One auspicious afternoon in 1975, back when he was still living in New York and reigning as the city's most fearsome gin player, Stu Ungar found himself at the home of a friend named Bernie. Set down in the middle of Bernie's kitchen table was a small, amber colored, glass vial. It contained a gram or so of white powder. Amazingly, 22-year-old Ungar needed to ask what it was. "Cocaine," replied Bernie. "It lifts your spirits and makes you feel good."
Attached to the vial's cap was a small spoon. Bernie scooped a bit of cocaine onto the spoon and held it out for his friend. Ungar leaned forward and snorted a hit of coke into each nostril. Almost immediately he turned giddy. It was a 180-degree reversal from how he had been feeling since early that morning. "This was the day I put my mother in a nursing home," Ungar remembered during the course of a lengthy interview at Arizona Charlie's, an off-strip casino in Las Vegas. "She was crying like a baby and she broke me up, but I couldn't handle it no more - to be playing cards, trying to scratch out a living, and my mother calls me to bring her a bedpan." Unable to shake that first snort of coke from his memory, Ungar added, "I started very moderately, like a gram a week."
Before moving to Las Vegas, Ungar said, drugs played a very small role in his life. Prior to the age of 22, he hadn't even smoked a joint. He didn't drink. He didn't party. His vices at that point were gambling and chasing girls. "If there were 58 massage parlors in New York, [Stuey] knew all 58," card player Teddy Price told a reporter. "And he was a big tipper. He'd walk in the door and the girls would yell, 'Stuey's here!'"
By the time he won his second World Series championship, in 1981, his drug consumption had spiked precipitously. But Ungar insisted that it was rooted in practicality. "I did the coke to keep up," he said. "You use it as an excuse to stay awake and play poker. But then you take it home with you." Ultimately, of course, the cocaine went beyond recreation and practicality. "When you have access to it and the money don't mean nothing and people keep calling you with it …" His voice trailed off, implying that there's nothing you can do to fight the temptation. "It's a sickness. I don't even like to think about it. I guarantee you, it's taken 10, 15 years off my life. I don't look like it, but I feel beat up." Actually, whether he wanted to admit it or not, he looked plenty beaten up. It was as if the pain that he felt inside had leaked out, erasing what once seemed like indelible youthfulness from his poker face.
The coke-fueled '80s stands as the decade when Ungar's sports betting spun completely out of control - right along with his drug intake. "The figures were exorbitant," Ungar acknowledged. "A regular person wouldn't even be able to relate to it. Winning a couple hundred thousand playing poker was nothing compared to what I would lose in sports."
Vegas's golf courses served as another sinkhole for Ungar's card room millions. "Stuey's a big sucker at a lot of things," Puggy Pearson said in the late '90s. "Because he's so good at certain things, he thinks he should be good at everything. This is his downfall." Puggy recalled that, as a golf handicap, Ungar was allowed to tee up all of his shots. "That's a huge advantage, and he had all kinds of tees - big long ones, itty-bitty short ones. Hell, I seen him tee the ball up in a lake one time at the old Sahara golf course. But he still lost every damned thing he had. He'd lose his shoestrings if he needed a couple dollars. That boy can't be still. He's got to have action."
During one memorable two-week period, Ungar went on a massive winning streak at the card tables and then laid it all down on a long Thanksgiving weekend of football games - Thursday through Monday. "I had a million in cash going into that weekend," Ungar said, "and at the end of Monday Night Football, I owed $800,000." He lost $1.8 million in a weekend? Ungar nodded. "I was betting $100,000, $150,000 a game. That was nothing to me. I had no sense of the value of money."
He hesitated a moment. "Sometimes I think that I wanted to lose, so that I could get mad and go back to the poker table."
Drugs and sports betting combined to leave Ungar financially and spiritually destitute. The dual demons created a vicious cycle that wreaked havoc with the one thing he could have done brilliantly: play poker. "He was always under pressure because he went through so much cash," remembers Billy Baxter, a professional gambler and frequent backer for the often destitute Ungar. "Stuey's money management was a joke, and he kept himself against the blade all the time. He never got into a comfortable financial position. He had to win every day just to support his lousy habits. Then he'd run bad a couple days in poker and be busted again." Indeed, when Ungar was losing and strung out, says high-stakes poker player Barry Greenstein, he became so scared and so desperate "that you were able to push him around like a little girl."
In the mid-1980s, Madelaine left Stuey and took his beloved Stephanie with her. Several years later, a poker-playing friend carted a dining-room set out of Ungar's home to settle a gambling debt. In 1992, he sold his beautiful Tudor home for approximately $270,000. "I needed money," Ungar remembered. "I borrowed $150,000 against the house. It was one of those hard-loan shit things, you know, and I had to pay the guy back." Ungar considered the circumstances for a moment. "I had a nice house."
Things didn't get better. Throughout the '90s, Ungar slept where he could and occasionally surfaced when he needed to win or borrow money. There were fl ashes of the old brilliance, but he spent most of his time away from poker, caught up in a world dominated by drug dealers, hookers, con men, and petty thieves. He scraped by with occasional low-profile le action, through financial support from benevolent friends, and by calling in the many loans he had made to other players back when he was flying high. But for the most part, nobody wanted to get involved with an unrepentant, unreliable drug addict. Even Phil "Brush" Tartaglia, Ungar's minder from New York, began to distance himself.
By all appearances and opinions, Stu Ungar was completely finished as a competitor in the heady world of no-limit. He seemed like the Brian Wilson of poker - a brilliant guy done in by drugs and his own strange, unmanageable form of genius. Then, during the early months of 1997, Ungar hit some kind of emotional nadir, and it compelled him to resurface, initially through occasional appearances at $20 buy-in tournaments around town. "People were saying how I'm a has-been and washed-up and all that," Ungar explained. "Finally, it got to me real bad. My pride was hurt. So I tried to eat right, got some sleep, put myself into shape to play."
Some of it, however, was involuntary. Following a couple of busts, one for possession of drug paraphernalia, another for trespassing, Ungar was legally compelled to remain clean. Whatever the impetus, though, his changes slowly became evident during the 1997 World Series. If his presence initially seemed like a sick joke, by day two nobody was laughing. On the third afternoon of play, local newspaper reporters, contemplating their leads for Thursday's paper, had already rechristened Stu "The Kid" Ungar as "The Comeback Kid." "If they wanted to do a clinic on no-limit Hold 'Em, they would have filmed me from day one to the final hand," Ungar said in 1998. "You can't play more perfect than I played. It was just a thing of beauty, what I did in '97. I was reborn."
At the start of the fourth and final day of the Series, Ungar had almost $1.1 million stacked in front of him, dwarfing his nearest competitor by more than $300,000. He was confident dent and cool, diminutive and fl ashy, with blue-lensed granny glasses and a densely patterned shirt. He played with such confidence that it was as if he could see through the backs of his opponents' cards. "It might have been the greatest performance ever in a World Series of Poker," says Mike Sexton, now a commentator on World Poker Tour, then a respected high-stakes player. "He just dominated the tables."
ESPN cameras stalked Ungar as if he were a movie star, and he reveled in the attention. When it finally came down to Ungar and John Strzemp, then president of Treasure Island Hotel and Casino, for the championship, it was clear that Ungar was the superior player by a wide margin. "But," says Sexton, "John was smart enough to recognize that he couldn't play with Stu Ungar. You can't sit there and play with the guy and let him take your money slowly but surely as you go along. John realized that the only chance he had of beating Stuey was to get all his chips in the pot as quickly as possible and gamble with them."
The miraculous resurrection culminated with Ungar pulling a tournament-winning straight on the final card of the last hand. Smiling broadly for the cameras, telling reporters how vindicating the victory had been, holding up a photo of his daughter that he had kept close to him throughout the contest, Ungar seemed to be his old self. "He was in his element again," says Sexton. "He was put back in that throne of destiny, where he would have a new chance to start fresh. I really thought he would do it."
Ungar, posing before a fortress of banded $100 bills, a freshly minted World Series of Poker bracelet in front of him, became the first player to win three championships. He promised to keep himself in shape for the next year's Series. "I was sleeping for 15 years," he announced. "I've decided to wake up."
But just a couple of months after netting $500,000 (the million-dollar first prize, minus a 50-percent cut for Billy Baxter, who put up the $10,000 entry fee), Ungar was broke. He apparently blew the money on all his old vices: sports betting, drugs, and hookers. A poker-playing friend who popped by the apartment where Ungar was staying in late '97 remembers a refrigerator with nothing in it but Tang. Propped against one wall was a beautifully framed collage, filled with laudatory press clippings from Ungar's glory days. "I'm reading the collage, and there's something in there that says, 'Talent will get you to the top, but you need character and discipline to stay there,'" recounts the friend, one of Stu's old coke buddies. "I said, 'Stuey, we ain't got that ******* shit. We have character and talent, but we don't have discipline.' He heard me, but he didn't say nothing."
edited by btd
