Rutgers Women Basketball

Gambler recounts his fall

Sitting in his car in the parking lot of the Wegmans supermarket in Sterling for almost five hours, Mike Ryan kept obsessing over the fork-in-the-road moments:

If only the Tennessee women’s basketball team hadn’t beaten Rutgers so bad, everything would have been okay. If only that dumb kid from Fresno State hadn’t turned over the ball against Boise State, it all could have worked out.

His job would have been saved, his wife and family never would have found out. He would have gotten out of the game even-steven, unscathed — instead of being in a $200,000 hole for gambling on sporting events.

Terminated for fraud from his $170,000-a-year job as a general manager of two skating rinks in Northern Virginia hours earlier, he would have to go home and tell his wife, his parents, and then find a way to pay everyone back.

It was too much.

Idling his black Honda Accord in that parking lot more than three years ago, inconsolably sobbing, the man who outwardly had it all decided he’d had enough. He would gun the damn accelerator over the edge of a freeway off-ramp, preferably the Waxpool exit off Sully Road. There, in a heap of twisted metal and body, his problems would end.

“Part of me was glad it was over — I was so tired of lying, running away, hiding everything,” he said.

Then his cellphone rang.

Ryan, the president of the Virginia Council on Problem Gambling , last week lobbied on Capitol Hill for the passage of a bill that would provide federal funds for education and treatment of compulsive gamblers. He then revealed the motivation behind his cause: He once was in the throes of addiction himself, so far down he nearly lost it all.

“I made $12 an hour working security at the U.S. Open last month, some extra bucks while I’m still living at home with my parents,” he said at a downtown restaurant after his lobbying effort was complete. “You wouldn’t know I once had a great job, great family and everything a guy could want.”

You wouldn’t know the depths from which a 43-year-old with a master’s degree in sports management has emerged until you hear how he got hooked.

It began in 1991. He found a game to bet, Duke-St. John’s, and a bookie through a friend at the law firm he worked at as a messenger. And then the worst thing that could happen to a burgeoning addict happened:

“I won,” Ryan said. “I couldn’t miss. I was hitting probably about 85 percent of my games in January and February of ’92.

Rutgers-Newark Athletics - Nicolas Named To University Of Rhode ...

Nicolas becomes the second consecutive Raider women's basketball graduate intern to move on to a full-time position in coaching following completion of a Rutgers-Newark's graduate program. Alexa Shields, the first graduate intern in women's basketball for Morris, just completed her third season as assistant women's basketball coach at the United State Merchant Marine Academy.

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Congressional Record, V, 153, Part 7, April 18, 2007 to April 26, 2007

Rutgers Scarlet Knights Women's Basketball, Rutgers Scarlet Knights Women's Basketball Coaches

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