Advertisement
Advertisement

Lottery losers

Claude Adams

One of the few good things that ever came out of a state lottery was the Great Wall of China. The rest is human folly, the kind so well expressed by Yossarian in Joseph Heller's Catch-22: 'What a lousy earth! How many winners were losers, successes failures, rich men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings?'

Yossarian was not expressly talking about lotteries, but he might have been. Lotteries in North America are part of the great dream business, and it seems that for every winner, you hear an unhappy ending. And the reason is simple: money transforms, and then it goes away. And what it leaves behind is mostly mayhem.

Take Jack Whittaker. On Christmas Day in 2002, he won the biggest undivided lottery jackpot in North American history: US$314.9 million. Then everything fell apart. Over the course of two years, he was arrested twice for drink-driving, he became a compulsive gambler and alcoholic, his house was broken into several times, and his 17-year-old granddaughter ran away from home. 'I wish I had torn up the ticket,' says his distraught wife, Jewel.

Jeff Clark, of Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, won C$2.5 million ($16.2 million) in 1996, and went on an orgy of impulse spending: six luxury cars, lavish gifts to friends, wild splurges in the stock market. Today, he is so broke that he rolls his own cigarettes and his only form of transport is a rusty mountain bike. He now sees his life as one great wasted opportunity. 'I'm reeling,' he says. 'How the hell did this happen to me?'

To be fair, lotteries do produce winners who pay off their bills, invest their money wisely, send their children to the best schools, and donate to charity. But I have the feeling that these are the kind of well-adjusted people who would find happiness with or without a jackpot. It is all those others who intrigue us; the heart attacks, suicides and broken marriages. Toronto filmmaker Catherine Annau produced a documentary on lotteries, and she found that many winners feel 'alienated'. Some suffer from guilt, others have an obsessive fear of sudden loss.

And some just turn into Scrooge. Canada's poster boy of misfit millionaires is Ray Sobeski. He is a one-time ginseng farmer who won C$30 million in Canada's richest lottery. But he waited a year before collecting his winnings so that he would not have to share a penny of it with Nynna Ionson, who claims to be his wife. She is unemployed and a mother of four.

When two movie producers came offering to buy her story, she said no. She still loves Mr Sobeski and is hoping he will come back home - with or without his millions.

Post