One of a Kind was originally intended to be Stuey Ungar’s autobiography. Before Peter Alson got involved in this project with me, I spent many sessions interviewing Stuey face-to-face, often under the most trying physical and emotional circumstances. Most of the interviews took place in various hotel rooms scattered throughout Las Vegas in the summer and fall of 1998. At times, Stuey was remarkably cooperative and was able to recount details of his life that had occurred decades earlier. At other times, he was aloof and unable to remember even the simplest of details. At still other times Stuey was nearly incapable of functioning in normal human ways.
Many of Stuey’s closest friends and supporters hoped this book project would be a catharsis for him, a purifying emotional exercise, which would allow him to come to grips with his drug problem. Stuey himself seemed to take great pride in reflecting back on his life and discussing the early influences that eventually made him an icon in the gambling world. Unfortunately, the temptations of that world and Stuey’s own self-destructive tendencies doomed him to his tragic and in many ways predictable fate.
His untimely death produced an ethical dilemma for me as an author as to how to tell his story. I decided that it was important to tell parts of the story in Stuey’s own words so that readers could grasp his streetwise vocabulary, his incessant vulgarity, his rough humor, and his deep passion for taking risks. I also realized that in shifting from a memoir to a biography I needed a coauthor who could help me tell a deeper story.
Peter Alson, a native New Yorker and acclaimed author, understood immediately both the significance of Stuey’s story and what was needed to bring it fully to life. Not only did Peter know the terrain from having written about poker and gambling for magazines like Esquire, Details, and Playboy, but he is a poker player himself, who has competed in the final event of the World Series of Poker. He also had a personal brush with Stuey in 1988, while covering the Super Bowl of Poker at Caesars Palace, an event that Stuey Ungar won.
Together, Peter and I conducted extensive interviews of the people in Stuey’s life, and we hope that the accompanying narrative will serve to give some insight into a man who was by equal turns fascinating and infuriating, inspiring and frustrating, generous to a fault and selfish beyond all reason.