Eskimo Wants a Book

Paul “Eskimo” Clark is one of the most colorful, intriguing and puzzling characters in poker. Most players think he got his nickname from being born in Alaska, but he actually hails from New Orleans. His moniker seems to really derive from his resemblance to an Eskimo with his thick, bushy hair and beard and rugged countenance.

Incidentally, my apologies to my politically correct readers. “Eskimo” is considered a slightly pejorative word meaning “eater of raw fish” (funny, I didn’t know they had sushi back then) and I should use either “Inuit” or “Yupik,” one of the two main tribes of Alaska – or perhaps just “indigenous people.” Sorry, guys, but Paul “Indigenous People” Clark just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Anyway, Eskimo (or whatever you want to call him), is one of the top players in the game. With more than $2.7 million in tournament cashes, he was the first to win bracelets in seven-stud, razz and stud high-low, a record that was unsurpassed until Jeffrey Lisandro matched it three years ago. But he’s even more well known for his extreme financial swings, loaded one day, unloaded the next. I once wrote a story which had him as a speaker at Big Denny’s Poker Camp. He had just won $80,000 in a poker tournament, and the first thing he did when he got on stage was to ask to be staked in a tournament that night.

Stories about him abound. In 2007 he apparently had a stroke or heart attack while playing a WSOP razz tournament, refused to leave the table, got treatment from a paramedic at the table…and finished fourth! Then there was the rumor circulating that he had been murdered, which as far as I know wasn’t true.

Eskimo once threatened to sue me and Card Player for a million dollars for something I wrote that was pretty innocuous. I had cast him as a cowboy in a film called “The Barstow Kid Rides Again,” and when Aunt Sophie, playing a dancehall girl, tries to kiss him, he barks, “Get away from me, you old hag.”

“I would never talk to a woman that way,” he protested (Who cares about how anyone talks about Aunt Sophie?).

He never did sue, and we’ve been friendly for a long time. Then, during this year’s WSOP, he approached me, said several people asked him if he had a book to sell, and told me he’d like me to write one for him. It would be a big book, he said, $40 a copy, and he assured me that millions of them would be sold. (Gee, almost as many as “Harry Potter.”) The title he suggested was “Eskimo Freezes the Field,” the headline of a write-up I once did for a tournament he won. And the cover, he continued, would have a picture of an Alaska Airlines plane that carried his picture on the tail. Yes, he assured me, that airline did carry his illustration on its tail section. (Alaska Airlines used him as its logo? Wouldn’t Sarah Palin be more appropriate?)

I did research and discovered that the airline indeed once sported a drawing of an Inuit tribesman. Somebody once posted on the Internet a picture of Eskimo on a plane’s tail, and you can decide if it’s legit or not.

It’s not the first time a player wanted me to do a book about him. The equally colorful and successful John Bonetti also once asked me. Bonetti didn’t start playing poker until his 50s, and rang up more than $4 million in tournament cashes in 20 years. He was also known for his ongoing war with dealers and his pile of “coise–woid” penalties in poker. He even established a record of sorts by once getting a penalty at the WSOP for dropping the f-bomb while on break after he had just left the table.

Many players also think he made the biggest goof in poker history when he got all his chips against chipleader Jim Bechtel, three-handed for the WSOP main event title, holding top pair/top kicker, even though Glen Cozen was sittng and watching with about two big blinds left in his stack. Bechtel had a set, and Bonetti was gone, missing on a big pay jump and a chance to win the bracelet.

The book didn’t get very far before John became terminally ill. Sad, because his life was fascinating. Here’s how he described his beginnings:

I was born in Brooklyn in 1928 and grew up there. Both my parents were of Italian descent. My father came from Naples where he lived in the mountains. He came to this country in 1914 when he was about 12 years old. I remember he was an immaculate dresser. He would walk to church every Sunday with my mother, Rose. Gray hat, suit, shoes shined. My mother, who was more religious, would go into Mass, and he would pace back and forth until she came out. That was love.

My life was kind of tough. We lived in a six-family tenement home called a railroad flat. Two families on each floor shared one toilet. Sometimes I’d run home to go to the bathroom. Too late, somebody from next door, like my cousins, were in there. It was rough, but that’s what we went through in those days.

We had no money. My father made $12 a week working as a tailor. We had a coal stove and an ice box. Mitch the ice man delivered coal in the winter and ice in the summer. A chunk of ice cost maybe a nickel and would last a few days. That’s how we kept the food fresh in those days. There were no refrigerators, no steam heat. We kept the coal in a bin in the basement. I’d go down with a pail, bring it upstairs and my mother would put it the stove to warm the apartment.

My father was a very, very honorable man. Once in a while I’d fib, tell a lie, and he’d get furious. He’d say, “The one thing you’ve got to learn is that you’re never to lie and you’re never to steal.” (I guess stealing pots doesn’t count.)

Anyway, Eskimo’s book may have to wait, because I just did one of my own called “The Chimp, the Chump and the Champ.” the story of the interlocking lives of Big Denny, the fearsome ape and the world’s most crooked casino owner; Max Shapiro, the world’s foremost poker humorist; and Barbara Enright, the world’s greatest woman poker player.

As I wrote in the preface, a couple of authors in past years have attempted non-fiction novels. Truman Capote wrote “In Cold Blood,” and Norman Mailer authored “Armies of the Night.” Of course, neither writer was in my league, nor would either have attempted anything as daringly groundbreaking as “The Chimp, the Chump and the Champ,” a semi-factual, semi-fictional, multi-biographical novel narrative. It will change the course of literature forever, though I’m not sure if it will advance or set it back. (Any publishers out there interested?) Anyway, I think this daring journalistic venture will have to take precedence over Eskimo’s book. So how about you doing it, Nolan Dalla? Just think, five million copies, at $40 a piece. ♠

Max Shapiro, a lifelong poker player and former newspaper reporter with several writing awards to his credit, has been writing a humor column for Card Player ever since it was launched more than 20 years ago. His early columns were collected in his book, Read ’em and Laugh.