The Thin White Line

In the old days I used to play poker in Texas with Henry Bowen, a real tough guy and a great poker player. Henry had dainty little hands – I could never understand how he could be so tough with those dainty hands. In his younger days he had been in prison a lot for bank robbery and for just being such a supertough guy. One Saturday Henry and I went to a rodeo in Tyler, Texas (Cowboy Wolford's old stompin' grounds) with Johnny Wheeler, who ran the rodeo. The rodeo was going on the next weekend, as well. I didn't make it to the rodeo the second weekend, but Henry did. That night, three people – a dope dealer and two others – were murdered by the side of a pool in Oklahoma City at 11:45 p.m. Although hundreds of witnesses placed him at the rodeo at 11 p.m. in Tyler, Henry was charged with their murders.

Henry was convicted of their murders and sat on death row for seven years. Benny Binion went to bat for him, paying for lawyers and other stuff, because he was a friend of Henry's. A lot of poker players also contributed money for his defense. Finally, after his story came out on 60 Minutes, the case was retried and Henry was set free. It seems that he had been railroaded in the murder case because of the things that he had done in the past.

Now, Henry has just gotten out of prison after being on death row for seven years, and he comes to the home poker game where I'm playing. The game was being run by the Big Texan, a man Henry didn't much like, to say the least. We're playing no-limit hold'em when Henry makes a bet at the pot. The Big Texan raises him. Henry's thinking about calling the raise, and his hand is shaking a little bit. You can imagine that you might be a little nervous about things if you've been away for seven years.

"How come your hand's shakin', Henry?" the Big Texan asks, to give him the needle while he's thinking about the call.

Henry very quietly turns to the Big Texan and says, "You know, ever since I got out of prison, I've been trying to act like a Quaker – you know, tryin' to be nice to everybody. But there's a fine white line, and you've just about stepped over it."

And I mean to tell you, the Big Texan went absolutely white, like a ghost. Henry was not the man you wanted to give a hard time to. The Big Texan went into the front room and watched television for about an hour – he was scared to death that Henry was going to kill him.

The guys I played with in Texas back then were all great poker players, but, of course, they didn't want to play against just each other all the time. You always need producers to feed a game, you know. At one time we had three multimillionaires playing poker with us who would start the game and finish it. One of them took the cure and joined Gamblers Anonymous, and now he's a bigwig in GA. And if Hugh Briscoe, who used to own a lot of land up in Denton, went broke, he'd just sell another bit of land so that he'd have more poker money. I guess that he probably lost $10 million in Dallas. And then there was Ken Smith, who could play but was always on a time schedule, so his money wasn't worth anything. He had only two hours for poker, so he played fast. (When Kenny wanted to, though, he could really play the game.)

And then we got busted in Dallas, and that was the end of the poker there. Now they have limit games all over town, but it's nothing like it used to be.

Editor's note: T.J. Cloutier, the top money winner at the World Series of Poker, is the co-author (with Tom McEvoy) of Championship Hold'em, Championship No-Limit & Pot-Limit Hold'em, and Championship Omaha. All of his books are available through Card Player. For more details, visit www.pokerbooks.com. Cloutier may be reached by E-mail at [email protected].