Continued from ‘An Icon of the Game’…
When writing a series of articles on someone as multi-faceted as Stu Ungar, it’s painfully difficult to know where to start. So, I asked a few of my poker friends a very simple question, utilising a word association technique that I’d picked up from Timmy Mallet’s rampage of child cruelty during the early nineties: when you think of Stu Ungar, what’s the first word that pops into your head? Of course, there are a number of possibilities: champion, genius, prodigy, talented – but the feedback hit a rather more tragic note.
Despite his status as one of poker’s greats and a true master of the game, the one characteristic that most people associate with Stu Ungar is… drugs. For someone who achieved so much – three WSOP titles, dominance at Amarillo Slim’s Superbowl, an unbeatable entity at gin, a post-death legendary status that continues to grow – it’s the ‘demons’ that led to his eventual downfall that stick most vividly in people’s minds. I’d be the first to confess to a similar knee-jerk response, but why is this? Stu Ungar was almost godlike in the way he played poker, he was the only player ever that people considered unbeatable when on his ‘A’ game, whatever misfortunes the Poker Gods held up their sleeve. So why do we focus on his vices?
The obvious answer is that we love a good horror story; we bask in life’s rollercoaster rides when it’s someone else enduring the ups and downs, and there’s a dark, demonic side to our soul that yearns for a good ‘Rise and Fall’ tale. It’s what makes life more interesting. But for Stuey, I think the answer is more visual, and one that conjures up a memorable image in our mind that makes Mallet’s Mallet a rapid affair.
The starting point for my research was the video haven that is YouTube, where I duly searched for anything Ungar related. The video that topped my screen was titled ‘Stu Ungar Winning WSOP 1997’ and showcased his near miraculous recapturing of the title when his time was already drawing to a close. But whatever the board read and the commentators said, I was unable to take my eyes off Stuey. I can’t even recall what the other guy looked like. Stuey was alien-like in his appearance, a pasty skeletal figure with a posture that would send chiropractors worldwide into a spin. He may have pulled off countless moves in his time, but the one bluff that he couldn’t fool us with was the condition of his nose. Although he tried to conceal the damage with a pair of blue-tinted sunglasses, it looked as though they were holding his nose in place rather than the other way around, and one quick close-up unveiled a nasal collapse that one associates with years of drug abuse. It was an image that you simply couldn’t forget.
One fascination we have with people who have suffered from severe drug intake is how their appearance changes, but Stuey wasn’t always the dishevelled embodiment of addiction that we witnessed in ’97. Once upon a time, in a galaxy far far away, Stuey was a sprightly, fresh-faced upstart, bubbling with enthusiasm and taking the poker world by storm. A quick scroll down the YouTube clips reveals his earlier WSOP wins in 1980 and 1981, a young gun in old guard territory, but brimming with the confidence and self-comfort of a 50-year veteran. This was a guy who would never let anyone, or anything conquer him. In fact, his whole philosophy back then was completely different; poker was his only drug. Ungar himself said: “One thing I never got into back then was drinking and drugs. I saw what booze did to people when I was a kid hanging out at my father’s bar. The only thing I was interested in was gambling. That’s what got me high.”
So, why, with the world at his feet, and a talent that threatened to dominate the game in Phil Taylor-esque fashion, did he turn to drugs? The history books suggest an obvious answer, and one that combines both loss and loneliness. Having met eventual wife Madeline in, unsurprisingly, a casino, Stuey adopted her son, Richie. They formed such a strong bond, that Stuey treated him like his own offspring, and even bestowed upon him the ‘Ungar’ family name. Tragically, Richie committed suicide after his school prom, and a devastated Stuey sought solace in drugs. Although he claimed that it was initially for performance enhancement – drugs, perhaps, wasn’t the taboo subject it has become now -, it cushioned his grief and aided the mourning process. Having divorced Madeline soon after, Stuey was left to fend for himself, and drugs became a quick fix for a sense of loneliness that he would never escape.
When we discuss Stuey’s vices, we automatically frame his demise within the nineties, but although his body had yet to fully display the downhill slope he was on, the initial signs of rot and decline first emerged in the mid eighties. Not everyone noticed, but to those who played him regularly or for long periods at a time, it was clear that something was awry. Freddie Deeb battled Stuey numerous times over the eighties and nineties, and couldn’t help but observe the gradual changes in Stuey’s behaviour. “He was always a good player,” compliments Deeb, “but he had his bad habits, he was doing the drugs. I noticed this even in the eighties, you could tell by the way he behaved that he was on something all the time.
“The problem is,” he continues, “the drugs were fucking him up too much and affecting his game. It was costing him money left and right. It’s not the price of the drugs, the price of the drugs is cheap compared to what you can lose on making one mistake when you’re playing such big games all the time. Drugs are always around poker – the partying, the alcohol, it’s easy to get involved in that side of things if you’re not careful, especially if you become involved with the wrong people. This was never really the case with Stuey, he could borrow $100,000, no problem, he didn’t get in trouble that way. His problem wasn’t money. In the poker business, you get involved with drugs because you’re around drugs and overdoing it.”
From Deeb’s perspective, the drugs were clearly hindering Stuey’s game, and preventing his natural talent from flourishing. However, there was a consensus among many players that drugs could actually elevate your game, help you stay awake and improve your focus. Poker players are never going to be athletes in the true sense of the word, but like Ben Johnson at the 1988 Olympics, they were keen to get ahead, and were willing to go to extreme lengths to aid their cause. Back then, people were less educated on drugs. There was no Wikipedia, no Internet to supply the wealth of information we are treated to today, and you couldn’t just ring Frank and ask, ‘Will cocaine make me a better poker player?’ - people had to make up their own minds. During these times, poker was a different game, one in which you had to take your opportunities when they arrived, and if drugs helped you do that, then so be it. Many players would thus play heads-up for hours on end, meaning you could go bust at any point. Avoiding that one unforced error due to fatigue was crucial. Increasing your attention span and maximising you ability to play longer equated to more money, and drugs could potentially offer that. As Padraig Parkinson once said to me with his trademark chuckle, “There were no players back then, people had to play heads-up.”
Donnacha O’Dea tends to keep a low profile – he declined an invitation to Late Night Poker in fear that the under-the-table cameras would reveal too much information – but during my stay in Dublin for the Irish Open, I was able to grab a few words with the Irish legend about his encounters with Stuey – of which there were many – and the part drugs played in poker during those times. “People were saying that his erratic behaviour was because he was on cocaine,” O’Dea confirms. “They were saying quite a few players had got into it because of the long sessions, saying that cocaine would keep you awake. They even said Chip Reese was on it for a while. His partner at the time, Danny Robeson, who was one of the best Seven Card Stud players around, was a big coke head, so quite a few of them got hooked into it. It wasn’t just the social aspect, it was because they thought they had an advantage. With Stuey, you became aware that he was taking cocaine the more it dragged on. Half his nose was missing and stuff like that and I’d think, wow, if ever you want to do a drugs campaign, this would be the perfect picture.”
There are conflicting opinions as to whether or not drugs improved or destroyed a poker player’s game. On the one hand, observant opponents such as Deeb and O’Dea concur that drugs led to mistakes, and with Stuey there are countless stories in which he missed tournaments due to drug use. It’s no secret that during one World Series he was found unconscious in his room and had to be escorted to hospital. Incidents like these were not unusual, and were the reason why he found it increasingly difficult to find financial backing. He was unreliable, and people became tired of him. Drugs, for all its rumoured benefits, prevented him from playing. On the other hand, would he have won the 1997 Main Event if he weren’t on drugs? Some say that he would have been unable to stay awake, that he wouldn’t have made it to the end. Cocaine kept him on the ball, ‘buzzing’, and able to reach the end of what has always been a truly gruelling tournament requiring stamina, endurance and mental fortitude.
On the whole, however, I don’t think I’d be going out on a limb if I declared that Stuey’s life would have been better off without drugs, and I believe that Stuey knew that too. It then makes you wonder why he never sought the help he so desperately required. It’s widely understood that those suffering from drug addictions can seldom help themselves – that is clearly the toughest mountain to climb – but there’s also the assumption that in the poker world, you are ultimately alone. With Stuey, I’m unconvinced that was the case. Sure, he was a lonesome being and continued to suffer after the loss of Richie, but was also surrounded by fellow poker players, many of whom, despite their goal at the table being to send him broke, genuinely cared for his well being. The fact is that Stuey was unresponsive to these out-stretched paws, and declined any offers of assistance. As Chris Bjorin says, “Stuey had a circle of friends that helped him, but it’s very hard to stop someone who is abusing drugs.” “You can’t just blame the bad influences,” continues Mickey Wernick, “because he still had a lot of people helping him like [Billy] Baxter who used to back him. He’d back him in cash games and everything, right until his death. I think Baxter even backed him in some of the hands I played with him too.”
“Doyle and Chip did a hell of a lot for him,” recalls O’Dea. “They paid for him to go to rehab. He was so thin. They went somewhere for weight loss and they brought Stuey with them, probably to play gin, but also to help him gain weight. Apparently, Doyle and Chip would be sitting there with a bit of lettuce, and Stuey would have a double hamburger in front of him. He’d say to Doyle, ‘I’ll sell you this for $500.’”
If Stuey did oblige, it was little more than a token gesture than a full commitment to the healing process. As a result, the slippery slope would continue to worsen until his ultimate death in November, 1998 where he was found unconscious in his room at the Oasis motel, alone. Stuey had died from a heart condition, but the traces of drugs in his system proved that addiction had haunted him until his final days. In his closing years, hiding his addiction had become an impossible task.
“When I played him in 97,” says Wernick. “He had a big lump out of his nose. Then after he won the World Series that year, he had to defend his title, and apparently he spent one month in his room and never came out. The place stunk, and they actually threw him out, so he didn’t defend his title to my knowledge. If he did, I didn’t see him. There was a lot of talk the previous year when he won about him being drugged up in his room.”
“You can see that actually even his nose was burned up,” adds Deeb. “His face looked deformed compared to what it looked like before.”
“I'm amazed he lived as long as he did,” comments Mike Sexton in the documentary ‘One of a Kind: The Rise and Fall of Stu Ungar’. “looking back on it now, as big a cocaine user as he was.”
Even now, I return to that YouTube clip with increased intrigue. Here is a man who, despite his current turmoil, still had the world of poker in front of him, but allowed addiction to rob him of not only decades of his life, but also a legendary status that would have gone beyond the story, the external influences, and the fast lifestyle he led. How many more titles could he have won? How much money would he have made? How famous could he have been?
With a rare glint in his eye, Stuey looks down at a picture of his 14-year old daughter, Stephanie, which a rather youthful Gabe Kaplan holds with near equal pride. “Let me ask you a personal question,” says Kaplan, pivoting into a more somber tone. “In 1980 and 1981 you won the championship, you weren’t smart after that, your life didn’t go 100 percent in the right course. Now you’re older, you’re wiser, you’re 43 years old, do you think you’re going to do things differently now?”
With his daughter dangling before him like some sort of persuasive bait, Ungar pauses. He knows what to say, he knows what he should say, but he doesn’t say it, he can’t, because he knows deep down that the light at the end of the tunnel will continue to diminish. After a slight hesitancy, he answers, “Well, I hope so Gabe. I’ve neglected my kid, I’ve done a lot of stupid things. I want to tell you something as a fact: there’s nobody that ever beat me playing cards. The only one that beat me was myself. My bad habits. But when I get playing like I did this tournament I really believe that no one can play with me on a daily basis.”
I think many people ‘”hoped” that he’d “do things differently”, but by this time, they knew he wouldn’t.
Next time, I examine Stuey’s abilities in gin, a game in which he is considered the best there was and ever will be.