'My life,' he said, 'has become a horror story.'įorte said his downfall is the result of an illness he did not recognize until he could no longer make payments on his million-dollar house: compulsive gambling.įrom 1960 to 1988, Forte said, there were days that he wagered as much as $100,000 on football, basketball, baseball and hockey as well as boxing and horse racing. Today, Forte - the national collegiate basketball player of the year in 1957, when he was known as 'Chet the Jet' - is $1.5 million in debt, shunned by the TV industry and facing a possible prison term for federal fraud and tax offenses. He won nine Emmy awards, earned a salary that reached $900,000 a year, lived in a six-bedroom, seven-bathroom house in fashionable Saddle River, N.J., and rarely left home without that chauffeur-driven limo. He was the director of ABC television's 'Monday Night Football' as it became an American institution. For more than two decades, Chet Forte's life was a stretch limousine.
