The last time John Rich played a hand of blackjack was in 2010.
The country star admitted to Fox News Digital that he struggled with a gambling addiction following his success in the music industry.
“I mean, find me a find me a grown man that never had a horrible problem, I’d like to meet him,” Rich told Fox News Digital. “I’m human like everybody else.”
Rich said podcaster Shawn Ryan recently asked him on his show about his life when he started selling millions of records in his 20s and 30s.
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“I said, ‘Oh yeah, man, I love a blackjack table.’ You know, and I was good at it,” Rich said. “But it got to the point where it was a dominating thing for me. Like I would go way out of my way. And then it’s probably like — I was never into drugs — but as you hear about drugs, you gotta take more and more and more and more and more to get to the same level. Well, gambling’s the same way.”
He continued, “You start out at $5 a hand, and then it’s $20, and then it’s $50, and then it’s $100, and then it’s $1,000, and then it’s $5,000.”
One day, he said he realized that it “was so disrespectful to take what God had given me and blessed me with success, and I’m taking this success and instead of giving it to people, helping other people with it, or helping my own family with it, I’m putting it on a stupid blackjack table, hoping that the cards turn in my favor and I can make some more money.”
“It just seemed so gross to me that I was living that way and thinking that way that I just stopped,” he admitted. “I just literally went ‘bang.’ I didn’t ratchet it down little by little. I literally just stopped. 2010 was the last time I played a hand of blackjack.”
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He said he felt like God was “convicting” him, and “letting me know how disappointed and displeased he was on how I was handling and managing what he had given me.”
“I mean, number one, he gives you the ability to go earn the money in the first place, and then he makes the money come in. So the whole circle is all him,” he explained. “None of it’s you. And so, you take it as if it’s yours and go out here and recklessly put it in harm’s way.”
He said his gambling problem changed the way he looked at earning money and spending it.
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Rich also delivered one of his most gripping works to date with the release of “The Righteous Hunter,” a riveting new single and short film that shines a piercing light on the epidemic of child trafficking.
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Rich’s new single and short film is about those who hunt down child predators — and the film even depicts a fictional child being trafficked.
“It gets right to the point,” he said of the song. “It is, it is one of the most aggressive lyrics I have ever written, maybe the most, but it came from a spot down in my soul as a father, that there’s literally nothing I wouldn’t do to protect my two sons.”
He said for the video they brought in professional sting units of people who hunt child predators.
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“I would call them the righteous hunters,” he explained. “They’re the ones going out and getting the bad guys. We had them come on set and tell us how to do this to make it accurate. I wanted this to be an accurate representation, not some Hollywood version.”
Rich said he even teamed up with the Department of Homeland Security to hold a seminar about how parents can protect their kids online.
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“The DHS agent said your child should be a hard target [online],” he said. “Predators will move right past them if they see that they can’t get to them easily. They go for the easy, the easy shots.”
He’s learned with time that the most cherished memories can’t be bought.
With Christmas coming up, he said his favorite traditions with his family are opening up one gift on Christmas Eve, dressing up his bulldogs in funny clothes, and making his late grandmother’s fried chicken dinner, “just me and my wife and my two sons and hanging out with the dogs.”
“I think that the simple things in life like that are the absolute most valuable,” he said. “The real memories that I think you probably wind up hanging on to the longest are the ones I’m talking about. Putting goofy clothes on the dogs, opening one present, and making your grandma’s fried chicken recipe. You know, that’s the stuff that I really cling to memory wise up here.”
