Double or Nothing: How Two Friends Risked It All to Buy One of Las Vegas' Legendary Casinos (4 page)

By 6:00
AM
Monday morning, the company handling the credit card transactions had deposited Tim's first day of revenue in his checking account. There would be no sweating that check. Las Vegas Reservation Systems was in business.

When Tim got to the office an hour later, the mailbox on his answering machine was maxed out.

J
ust as there was a moment for me, there was a moment for Tim.

While Tim doesn't recall offering to buy me that sandwich at Sardina's, he does remember the first moment he trusted me. And, of course, it's a moment that completely passed
me
by.

One day, after graduating from college, I showed up at his LVRS office to meet him. An unattended phone rang and I picked it up, grabbed a pen, took the message, and passed the information on to him. It was the most natural thing in the world. So there's no way a moment like that would stand out in my mind. But it stayed with Tim.

It astonishes me when I look back on it. Hundreds of millions of dollars would be made from a partnership based on trust, and that trust was rooted in the ordering of a sandwich and the answering of a phone.

I hadn't given the slightest thought to working with Tim when I graduated from college. My goal was to be the next Bob Costas.

I got my first television job in a small town in the desert between San Diego and Las Vegas. If you've never heard of Victorville, California, maybe you've heard of Roy Rogers and Dale Evans. That was their home. Victorville's top attraction back then was a statue of Roy's horse, Trigger, rearing up on its hind legs in the center of town. You get the picture.

The sports job at KHIZ was already taken. I started as the weatherman. Sometimes I phoned Tim before I went on the air to ask him the temperature in Las Vegas. “It's hot,” he'd say.

On the surface, being a weatherman in the desert may not seem like the most challenging of jobs. But I learned how to react when the 112-degree temperatures knocked out the power and the teleprompter failed in the middle of a segment. I learned how to make a feature on the prizewinning goat at the county fair grab your attention. It wasn't long before I was covering the Lady Jackrabbits basketball team at Victor Valley High School and sitting in the sports anchor seat. You know what? It was
great.
I had the opportunity to soak in every detail about communicating through television and took advantage of every minute. I learned how to speak with proper diction, how to feel at ease in front of a camera, and how to edit my own pieces.

But a year later, I was still 2,800 miles from ESPN headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut. And I was making $12,000 a year. It was hard to imagine Bob Costas living on ramen noodles in an apartment with a fake fireplace.

The lights of Las Vegas were less than three hours away, and I took off to see Tim and Lorenzo whenever I could. Tim could make an ordinary day extraordinary. A trip to Vegas might mean a seat at an Evander Holyfield fight through one of Uncle Jack's
connections. Or dinner on the town with Uncle Jimmy. Meals were not meals for Uncle Jimmy. They were events.

When Uncle Jimmy entered a room, it sparkled like a pinky ring. Fancy suits. Dark glasses. Being around Uncle Jimmy was like stepping into a Scorsese film. Seating me at Uncle Jimmy's table must've been as comical as dropping Uncle Jimmy into Disney World. And I know exactly how that would play out because it actually happened, and Tim's friend Cedric loves to tell the story.

At lunchtime, Tim, Cedric, and Uncle Jimmy were strolling through the world food court at Epcot Center, past restaurants offering dozens of cuisines, when they decided to go Italian. They entered what was by no means a fine restaurant. It was sort of like a giant cafeteria with teenagers making pasta in the window. Uncle Jimmy looked at the menu and asked the waiter about the veal piccata.

The waiter told him that it was great.

Uncle Jimmy slowly swiveled his head to reconfirm the setting and expressed his suspicions.

The waiter assured him the veal piccata would be to his liking.

Uncle Jimmy warned the waiter that if it wasn't done right, he was going to send it back.

A few minutes later, the waiter returned with fettucini for Tim and Cedric, and he set down the veal piccata in front of Uncle Jimmy.

Uncle Jimmy started working the plate over with knife and fork, maneuvering the food around, because it had to be set just right before it was worthy of a bite. Finally, he carefully sliced a piece of veal, took a bite, and looked up, “Where is that guy?”

The waiter came over, and Uncle Jimmy said, “You call this veal piccata?”

The next thing you know the head chef was wheeling the entire spice rack on a cart out to Uncle Jimmy. And Uncle Jimmy was pulling off the oregano, the salt, the garlic, and the basil and showing the chef the proper way to prepare the dish. When he was finished, he took a bite, turned to the chef and said, “Now,
that's
veal piccata.”

And
that
was normal to Tim, his family, and his friends.

I
was the oddity. The Square John from Barnsville. You could imagine Uncle Jimmy's eyes widening when I mentioned that the best steak I'd ever tasted was on a Northwest Airlines flight. Or Tim slapping his forehead when my younger brother, John, once referred to the favorite in a football game as “the over-dog.”

But there was something endearing about it to them, and they embraced me as family. I know I felt like part of the clan, because I remember being hit hard by Uncle Jimmy's death. When I came up to Las Vegas to celebrate Christmas in 1992, Tim was still hurting. Maybe he wanted to get as far as he possibly could from the pain of a Christmas without Uncle Jimmy. Out of nowhere, he said, “I want to see where you're from.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Let's go right now.”

So we went to the airport and got on an empty flight leaving the evening of Christmas. We landed in Minneapolis at 7:00
AM.
The temperature was five below zero. Tim rented a Cadillac, and we headed down the frosted highway to my hometown.

To most people, Burnsville, Minnesota, would not exactly qualify for the nickname “Barnsville.” It's a quiet, middle-class suburb south of Minneapolis consisting of nicely landscaped homes. But as Tim veered through the streets of my neighborhood and passed yard after yard decked out with giant plastic
Santa Clauses along with blinking lights and electronically trotting reindeer, he could only shake his head and whisper, “This is not the real world.”

We passed all the lawns I'd mowed in the summer and all the driveways I'd shoveled in winter. We passed all the front doors I'd determinedly walked the
Minneapolis Star and Tribune
up to on my paper route instead of hurling the newspaper on the grass. We passed the two houses I'd grown up in—basketball court in the driveway, swimming pool in the backyard.

Nearly anyone else in America listening to the description of my childhood—the red Schwinn bicycle with the banana seat, the Little League baseball, basketball, and soccer games, the skiing, cookouts, and zooms down Bob Lurtsema's water slide—would've seen me as the typical suburban kid who grew up next door. In Tim's eyes, I was unique.

If it wasn't for Tim, I might never have understood how not so typical I am. We all have different fingerprints. But we rarely put a magnifying glass to them. Sometimes we don't realize everything that we have inside of us. When I do look closely, I can only shake my head. The odds that my mom and dad—a farm girl from Minnesota and an Air Force pilot from Chicago—would meet at a certain moment in 1963 in Waikiki had to be more than a million to one.

My dad had finished eighth in a group of about thirty-five pilots in flight school, and the selection process sent him to Hickam Air Force Base in Honolulu. If he had finished seventh, he would've been stationed in California, his life would have been completely different, and I wouldn't be here to tell this story. But he
was
eighth. And that gave him a chance to meet my mom, a nurse who'd heard a doctor in Minneapolis rave about the exotic beaches in Hawaii. On a whim with five other nurses, she lined up a job in Honolulu and rented a house on a
hillside behind Diamond Head Volcano. I came into the world because two people with a sense of adventure were in the right place at just the right time. If there's a gene for that, I definitely got it.

The stories I told Tim as we drove through the snow were random. But in them I could hear the influence my parents had had on me. My dad's job as a pilot for Northwest Airlines was an execution of levelheadedness and smooth landings. And my mom could start up a conversation with anyone, which is probably what made an elevator ride with me so astounding to Tim. “If someone gets in an elevator at a hotel with Tom for a five-floor ride,” Tim loved to say, “the moment that elevator door opens, Tom will know where they're from and if they're married or single. If it's a ten-floor ride, he'll know how long they're staying and what restaurant they ate at the night before. If it's a twenty-floor ride, he'll know where they're from, how long they'd lived there, what they ate the night before, when their anniversary is, how many kids they've got, and what the kids' names are.”

Maybe, as we drove along that day, Tim was making these sorts of connections in his head and wondering how they might relate to his business. He's a great judge of character, and I must've been confirming his instincts as I described what it was like to grow up in the middle of a family with five kids.

My two older brothers used me to practice the moves they saw Andre the Giant execute on professional wrestling—turning me upside down, holding me by the torso, and crashing my head to the floor in the classic Piledriver. But that's what big brothers are for, right? My younger brother came along six years after me on the exact day I was born—so I had to share a birthday with him. I had to give up my room when I was nine on the day my adopted sister came up from Columbia. One thing I
learned from my birth order was how to understand everybody's situations and eccentricities. The way to be happy, I've found, is to make sure everyone around you is happy.

Our tour of “Barnsville” headed up the road past Holy Angels High School where my older brothers, Fred and Mike, grew to be six-foot-four varsity basketball stars. As we passed the gym, I told Tim about one of my deepest childhood wounds. It must've seemed trivial as we drove along, and it certainly is now as I look back upon it. But when you're young and vulnerable, a wound can stay with you and influence the rest of your life. You always hear stories like the one about a twelve-year-old kid named Cassius Clay who had his bicycle stolen and went into a boxing gym to learn how to fight so he could beat up the kid who'd taken it. It was the hurt from that stolen bicycle that set him on the road to become Muhammad Ali, heavyweight champion of the world. Look deep enough and you'll see that many of us are formed by our vulnerable moments.

It's hard to be five-feet-nine-inches tall after your two older brothers were six-foot-four high school basketball stars. I worked for years to star on that same high school team and kept waiting to grow into the role. My brothers had measured themselves with pencil lines on the wall of our laundry room, and I just couldn't understand why the top of my head stopped seven inches short of their top marks. I once read that Michael Jordan got cut from his high school team when he was a sophomore, that he knew he had to grow, and that he spent a lot of time over the following summer hanging from monkey bars at a playground as if to will himself into growing taller. And he shot up four inches! Maybe I should have hung from monkey bars.

Instead I compensated for my lack of height in other ways. I didn't try to be like Mike. (Well, sometimes I did—but only on an eight-foot rim.) My heroes were two guys you probably never
heard of unless you really follow college basketball: Johnny Dawkins and Tommy Amaker.

They played for Duke, and they were as close as two fingers on the same hand. In fact, their coach, Mike Krzyzewski, taught his players to come together like five fingers into a fist. I spent hours watching Amaker, the playmaker, and Dawkins, the shooter, on television with my backcourt partner, Chris Bednarz. Then the two of us would go out and practice until neither one of us even had to look to know where our other half was. We just knew.

It was obvious that I was never going to be the star of the team. But I thought if I could understand the eccentricities of my teammates and make everyone around me better, then I could get into the starting lineup. I sensed it was all about the extras. So when the coach asked for laps, I ran extras. When he asked for free throws, I shot extras. Maybe my Charlie Hustle attitude came simply from being five-foot-nine in a family of six-foot-four-inch high school basketball stars. When the waiters at the deli where I worked over the summer didn't want to make chocolate sundaes because the ice cream in the bin was rock hard and a pain in the ass to scoop out, they always turned to Tommy the busboy. In my own way, I willed myself into becoming the best point guard at Holy Angels High School.

Then the coach told me I wasn't going to start. The younger player coming along behind me was taller and more talented. I couldn't argue the fact that he had more potential. But he didn't have my experience, and he couldn't synthesize like I could. No two ways about it. I was the best guy at my position.

Maybe it was the way the coach told me. All I heard in his tone was: It doesn't matter how hard you try or how successful you are on this court.
You're not playing
.

I hated those words. To this day, I hate those words.

It was hard enough to walk in the laundry room and see the pencil marks on the wall. Hard enough being the kid who got
B
s in math after studying longer and harder than his older brothers who'd brought home
A
s. But the coach's rejection cut deeper than not fitting into the family footsteps. It wasn't fair and I felt betrayed. I remember wanting to hit the coach. Of course, I wasn't going to hit him. But I
felt
like it. And I never get into fights.

Well, I did get to start once. Several of our players got suspended for drinking, and one of them was the player at the starting position. The coach had no choice but to start me even though we were playing against the best team in the league. Our opponent, Totino-Grace, was not only undefeated, the game took place on their home court. It was David against Goliath, and the stakes were high. We needed to win to make the playoffs.