From one great Texan to another: Amarillo Slim, giant of poker and peddler of western wisecracks, has died. Now that poker is a mainstream entertainment, you have to do some brain-cudgeling to recall the era when it seemed distant and exotic and even attractively seedy. All that has gone the way of all flesh now that you can, should you be up all night, watch poker on television every day of the week. Poker players, these days, are ordinary guys who can come from anywhere. The game has become a corporate, branded business and, while this has enriched many people, one kinda feels something has been lost too.
In the 1980s, Anthony Holden’s account of a year as a professional poker player seemed a revelation. People lived like this? Who, as Paul Newman asked in a different context, were these guys? His follow-up, Bigger Deal, published five years ago, demonstrated that though the “new” poker circuit was bigger and glitzier it suffered by comparison with the shabby glamour of the older times. In one sense, poker outgrew its niche.
But it couldn’t have become a business without the likes of Amarillo Slim and others of his ilk. They were the guys who transformed poker. Their characters and stories and outlandish betting coups fostered the notion of the poker player as the last survivors of the old west. The lone card-player living on his wits and on the margins of respectable society was descended from the cowboys and gunslingers and outlaws who built a myth and, just occasionally, lived it too.
They played to their stereotypes and flattered their audience, permitting outsiders to think that, with a bit of luck, they too could be players. Slim’s advice to “Look around the table. If you don’t see a sucker, get up, because you’re the sucker” was sensible on its own merits but a beguiling con too; how many people, at whatever level of game, have the ability to recognise they might be the sucker? Precious few. But “appreciating” such “wisdom” was akin to being granted entry to the club and, somehow, meant losing wasn’t quite as bad as it might otherwise have been.
The New York Times’ obituary, I’m afraid, beats the Daily Telegraph’s version hands-down*. This is how a legend was built:
Amarillo Slim won five times in World Series of Poker events, was elected to at least four gambling halls of fame and played poker with Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon, the drug lord Pablo Escobar and the magazine publisher Larry Flynt, who dropped $1.7 million.
His wagers that had nothing to with poker garnered just as much attention. He once bet the 1939 Wimbledon tennis champion Bobby Riggs that he could beat him at table tennis as long as he, Amarillo Slim, picked the rackets, then showed up with iron skillets — with which he had spent months practicing. He then bet a syndicate of Tennessee gamblers that he could beat a world table tennis champion.
The champion practiced with a skillet, only to find that Amarillo Slim had changed weapons. He showed up with a pair of empty Coke bottles and won handily.
He said he won $300,000 from Willie Nelson playing dominoes. He bet on which sugar cube a fly would land on.
Amarillo Slim’s gift for colorful patois was legendary. When asked if he could bluff his way to victory with a bad hand, he said, “Is fat meat greasy?” He then offered the thought that most people who play poker “don’t have the guts of an earthworm.”
He was just as uncharitable to individual opponents. One “couldn’t track an elephant through four feet of snow”; another “had as good a chance of beating me as getting a French kiss out of the Statue of Liberty.”
Now that Slim has gone, Doyle “Texas Dolly” Brunson is just about the last remaining old-stager and the final link to a past that, like most western stories, wasn’t necessarily quite as swell as we suckers like to imagine it was but which, damn the facts, had a kind of romance that’s been and gone and will not return. That’s progress for you.
*Is it only my impression that the Telegraph’s obituary page is not quite as excellent as it once was?
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