 2005 and the answer comes right out. You want details of some of the games that I watched during this period of time and you get it. It is time consuming though and you can go long stretches during which you have time for nothing but the games.
The first bet that we placed for the game was $25 each person. We ended up loosing that weekend though, because although Maryland won the game, they did not cover the spread. Robert by the way was not the main bookie. He was just the intermediary guy. The name of the real guy was Sid and I got to meet him twice. The first time was when he came to collect $5000 from Johnson(Robert had gone through a terrible week and lost all that money on a bad loosing stretch).The second time was about a year later when I went on a good winning stretch and Sid had to come make sure that I actually exist.
At first what we did was place our bets through Robert Johnson but later on he gave us a direct number through which Sid could be reached and we starting calling up Sid directly to place the bets. Robert collected any winnings for us and we also paid whatever we lost to Sid through him. After the Maryland game, I was mad for having lost $25 and I started making serious plans to make up for my losses the following weekend. I got a copy of the Saturday Washington Post and the lines for the weekend college football games where all there. I wrote down a long list of games and called Robert up that he should place those games for me during the weekend(9/16/1995).The bets were mainly $25 and $50,but added up to a potential lost of close to $900 dollars. I did not know the strength and weaknesses of some of the teams. I was just going by current record.
Anyway, I called up the bets and Robert was real surprise but took my bets though. I remember one of the games was Tennessee versus Florida in Gaines Ville, Florida. Tennessee was the higher ranking team though the Florida Gators were favored by a touchdown. All these bets where place early in the morning before I headed to the store for work. The games we could follow from various television sets that we had in the store. It was raining heavily at the "Swamp"(the swamp is the home of the Florida Gators and always a dangerous area for visiting teams),Steve Spurrier(nicknamed Coach Superior) was coaching the Florida Gators and at halftime his team was down to the Tennessee Volunteers by 34-17 on their way to losing their homecoming game or so we thought. In one of the great turn-around stories of the early season (week three) the Gators would respond in style, scoring 44 straight unanswered points, beating Tennessee 62-37.Tennessee managed just 3 second half points. I had $50 riding on this game and the bad news was just beginning. At the end of the playing Saturday I was down $700 to my bookie. This was my take home pay for two weeks at my job as a sales person for Circuit City. Some two weeks I did not even take this amount home. After the initial shock and talking to Robert, he agreed to cover it with his bookie and I would just pay him over time.
The experience of losing this amount of money did not stop me from further gambling though, I just cut down drastically on the number of bets to place at once. I believed I paid the loss that week over a period of about a year (some of it through future winnings) and about $150 was forgiving. I was hooked though to sports gambling and so were the majority of the store employees. We had some great fun and one of our favorite team that we followed was Ohio State throughout their magical run in the 1995/1996 season for the first 10 games before they eventually lost to Michigan. Ohio State had star players in their team in Eddie George, Terry Glenn, Bob Hoying, Shawn Springs and Orlando Pace. Eddie George would end up winning the Heisman trophy for his performance that season, Terry Glenn won the Biletnikoff award for the best college wide receiver and Orlando Pace won the Out land trophy for being college football's best lineman. He (Orlando Pace) finished the season without allowing a quarterback sack on his side of the field. By the fourth week we were (about six or seven of us) all putting money on Ohio State and they just were having a great season. They were blowing teams away and covering the spread at the same time. Some of the games would be close in the first half, but by the time the second half comes around, the other teams just seemed to get tired and Eddie George would just run over them. He would finish the season with 1927 rushing yards (scoring 24TD for the season).The Buckeyes crushed teams like Boston College, Washington, Notre Dame and Illinois. We were enjoying all the victories, especially the margin of victories. The magical run came to an end though at Michigan, where Ohio State played their last game of the regular season. It was the Tim Biakabutuka show as the Michigan's star running back ran all over Ohio State for 313 yards and led his team to a 31-23 upset victory of Eddie and Company. I have to mention that Michigan is always a difficult game for Ohio State no matter what the current records of the teams is. Not only did Ohio State not cover the spread, they lost the game.
While college football was where we made some money, the NFL was where we were getting hammered. The guys at Vegas sure know how to set those NFL lines. With the NFL you can pick four teams and lay money on them and you would be very lucky to come out with a single team covering the spread. Bad teams would let you down as well as the teams that are enjoying a fine season. For some reason though we kept playing with the NFL.There were the regular 1pm and 4pm games, later on the Sunday night game and lastly the Monday night football game. What usually happens for me is that by the end of Saturday I would be ahead by about $125 won on the college games. Instead of waiting for Tuesday to pick up the winnings, the compulsive gambling drive in me would have me placing bets on the professional games on Sunday. By the time that the Sunday night game comes around, I would already be in the negative. I remember a typical such week in which a lot of us in the store had to depend on a Monday night game involving the Detroit Lions to come out of the hole. I was actually down by $200 before that game and I thought for a while about waiting to pay the debt or risking going down by $400 at the end of the week. Imagine the type of effect losing that type of money would have on somebody that does not make much money to begin with. I did call in the bet for $200 and I held my heart in my arm as the Lions pull off the offset, thanks in large part to their star running back Barry Sanders to cover the spread and make me and a few of my co-workers even for the week.
The extend of my own gambling problem was huge in terms of how much time that it took from my engaging in other activities. When you are involved in sports gambling, there is lot of things that you do. The first one is go out and purchase all types of magazines that give you analysis of the games and the trends. There were publications such at the sporting magazine. At times I would purchase and take them home to read, at times I would just go to the stores that sell them, Safeway stores, Giants food stores, People Drug store, all had a section for magazines and you could go to the stores and read out the analysis. Once in a while, there is a good pickup, but the majority of the time, all you get was information that is based on history that has nothing to do with what will actually take place on game day. Another information source was through the television channels. I had paid cable for most of the time that I was gambling and on Saturday and Sunday mornings, there would be all types of people claiming to be experts at picking games. They had names like "big game" Tony, or "Big game" Wayne and they would say they have a sure thing for about $50.So the problem of gambling gets couple with that of people trying to sell you games that they claim are sure things. I did pay about $25 and $50 for about 5 games sometime during my gambling period and find out that there was nothing like a sure thing in sports.Also, once you call one of these numbers, they now have your contact information and you would be getting strange calls from different sources trying to selling you inside information that they claim to have. I remember at one time using one of my credit cards to try and buy a sure thing, but the credit card was maxed out and the person on the other end of the line said not to worry, that I have another credit card on their radar and they would just use that instead. Fortunately for me, that one was also maxed out. It did not end there though, about two weeks later, I got on my answering machine, a strange voice that when like this "Hey big guy, I got a play on the Texas A&M game, just give me a call back”. I was lucky in that I did not have any money to spend on the games at the time of the call.
I tried out just about every sport at one time or the other. After football, there was basketball, baseball, soccer and Ice Hockey. The soccer I still remember because this was during the Fifa 1998 world cup that France hosted and won. The game was Germany versus Croatia and I think the money line had me placing $90 to try and win $30.Croatia was a huge underdog on the game and as you can see from the lines, everybody was putting their money with the Germans. During this period of time though, sports gambling had become something that you could do over the internet. You no longer needed a bookie. All you needed was a credit card to set up the account for immediate action or you could go to one of the money transfer channels and send the money to your account. Anyway, big surprise for me in this game. Before the game, I had talked to one of my co-workers who worked in the video department named Bruce and boosted on how the Germans have a reputation for coming up roses on big games. He was surprised on my confidence on the Germans. I did not let him know though that I had money riding on the game. I left the store after work and headed home in time to catch the beginning of this 1998 world cup encounter. Croatia came up big in the game avenging a Euro-1996 lost to this same Germany team. I remember the game vividly with Croatia scoring two goals that look almost like an instant reply form identical sides of the pitch. Final score was 3-0 Croatia. Later-on, soccer games that I placed bets on did not come out any better, so I do not think that this is a good way of making money. For Basketball, the Pros games are a killer. The lines are almost impossible for you to cover. Robert Johnson used to place money on the pro-basketball lines and he would tell me that he had gone at times 0-11 which is the worst possible outcome for even those that know nothing about the sports at all. In my early days, I stayed off the pro-basketball game but did try it later-on using the money lines. Money lines is when you place say $10 on a team to win say $15.You do not get to lose money like in the lines spreads, but I did not win any money at all. A sure killer is to pick the higher money teams. It seems like each time that you do that the team loses. I did place some bets on the NCAA games and both regular season and playoffs pro-basketball games and got a little bit of success with the NCAA tourney games.
Baseball though is strangely an area in which I had quite a bit of success. It was a surprise thought because I was not following the sports a lot. I had to call in the bets to some 1-800 numbers that I got, I do not remember where and I starting calling in the bets on the underdog’s teams. The way the money lines on the underdog teams work is pretty good. You get to risk less money for a greater reward. If you are going to do any gambling on baseball, for me this is the way to go. The bets were money line bets and I remember the Chicago Cubs coming out smelling like roses for me during this stretch. I won in like three different occasions $500 and the feeling was such an uplifting one because this money made up for the loss that I had suffered in the past. The money itself took sometime to get to me. I had to call on about three different occasions before I would get a number from a lady on the other end of the line saying that the money would be coming from this person in this part of the country. Out of these three winnings I ended up losing $300 on a strange night out in the streets on Washington DC. Do not ask me what I was out doing at the time.
I tried some Ice hockey games and winning money gambling on hockey games was just as hard. After all these sports gambling my final conclusion was that you do not make money gambling on sports. I have watched a sports gambling documentary in which a guy was interviewed who made about $50,000 a year on sports gambling. I do not doubt his claim, but his story is the exception and not the rule according to my own personal experience.
I finally just stopped sports gambling after I left Circuit City in 1998 to join Sprint PCS in early 1999.This was a good thing because I was making much more money at Sprint PCS, but my experience in the past had taught me that sports gambling was not the way to go. Once in a while, I did go to the Casino but this was usually with money that I could afford to lose.
Why do people gamble their money away in the first place?
Part of the reason is that you have this belief that you could beat the odds, which is not true at all. Also, once you get into it, you are hooked and a lot of people find it very difficult to get out once this happens. Another reason is the thrill of winning. You ask any sports gambler and they would tell you about the high-lifting feeling that they get from winning one from the boys in Vegas. The problem with this is that you completely forget the loss that you have encountered in the past. My advice for the to be sports gambler is that if you need the thrill, there are a lot of places that you could place bets of about $5 and $10.This does not seem like a lot of money at all, but the advantage is that when you are winning, the feeling is just as good as winning a lot of money and if you lose, the pain would not be too bad. There is such a sinking feeling when you drop a big one on a game. The feeling hits you once the game is over and it carries on for quite a while. Your spirits are down at work and you would have some of your managers and co-workers asking you what is wrong. It takes some time before you get over it. What used to happen to me is I would go for a period without any sports gambling, then all of a sudden, the feeling would come back and I would be back in action trying to win some money. NCAA football bowl games was one of such period and what would happen, is after all the games are done I would tally everything up and find out that there was no money won at all. This was after I had some experience and knowledge about the different sports. I believe a legislation was passed by Congress(around 2006) banning sports gambling, even online in the US except of cause when you are in the state of Nevada where all types of sports gambling is allowed. This is good news because I had such a fear of what bookies could do to me if I lose and could not pay up my debts. There are a lot of movies that chronicle all the dark sides of sports gambling, including people losing body parts because of none payment. When I started sports gambling, I had such a fear of Sid(the bookie) and though when I did meet him he was not very scary at all, there was a certain loneliness in the way he looks and I got the feeling that the life of a bookie could not be such a glamorous one at all.
The good side is the amount of knowledge that you collect about the sports. You asked me any star sports personally around the mid-1980s through the year 2005 and the answer comes right out. You want details of some of the games that I watched during this period of time and you get it. It is time consuming though and you can go long stretches during which you have time for nothing but the games.
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