Odd ending turns sure payoff into one run short

Hooked on Gambling: Second part of three-part series

Walk into Executive Director Michael Osborne's corner office at Baltimore's Habour Pointe Center for compulsive gambling and you'd never know he almost gave up on life.

Pictures of his kids line the wall. Pages of a book in progress are about. And Osborne's busy talking to hotline callers, counseling them on ways to cope.

Yet it wasn't so long ago that Osborne himself was on the other end of the hotline, searching desperately for help for a gambling addiction that got so bad he found himself sitting on a railroad track and hoping a train would run over him.

"Sitting there I felt like, 'Why should I continue to live?' " recalled Osborne, 34. "I've tried Gamblers Anonymous. I've been to four rehabs. Outpatient didn't work. All I'm doing is driving myself down ... and I'm bringing those that I love the most down with me. My parents, my friends, my wife, my kids."

That was seven years ago. Today, Osborne is closer than ever to his loved ones. He also runs one of the nation's few residential treatment centers for problem gamblers. A place where addicts can spend a week, two weeks or more in a strict regimen of rehabilitation.

Osborne spent four tough weeks at Habour Pointe in 1999, assigned to the gray walls and small space of Room No. 1 on the third floor of the brick row house. He had no access to money or other gambling triggers, but could come and go as he pleased.

"My walk-in closet at home was bigger," he recalled.

But, he adds, it was exactly what he needed to get straightened out and patch his life together.

"I went to get help a lot of times," said Osborne. "In my mind I couldn't come to fathom that something was beating me. I had to get it (his life) back."

His life as a gambler started when he was 15 and betting on baseball. He doesn't remember who was playing that first time, but he vividly recalls the game that "sent me over the edge."

The New York Mets were playing the Atlanta Braves in Game Five of the 1999 National League Championship Series. Osborne had wagered $25,000 that the two teams combined would score more than seven runs.

With the score tied 2-2 at the end of the ninth inning, he had nearly conceded he'd end up a loser again. But the game progressed to the bottom of the 15th inning with a 3-3 score and hometown Mets on every base.

"Robin Ventura comes up and he hits a grand slam, he hits a home run with three men on base," said Osborne. "It was like 2 o'clock in the morning and my wife was sleeping next to me. I thought I had won."

What happened next, though, left Osborne astonished and demoralized. Ventura's teammates swamped the ballfield when the player on third scored and the other three runners never attempted to touch home plate.

Final score: Mets 4, Braves 3. One run short of Osborne's big payoff number.