NYTimes Editorial

[eastbay]

By HARVEY ARATON
Published: November 4, 2005

IF Alex Rodriguez so desperately needs the competition fix of a poker game after six-plus months of baseball, there are numerous places he could go that would not put him and his sport at risk and would make him appear community-minded with a youth-conscious and hands-on - so to speak - approach.

He could begin this winter by playing the bar mitzvah circuit.

According to Arnie Wexler, a longtime expert on compulsive gambling, the poker rage has infiltrated coming-out parties for Jewish 13-year-olds. "Kids are telling their parents they want to have a poker party at the bar mitzvah, and the parents are doing it," Wexler said yesterday, interrupting preparation for a speech he was to give last night in Deal, N.J., at a seminar titled, "Teen Gambling: What Every Parent Should Know."

Affirming Wexler's bar mitzvah assertion that hired dancers are out and hip dealers are in was Dan Romer, the research director of the Adolescent Risk Communication Institute at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Public Policy Center.

"I was at a bar mitzvah recently and, yes, they had a poker table," Romer said in a telephone interview. "It was just for fun, but there they were, a bunch of 13-year-olds learning how to play Texas Hold 'Em."

And apparently learning fast enough to bet furiously, Romer said. Last March, the Annenberg Public Policy Center released a survey that found an alarming spike in the percentage of boys and men between the ages of 14 and 22 betting on cards, to 11.4 percent in 2004 from 6.2 percent in 2003.

"It's kind of scary," Romer said. "We hear all kinds of stories about kids, especially college students, who get hold of a credit card, who stay online playing all night, who become addicted."

Too bad it took a stylish and heavy-hitting Yankee with an average annual income of $25 million - not counting endorsements - to stimulate debate this week on what Wexler calls "the poker explosion" and the dangers it is creating. Except on talk radio, it was all about A-Rod, who, according to an article this week in The Daily News, was told by the Yankees to stay out of Manhattan clubs that operate illegal games.

Will the Yankees refrain from showing on their cable network what they advertise as "the high-stakes action" of the Boston versus New York Poker Challenge? Unlikely, as poker programming has become a ratings keeper, a derivative of the reality television craze. Once a backroom adult passion, poker now poses as an all-American pastime. It is a megamerchandising industry that commands regular newspaper columns, including one in The New York Times.

"How, exactly, did poker become a sport?" Romer said, while musing about adding to next year's survey the question of how many young people actually believe it to be one.

In a sports entertainment industry that has had no crisis of conscience about the use of preadolescent baseball players as late-summer props, who would be surprised by the targeted exposure of vulnerable young people to a get-poor-quick gambling culture that is making icons and role models out of people once referred to as card sharks?

What's next on ESPN, the Little League World Series of Poker? Can you see those supercharged sports parents, hovering over the shoulders of their pimply and poker-faced wannabes, frantically waving cash?

Alex Rodriguez is a grown man, free to gamble his money legally, but the Yankees and baseball should move quickly if he has been frequenting clubs that fall under no supervisory umbrella, in part to protect A-Rod from himself. This is not about affordability. If Michael Jordan's well-chronicled gambling escapades with unsavory characters during the early 1990's taught us anything, it was that our pampered gods of sport often believe accountability is only for mortals.

And firing one's agent is not the equivalent of stiffing an unknown gambling associate from a game run on the sly.

But this is much less about A-Rod than it is about those Type A personalities being encouraged to take their shot at a Las Vegas lifestyle, to forsake traditional career paths for a shortcut to stardom, for a place in an increasingly popular "sport" that does not require uncommon hand-eye coordination or increased muscle mass or breakaway speed.

Like Romer, Wexler is also hearing stories, on the hot line he operates for those seeking help. "One-third of my calls are coming from people under 25, or parents who discover that money has disappeared from checking accounts, credit cards have been taken and run up with thousands in debt," he said.

One parent new to Wexler's speed dial, a mother from East Brunswick, N.J., agreed to speak with me on the condition of anonymity to protect her family's privacy. Her 17-year-old son, she said, had lost no money playing poker online, only the desire to do anything else.

"He was an A student, talking about going to M.I.T.," the mother said. "He was playing online in free tournaments and won enough to be given credit. Now he won't go out with his friends, won't do his schoolwork. He says, 'What do I need to learn chemistry for when I want to be a poker player?' "

A family friend recommended Wexler, and she planned to attend his discussion last night at a Jewish community center in Deal.

"I wish I had known sooner," she said.

Parents of those 13-year-olds now being conditioned to think that a good hand is as cool as a gold glove, are you listening?