But he taught me one of the most valuable lessons I’ve ever learned. Some people close to me are familiar with this story while others have never heard it, so there’s no better time to bring it up than now. I have a big history with Vernon Forrest that goes back six years to when I was 19 years old, and when he was undefeated. It was at that time that I got sucked into sports betting on a daily basis by a kid on my dorm floor who had just about every bad habit you could imagine (I think he once placed a sports bet on the computer while sipping 151 and snorting coke off a hooker’s ass with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth). I had been making money betting on college basketball games and it all stemmed from betting against UCLA because they were so horrible that year (Lavin got fired but the UCLA name still made them favorites in the book, so the formula was quite lucrative). On one particular Saturday, January 25th, 2003, I had made a little over $100 betting on Pac-10 hoops — not bad money for a college sophomore. I was looking for just one final score to get me up to about $150 for the day and I had been eying the Vernon Forrest line for about a week.
