The George Best Will-He-Won't-He-Morbid-Curiousity-Media-Frenzy-Sweepstakes!
Quite a few people have posted stories about their mixed sense of shame and pride at winning a George Best Sweepstakes. In contrast, I was one of the people who opened a book on his inevitable demise.

Personally I cared very little about George Best but observed that the press, however, was determined that we must all pay attention whilst the greatest footballer and party fiend of his generation degenerated before our very eyes.

Therefore, I proposed a game to my friends to make watching the poor hacks camped outside the hospital more fun:

The George Best Will-He-Won't-He-Morbid-Curiousity-Media-Frenzy Sweepstakes!!

It was a very simple game. All you needed to do to enter was email me and promise that you would cough up the £1 entry fee and when you thought good old George will finally succumb to multiple internal haemorrhages and complete immune system collapse.

At first betting was slow and i recieved little response, in fact the only response I got was frosty silence punctuated only by the scribbling of biros crossing my name of christmas card lists. Eventually, as my email updates on George's health and the betting situation increased in both number and hysterical volume more bets came in. They ranged from 1946, Thursday 24th November; to the wildly optimisitc 1234, Wednesday 1st February.

Finally, George died and the media plucked our heart strings, like Princess Diana all over again but hairer, smellier, yellower. The winning bet was by a young lady who went for 0715 Friday 25th November, several hours out but she walked away with the staggering £13.00 jackpot.

Still the shame of this story comes not from having run such a despicable scam and encouraging my friends to bet on the death of another human being; not at effort that I into the many updates that I spent my time at work writing; or even that I spent more than few days signed into MSN as "George Best's Liver" and had a picture of a cirrhosis riddled organ turning even my own stomach everytime I used it. No, my shame comes from something else, something more fundamental: I made nothing from the whole scheme. Nothing at all. What was i thinking?

First rule of gambling: the house always wins.

No apologies for length, girth, etc. It's my first time, I was nervous.
(Gyre, Tue 29 Nov 2005, 11:12, Reply)