Amarillo Slim in a World Full of Fat People
by Amarillo Slim Preston
HarperEntertainment
"Amarillo Slim in a World Full of Fat People" belongs on the shelf alongside "You Can't Win," "Pimp" and "The Big Con," not far from "The Life of P.T. Barnum." It's a tale of the underworld, of rootless loners who come to town with only a gun for company, exchange fortunes with ghosts in the night and try to get their winnings out of town without being hijacked or worse. It's also about how poker was popularized, and moved from hotel rooms and back offices to casino card rooms and ESPN. Above all, it's the story of Amarillo Slim, a gambler who rarely loses and always gets the last word. Not a hundred words in, you know you're going to have a good time reading it, and that's high praise for any book.
Smart enough to complete both third and fourth grade in a single year, Slim especially excels at snooker. While still in high school, he attracts the attention of a couple of gamblers who back him in exchange for equal shares in his winnings. The young prodigy is initiated into the shadowy brotherhood of those who live by their wits at challenge matches and sucker traps throughout the southwest. "Back in those days, all the pool hustlers got together and played in Hot Springs during the horse-racing meet down at Oaklawn Park," where Slim first meets Minnesota Fats — formerly New York Fats, until he took advantage of a popular movie to claim a more famous moniker.
It was from Fats that Slim drew inspiration for his own nickname, and also his hallmark patter and bravado. One of his rules for living is "play the player more than the cards"; trash talk elicits tells from your fellow players, and incites emotional decision-making — always a distinct disadvantage. Slim's Hicksville glibness masks a sharp mind, and his turn of phrase draws people to him, friends and opponents alike. After a humiliating loss, a champion billiards player becomes "sloppy as a wet dog." "This man's slower than a mule with three broken legs," Slim might complain at the table. He'll goad an opponent into losing more than he can afford and then some, break his spirit and his bank account, but leave on good terms because "you can shear a sheep many a time, but you can only skin him once."
His personal fortune rising through five figures by the age of 16, Slim takes his diploma early to join the Navy, where his pool ability earns him the patronage of an officer who gives him plenty of time off to sharpen his game and develop a complementary set of gambling skills. On returning to the States, he enlists in the Army, where a stint in postwar Germany makes him a black market millionaire and an assignment playing exhibition games for the Special Services earns him an international reputation.
Back in Texas for good, Slim embarks on a career as a professional gambler the way another man turns to a life of crime. You may enter with one specialization, but the whole of the guild is always an option: a bank robber embezzles, a murderer deals drugs. Slim comes in as a pool player, but he does everything from fixing military baseball games to riding a camel through the finest casino in Marrakech to make a buck. The steely-eyed, teetotaling cowboy (literally — he owns a ranch) will meet you anywhere in the world if you've got an interesting wager and some money to lose — and he'll darn well make sure he wins. "I also learned that there are people who love action and others who love money. The first group is called suckers, and the second is called professional gamblers, and it was a cinch which one I wanted to be."
Of course, it's not enough to want to win. You've also got to be good enough. Slim puts in long hours over many years perfecting his pool game, his free-throw shooting, his ability to play ping-pong with any implement you could name. He develops a method for keeping his grip on a horse's tail while it galloped a quarter-mile — and then he does it. He even hires Jacques Cousteau to make him a special wetsuit for a history-making winter run down the River of No Return.
Although only a secondary part of Slim's business, these proposition bets are the purest essence of the craft, applied anywhere that chance or uncertainty exists. Whether one man can outrun another. Which sugar cube a jailhouse fly will land on. How far it is to the next town. These ritualistic wagers monetize the arbitrariness of life and so deliver catharsis for winner and loser alike.
Slim displays an ironclad sense of honor. On one hand, he has no truck with law enforcement, to the extent that he wouldn't call the police on a man who'd robbed him; like his friend Willie Nelson, he has also had his share of trouble with the IRS. But he has never cheated or backed out of a debt. Quick to resort to trickery to win a proposition bet — substituting a football for a basketball in a free-throw shooting contest, bringing in a blind ringer to win a blindfolded bowling match — his stunts are always just within the letter of the agreement, as his fleeced opponents universally concede.
At one point, Titanic Thompson, a ruthless gambler who couldn't win if he couldn't cheat (and the model for Sky Masterson in "Guys and Dolls"), falls on hard times. "Rumor has it that a skinny old pool hustler helped pay his other expenses, but I'll deny it to this day. It wouldn't surprise me, though, because gamblers do have a way of looking after each other, and, shortcomings aside, Ti was one of us — and a legend at that — and he deserved to be taken care of in his old age."
After all, Slim is a family man through and through. While in his teens, he marries a girl "as pretty as a speckled pup under a red wagon," and she and their son, little Bunky, ride with daddy from town to town in the station wagon hustling pool. When Bunky's sister arrives a few years later, Slim knows the time has come to put family first. "So, in hopes of living a more traditional lifestyle and settling down to a good clean life, I gave up pool and turned to a more noble profession. Two professions, really — booking sports and playing poker."
Slim's fame and financial success continue to grow in tandem. Soon too well-known to travel incognito, he develops into an iconic figure like Arnold Rothstein, Benny Binion, and his arch-nemesis Jimmy the Greek, and his clean-living persona helps polish the game's public image while raising its profile.
Around the time of the first World Series of Poker in 1970, Slim's book settles into an easy anecdotal rhythm of card games, proposition bets and character sketches, along with the obligatory recitation of how Bugsy Siegel, Howard Hughes, Bob Stupak and Steve Wynn turned Las Vegas from a remote desert outpost into — yeah, you've heard it before, but Slim keeps it short. He plies his trade with an international litany of characters like Evel Knievel, Willie Nelson, Pablo Escobar, Presidents Nixon and Johnson and an unnamed Democratic Party official who lost a boatload on Gore in 2000.
As with so many of the books on this shelf, the story becomes necessarily less compelling the closer it comes to our own time, less fantastic, more familiar. Nowadays, Poker is practically an Olympic sport. It's still plenty colorful, but it's about as menacing as the Vegas Strip.
Now an eminence grise of the world he helped create, Slim lives out his well-earned happy ending on a ranch in his eponymous hometown. "Now, ordinarily, I'd rather see early frost on my peach trees than write some book giving away my secrets to success, but, as I said, I've got seven grandbabies — six fillies and one baby boy — and it's about time they learned my life story." There aren't many left like him, and we're fortunate he's still around to tell his tale. The lament sounds cliché — Amarillo Slim embodies something in our cultural heritage that's fading away — but it's true.
— Review by J. Daniel Jansen<!--AUTHOR-->
