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Ryan Tatusko had Tommy John surgery when he was 17, but that didn’t scare Indiana State University’s baseball coaches away from the talented teenage pitcher. Tatusko arrived on campus unable to play right away. Instead, he started to gamble to stave off boredom.
The games were Mario Kart or five-card draw poker, and the stakes were small. If someone lost, they’d have to spring for “lunch at Chick-fil-A in the Commons,” Tatusko recalled.
But things quickly escalated. One night, Tatusko and his roommate played in an all-night online poker tournament. His roommate won. Tatusko didn’t.
After his roommate went to bed, Tatusko secretly logged on to his roommate’s account and managed to lose every penny of the $300 he’d just won. When his roommate found out, he had the team stage a sort of intervention, wherein they wouldn’t tell their coach about the incident if Tatusko swiftly paid off the debt.
He got a cash advance from his credit card and did just that. His roommate moved out.
Some two decades later, Tatusko was sitting in his car in a Texas parking lot with a bottle full of sleeping pills. The gambling habit he picked up in college had mushroomed considerably, both during and after a long career in the minor leagues. He was six figures in debt and owed money to pretty much everyone he knew.
“The only thing I knew I had left was a life insurance policy,” he told Sports Handle. “My thought was, ‘How do I make it look like an accidental overdose where my wife could collect on the life insurance policy?’”
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Tatusko swallowed a bunch of those pills in that parking lot, thinking he’d never wake up. He did.
For most people, such a grim situation would constitute rock bottom, a place from which to rise up after a brush with death. But Tatusko didn’t see it that way.
“The one out I thought I had, I didn’t have anymore.”
‘A lot of time on my hands’
In Terre Haute, Indiana, when Tatusko’s teammates would hit the bars to blow off steam, the 6’5” righty would instead “go find any poker game in town.”
“I’m going to spend money at the bar anyway — what’s the difference between that and a poker game?” he said, recalling how he rationalized his behavior. “I started alienating myself from the team. When people would ask, I’d just use it as a mask of, ‘I don’t want to go to the bars; I’m draft eligible.’”
Tatusko was indeed drafted in the 18th round in 2007 by the Texas Rangers. At spring training in Arizona, he recalled, “I had a lot of time on my hands and there were Indian casinos all around me. We’d get meal money on a Friday — $100, $150 — and I would just go sit at a poker table all day.”
This routine repeated itself on the road — for quite some time.
“Whenever we traveled, we’d stay at a hotel inside of a casino, and you’d find players at a blackjack table or a craps table, which isn’t against the rules for baseball,” he said. “That happened all through my career — whenever I had free time, I’d go to the casino. As I got closer and closer to the big leagues, I was gambling with people who had more and more money who were willing to lend me money. That was kind of when the gasoline got poured on my fire.
“Unfortunately, for me, money just became a number. It wasn’t a car payment or house payment — it was chips. I was borrowing money.”
Tatusko enjoyed an eight-year career in pro baseball, coming up just short of the majors (AAA was his zenith). His final stop was a brief stint overseas in the Korea Baseball Organization, where only foreigners were allowed to gamble in casinos. Since most of his teammates were thus prohibited from joining him at the felt tables, this experience provided Tasusko with “anonymity” and “a sense of solace,” he said.
When asked if he felt like his appetite for gambling interfered with his playing career, Tatusko said, “In the past, I told myself it didn’t. Now that I look back at it, I do believe it affected it. I always got my training done, but in terms of getting sleep, it’s hard to get your eight or nine hours” when you’re fixated on gambling or playing all night.
“You’re not eating well, you’re not sleeping well, your mind is constantly other places,” he added. “I put my work in, but that’s 10 percent of it. It’s the mental aspect — I could have spent that time studying why I gave up six earned runs in the game instead of studying craps and blackjack.”
‘Someone else is gonna raise my kids’
When Tatusko retired from the sport in 2014, people stopped loaning him money — but he kept right on gambling. For the first time, he was allowed to bet on baseball, which he did with vigor. It didn’t go well.
“Being able to gamble on the sport I know and love was truly my downfall,” he said.
When he woke up from his suicide attempt, Tatusko went back to his everyday life — one that continued to include compulsive gambling.
“Rock bottom for me came when my son was watching a cartoon on my laptop that was being beamed to my TV downstairs, and I took my laptop and was doing some work and needed to gamble,” he recalled. “I was gambling all day, doing my work and gambling, and everything I was doing was being beamed downstairs.”
Unbeknownst to Tatusko, his wife was downstairs watching the TV, shocked at the amounts and frequency with which he was betting. She kicked him out of the house and told him they were getting a divorce.
Shortly thereafter, Tatusko asked his wife if he could see their kids. She told him no, explaining that such visitation rights were for the courts to sort out.
Tatusko said this was his “awakening.” He thought to himself, “Someone else is gonna raise my kids.”
Tatusko and his wife separated, but did not divorce. They attempted to reconcile and went through two subsequent separations. Now with three children, their marriage is on solid ground, thanks to Tatusko’s ability to come completely clean about his gambling addiction and his wife’s graciousness in allowing him to do so.
“This last time it was, ‘Show me true progress and work,’ and much to her credit, she decided to stick with me after I showed some progress in therapy and doing some other things and coming clean to her about the extent of it — how much, how often, how frequent,” he said. “I think it opened her eyes: This is an addict, it’s not something he can control, and I’m going to go down this path of recovery with him.”
‘Ryan just checked all the boxes’
Jeff Wasserman was a successful lawyer for more than 30 years before, as he put it, “gambling addiction, among other things, eliminated my career.”
He sought help for his problem in 2015 and got connected with the Delaware Council on Gambling Problems. He is now one of the organization’s certified peer recovery specialists and runs a daily online support group for problem gamblers. It was there he first encountered Ryan Tatusko.
Wasserman had worked closely with EPIC Risk Management, a 10-year-old organization founded by Paul Buck, himself a recovering problem gambler who spent time in prison as a byproduct of his addiction. EPIC specializes in exposing student-athletes and professionals from all sectors to “lived experience” testimonials, and Wasserman thought Tatusko would be an ideal candidate to join EPIC’s roster of presenters.
One day, during his online support session, Wasserman asked Tatusko to share his story, and Tatusko agreed. What Tatusko didn’t know was that there were a couple of EPIC representatives tuned into the call, listening to what the former ballplayer had to say. They came away impressed enough to offer Tatusko a paid position that would soon evolve into a full-time job promoting responsible gambling.
“I thought he would be a really good candidate for EPIC,” said Wasserman. “My first loyalty is to the person in recovery. Once their recovery is stabilized and they’re in a mindset that they want to help others and they have the skillset and personality to do it — Ryan just checked all the boxes on that. I thought it would be a good fit and they made the decision to hire him.”
While Tatusko talks to people who work in high-risk sectors like banking and the military, he has spent much of his fledgling EPIC career speaking to student-athletes at the collegiate level — a group that’s critical to reach early.
“Clearly, the research shows that athletes — especially college-age athletes — are at a significantly higher risk” for problematic gambling behavior, said Wasserman. “[Tatusko] has a great personality and he’s a great speaker, very articulate and thoughtful. All of those things, as a package, he really has the opportunity to connect with young athletes that have an elevated risk of developing a problem with gambling or a gambling disorder.”
‘Not somewhere we want to go’
Tatusko shares his story for a living, but there’s one plot turn that still gives him pause.
“Now having young kids, the suicide attempt is always tough,” he conceded. “Now there are days I look at them and wonder, ‘Wow, this is what I would have missed.’ It is not lost on me that I have a second chance. I’m blessed to be able to share my story with athletes and businesspeople alike. It is an addiction that’s silent — there are no track marks on your arms. It’s something you can hide for five, 10, 15, and, in my case, 18 years.”
In speaking to college athletes, he said “there hasn’t been a session yet” where a student hasn’t stuck around after Tatusko’s talk to ask him how to deal with a friend or family member who might have a gambling problem. With EPIC on the brink of establishing similar relationships with some major professional leagues, he said he expects to encounter players who were just like him, guys who might wonder, “Hey, I’m in spring training and I’m bored and I’m constantly in a casino. What do I do to stop?”
Expounding on the experience of many professional athletes, he added, “These elite athletes, there’s so much pressure on them. I’m sure these leagues are giving them education, but there’s so much stuff being thrown at you that, unfortunately, wires get crossed and things get missed.
“I think what makes EPIC so powerful is it’s not just someone from the front office telling you you shouldn’t bet. It’s someone like me, saying, ‘Hey, I went left when I should have gone right and I was sitting in your seat.’ Our message is remembered, but also, ‘This person was one of us and fell down this slope, and it’s not somewhere we want to go.’”
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