Mark Wahlberg bet $10,000 on first tennis match

By Tribute News on January 22, 2015 | Leave a Comment

Mark Wahlberg once bet $10,000 he could win a tennis match, despite never playing the sport before. The actor admits he thought he had a great chance of triumphing because he predicted his opponent wasn’t going to be very good and fortunately for the Hollywood star his risk paid off and he won the five-figure sum.

He said: ”We played a tennis match for $10,000 in Detroit while we were shooting Transformers. I’d never played tennis but was playing against a guy who wasn’t any good at tennis either so I was actually able to win.”

Mark stars as college lecturer and gambling addict Jim Bennett in The Gambler and he prepared for the role by risking a lot of money in casinos but even when he won big he still managed to lose it all. He said: ”I certainly did as much gambling as I could while preparing for the role and during the making of the movie. In Macau, I was playing pretty high-stakes blackjack. Like the character in the movie, I won a lot of money on blackjack and then I went right to the roulette wheel and lost it all.”

While he got into character by betting a lot prior to the movie, Mark – who has four children, Ella, 11, Michael, eight, Brendan, six, and five-year-old Grace with wife with model Rhea Durham – admits he doesn’t normally bet on anything because he was put off by his father Donald. He added to Metro: ”My dad was a big gambler so I try to avoid it at all costs.”

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