To Live and Die in L.V. - Part 2

By Brad Reagan and Michael Kaplan

Editor's note: Part I of this story, excerpted as is (unedited by Card Player) from the recently published Aces And Kings (Wenner Books), chronicled Stu Ungar's rise as a master gin player in New York, his growth into a great no-limit poker star, and his love for the 24-hour action of Las Vegas. That initial installment can be viewed at www.cardplayer.com. Much of the information in this article comes from interviews that one of the authors conducted with Stu Ungar during the summer of 1998.

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."

"Stu Ungar with Chair" (1980) ©2005 Ulvis Alberts

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."

Private heads-up game, Stu Ungar and Bob Stupak (1982) ©2005 Ulvis Albert

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."

Jack Binion and Stu Ungar "World Champion of Poker" (1997) ©2005 Larry Grossman

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 fucking shit. We have character and talent, but we don't have discipline.' He heard me, but he didn't say nothing."

Whatever Ungar's problems, it seemed to be a given that he'd put in a good effort to defend his World Series crown. He checked into Binion's Horseshoe on April 17, intending to rest up and get acclimated for the championship event three and a half weeks later. Billy Baxter, who once again funded Ungar's $10,000 entry fee, suggested he get himself warmed up with a couple preliminary tournaments. But Ungar waved him away and said, "I don't need that shit."

On the morning of May 11, the day the Series was slated to begin, Ungar's cocaine addiction was in full fl are, leaving him emotionally depressed, strung out, and physically wrecked. His right nostril was practically flush against his face. The tips of his fingers had been burned black from handling the hot end of a glass crack pipe. Bob Stupak, casino entrepreneur and occasional backer of Ungar's, had offered to provide a hairdresser and makeup artist to ensure that the drug addled star would look presentable, but Ungar never green-lighted them to come upstairs.

Just minutes before the tournament's starting time, Ungar remembered, "I got showered and dressed. I put my clothes on. And then I looked at myself in the mirror. I looked terrible. I looked like I came from Auschwitz. That's when I knew I couldn't sit there and play for four days, for 10 hours a day, and put in a good performance. I wasn't geared up. I was physically out of it. The year took a toll on me." As the opening hand was being dealt, Ungar remained sequestered in his 12th floor room at the Horseshoe. Baxter managed to get back his $10,000 and the game went on without its defending champion.

Ungar stopped speaking for a moment, maybe to replay the World Series nightmare in his mind. "Listen, not coming down to play in that tournament was criminal. I honestly think I could have won back-to-back if I was in decent shape. But I thought it would have been more embarrassing to have shown up looking the way I did than for me to stay in my room and not play. In the end, though, I disappointed everyone and, what's worse, I made everybody who's jealous of me happy."

But maybe the horrible experience had given him perspective. If he walked away from the Horseshoe with a realization that some things are more important than the primitive act of winning money – like not letting down the very people who care about you – then it all could be worth it in the long run, couldn't it? Ungar considered the theory for a split second. "If there is more to life than gambling," he said, "I don't know that I'm able to enjoy it. And what I'm afraid of is that gambling ain't stimulating me lately. That's a bad sign."

Stu Ungar at the World Series of Poker final table in 1997 ©2005 Larry Grossman

Several days after opening up at Arizona Charlie's, Ungar was having dinner with his ex-wife, Madelaine, and daughter Stephanie at the Sahara Casino and Hotel, a mid-level place on the Strip with a low-stakes poker room. Stephanie, 16 at the time, was a lovely, intelligent girl who had endured a lot of disappointment and heartache from her father. At that moment, though, she was thrilled to be with him. "We've spent a whole week together," she gushed. Most importantly, he appeared to be completely straight. "People introduce themselves to my dad and say that it's a pleasure to meet him. We walk around holding hands, and everybody is so happy to see my dad with me."

When they strolled into the Sahara's poker room, Ungar's dentist was there, messing around in a low-stakes, 30-person freeze-out with a $22 buy-in and a first prize of a few hundred dollars. Just for kicks, maybe showing off his star patient, the dentist requested that Ungar pull up a chair and enter the event. Considering that Ungar's more obvious poker milieu would have been the Horseshoe or the Mirage, where, at the time, games ranked among the highest in town, this was a bit of a comedown. But, as a favor to the man who had built a bridge for the front of his mouth, Ungar dispatched his ex-wife to the blackjack pit and accepted the invitation.

He wound up signing 40 autographs, and a crowd of some 200 railbirds formed around a tournament that would ordinarily have generated no interest whatsoever.

Goosed by the crowd and glad to be back in action, Ungar played aggressively and hard, as if psychologically making up for the World Series he had missed. "It came down to me and this old man," Ungar recalled. "I had $12,000 in tournament chips in front of me. He had $400. Then he outdrew me for seven pots in a row and won the thing."

Ungar was initially upset about losing. Then the man told him, "You made my life, Mr. Ungar. I can tell my children, my grandchildren, and everybody else that I beat you."

After shaking the man's hand, Ungar said to him, "If I can make your life, I'm tickled that I lost."

This encounter provided a rare glimpse at Ungar's sentimental side, but, sadly, it didn't augur long-term change. A couple of weeks later, he convinced a doctor to prescribe narcotic painkillers and found himself backsliding into drug dependency. Following a disagreement with his girlfriend, he bashed her in the face with a telephone. She kicked him out of her house and called the police. He went to stay with a friend, someone said, but nobody seemed able to find nd him.

Mike Sexton hinted that Puggy Pearson might have a lead. Puggy had met Ungar two days before at Sam's Town Hotel and Casino, and had lent him $500. "He didn't look too damned good," Puggy said. "Stuey was sitting there on the bench, next to a guy who claimed to be his plumber. Stu gave me his word, on his daughter's life, that he would pay me back $500 in two days, which is today. I lay 100-to-1 that I don't hear from him until he needs me again. But that's okay." Puggy sighed. Then he added, "Stuey's all right."

A day later, Ungar was back at Binion's Horseshoe, registered on someone else's credit card. Speaking over the phone and sounding lucid, he said, "I'm gonna start playing. I'm waiting to see a friend of mine who's got money for me. Then I go to the Mirage."

Despite vows to resume his once brilliant career, Ungar maintained a ghostly poker-room presence during the summer and into the fall of 1998. Billy Baxter lent him 25 grand and he used it to play $30/$60 Hold 'Em. But his heart was no longer in it. Inferior players beat him in headsup matches, and cocaine retook its place at the center of Ungar's life. He continually phoned the Mirage poker room, trying to scare up money from old friends, but nobody would take his calls.

Then, in November 1998, things seemed ready to turn around yet again. Ungar signed a contract with hotelier Bob Stupak, agreeing that Stupak would pay off Ungar's debts and finance tournament-play in exchange for a piece of Ungar's future winnings. Stupak even assigned a bodyguard named Dave to look after Ungar and make sure he stayed away from drugs. However, on November 20th, Ungar convinced Dave that he had to take his daughter to a birthday dinner.

Dave cut him loose on that Friday afternoon, and Ungar checked into the Oasis Motel, a notorious short time sex joint on the northern end of Las Vegas Boulevard. He paid cash for a single night and claimed the Mirage as his permanent residence on the check-in form. Earlier in the day Stupak had given him a $10,000 advance, as "walking-around money."

The next morning, after Ungar failed to check out of his room on time, an Oasis employee knocked on the door, entered the room, and found him lying face down in bed, shaking. Apparently in no condition to leave, Ungar asked to see the hotel manager, then slipped the manager a $100 bill for a second night. "Can you close the window?" Ungar asked. "I'm cold." The manager looked up and noticed that the window was tightly shut.

Twenty-four hours later, on November 22nd, Stu "The Kid" Ungar was found lying in the same faced own position on the mattress – but this time he was dead. Eight hundred eighty-two dollars, all that Ungar had to his name, was in his pants pockets. Police found the room to be clean of drugs and paraphernalia.

Stu Ungar in action ©2005 Larry Grossman

According to a Clark County spokesman, the official cause of Ungar's death was coronary arterial sclerosis brought on by his lifestyle. Essentially, the arteries around his heart hardened and would not allow blood to circulate. Ungar's passing was ruled accidental, even though cocaine, Percodan, and methadone were found in his blood.

Maybe the dope in Ungar's system reflected a final binge before he checked into the motel with the intention of kicking his habit for good. Maybe he sensed that the end was near and wanted to die alone, in peace. Or maybe something more nefarious transpired.

A longtime friend of Ungar's claims to know what happened. "Stuey bought a bunch of crack and picked up two hookers who like to troll near the Oasis," says the friend. "Once they found out how much money Stuey had on him" – presumably a good chunk of Stupak's $10,000 – "he was as good as dead. They pushed him to smoke enough so that he went into convulsions – which Stuey was prone to do. The convulsions came, they took most of the money, and left Stuey for dead."

Ungar's funeral was presided over by a rabbi and financed by Bob Stupak. The ceremony was a who's who of no-limit players, and Stupak reportedly hit them up for donations to help cover the burial costs.

Days later, at the big-money tables around town, cards were dealt, millions were won and lost, and the games rolled on unabated by the passing of poker's ultimate supernova. ♠