Gambling Athletes, Pt. 2 of 3

Welcome to Part 2 of a series on pro athletes who are known to gamble, often in unhealthy doses.

Phil Mickelson

Up until quite recently Mickelson was known as the best pro golfer never to win a major. That all changed in 2004 when he won the Master’s at Augusta National, and when he recently won his second Green Jacket. He is also known to be an avid gambler who likes to bet on just about anything. He was fined by the PGA commissioner for making a $500 bet with Mike Weir that Jim Furyk would hole his bunker shot in a play-off against Tiger Woods. Furyk did just that to make Phil look like some kind of mystic. On his website he also claimed to have won $560,000 on 28-to-1 odds by picking the Baltimore Ravens to win the 2005 Super Bowl. It makes you wonder how often he lays down $20,000 bets and how often he wins.

Mickelson tries on his second Green Jacket

Lenny Dykstra

Dykstra was known as a hard-working and hard-partying ball player with a penchant for the fast life. Always an injury-plagued player, Dykstra nonetheless had a large measure of success in his healthy periods. He also admitted to having lost over $78,000 playing poker between 1988 and 1989. In 1991 he was investigated by Major League Baseball for gambling on games, which proved to be a fruitless endeavour. He has appeared on several celebrity poker tournaments in the last few years.

Dykstra with his signature chewing tobacco

“Shoeless” Joe Jackson

He was one of eight players banished for life from professional baseball for his alleged participation in the Black Sox scandal, in which they agreed to throw the 1919 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds. His .356 career batting average is the third-highest in the history of professional baseball, but he will always be remembered for the scandal.

“Shoeless” Joe was banned from baseball for life

Stevin Smith

Smith was an All-Pac 10 point guard who played college basketball at Arizona State University from 1991 to 1994. It was here that Smith became heavily involved in gambling and deeply in debt to a bookmaker, and therefore agreed to fix several of the Sun Devils regular season games. This didn’t surface until 1997, and Smith plea-bargained a deal with state prosecutors which ended up in him spending ten months in prison. It is widely believed that this point-shaving scandal cost him an NBA career, and he now plays professional basketball for Dynamo Moscow of the Russian pro league.

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