June 1997
Rick “Big Daddy” Matthews and I are playing golf at the Sherwood Country Club, not far from his summer home near Santa Barbara, California. Founded by David Murdock, the gentleman who owns Dole and much of the island of Lanai, the club is a rarefied playground where some of the most privileged people in America dig up the sod. The clubhouse is the size of a respectable basketball arena, albeit one outfitted with leather furniture and a staff of full-time shoe-shiners. Tiger Woods has his annual postseason invitational here. This Sherwood isn’t the kind of place where ordinary Robin Hoods might enjoy a game of golf. Initiation fees are reportedly more than $250,000, an impost that ensures that the first tee remains accessible to the celebrity membership, which allegedly includes Jack Nicholson, Kenny G., and Janet Jackson—although discretion prevents the club from commenting on such delicate matters.
Rick Matthews moves comfortably in these elite circles. A millionaire many times over, he’s built a four-state empire of “casual gourmet” restaurants, where patrons pay premium prices for a fine dining experience uncomplicated by menus written in French. He has all the trappings of extraordinary financial success: a private jet, a fleet of luxury cars, and a stable of mansions (some of them with actual stables). Big Daddy gives generously to charities, to institutions of higher learning—which courteously rename academic buildings in his honor—and to politicians who are sympathetic to his concerns. The man is a vital member of society.
And he got where he is by taking a gamble.
Actually, thousands of them.
The restaurants, the mansions, the ear of the senator—the whole towering monument to the American dream is built on a foundation of bet making. Not wagering on the stock market or an obscure foreign currency, but the kind of gambling most citizens of the United States can vaguely understand from firsthand experience. Big Daddy Matthews made his fortune betting on sports.
The man has always had a penchant for games of chance. For taking a risk, even a foolish one. Before becoming the kingpin of American sports betting, he won and lost millions of dollars on roulette, blackjack, and other negative-expectation casino games. At one time Rick Matthews, son of a church deacon father and a schoolteacher mother, was one of the most valued customers in Las Vegas, a certified sucker with a drinking problem who was prone to blow $1 million or more per visit. The Golden Nugget, in downtown Las Vegas, kept a suite on permanent hold for Matthews and would dispatch the casino’s airplane whenever Mr. Rick got the itch to do a little gambling. He had a profitable fast-food chain called the Fryer back home in the deep-South Arkansas-Mississippi-Alabama region, where customers unafraid of the ravages of bad cholesterol could get all manner of oil-drenched comestibles, including battered Snickers bars. Whenever the betting bug bit, Rick would siphon off money from his own company, leaving it on the brink of bankruptcy. Fortified with greasy cash, Rick Matthews would lose every penny of his quarterly earnings during his forays to Sin City. But as long as the lard kept bubbling he could count on a steady stream of money to donate. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to win—he tried every spurious betting system and useless angle he could find. Matthews just didn’t know how to beat the house.
And then, after years of fruitless exploration, the lifelong action junkie finally discovered the key to the casino vaults. Rick Matthews figured out which football teams to bet on. The rumor going around Las Vegas was that Matthews had some sort of supercomputer tended to by a coterie of experts known as the Brains.
It wasn’t precisely a license to print money. But when you win three and lose two over and over, day after day, season after season, your fortune starts to stack skyward, like a pyramid in the desert. Unlike many sick gamblers, whose compulsions prohibit them from holding on to their winnings, Rick Matthews conquered his alcoholism, invested wisely, avoided leaks (bad decisions that inexorably erode a gambler’s bankroll), and continued to raise his bets while he was ahead. Which is a smart play when you’re on a twenty-three-year winning streak.
His name isn’t well known, but Rick’s prowess at prognosticating football games is famous. Even the hacks at my golf club in Los Angeles, who participate in a weekly pool, know that there are supposedly a few guys who can beat the point spreads consistently. My golf buddies have never met any of these wizards and couldn’t tell you what they look like. But the boys like to repeat the rumor that there’s a genius in Las Vegas who’s built his multimillion-dollar restaurant empire with capital earned from his sports betting exploits.
To the gambling cognoscenti, Rick Matthews is no rumor. He’s credited as the emperor of an operation that inspires fear in bookies and jealousy in aspiring professional punters. He’s the Michael Jordan of the wagering business, a man to whom the cliché “living legend” may be applied without embarrassment. One man moves the Vegas line. One man influences the way millions of people bet on sports. One man is a celebrity in a milieu otherwise devoid of stars.
Knowing I was eager to meet the legend for an interview I hoped to publish in a national magazine, a friend of a friend, another member of the secretive fraternity of professional gamblers, introduced me to Rick Matthews. Before I shook Rick’s hand and proposed that he allow me to include his tale in a book I was researching, my friend warned me about Rick Matthews. “The guy is totally charming. A real sweetheart. But don’t let the southern gentleman deal fool you. When it comes to getting the best of it, the guy’s a stone-cold killer. You’ve heard of ice water in the veins? Rick Matthews has liquid nitrogen.”
On the sixth tee, I watch Matthews hit a towering drive, an elegant parabola that rockets out to the right and slowly curls back to the left, coming to rest three hundred yards in the distance, bisecting the fairway. It’s the kind of golf shot I hit regularly—in my fantasies. I’m envious of Rick’s prowess, but not surprised. Before Big Daddy Matthews hit upon the secret to beating sports, he earned the bulk of his gambling winnings on the golf course. Rick, in fact, is one of the greatest golf hustlers of all time. Major champions like Lee Trevino and Fuzzy Zoeller have played with him, and they don’t look forward to wagering against him again anytime soon. Rick’s the rare bird who can shoot just about any score he needs to. When he was a bit younger, the talk around Sherwood Country Club was that Rick ought to take a crack at the Champions Tour when he turned fifty. But then everyone came to his senses and realized Big Daddy Matthews could earn a lot more money at golf staying at home playing against oil barons and telecom CEOs.
Now nearing sixty, Rick can still shoot in the seventies. And since there’s almost no amount of money he won’t play for, it’s impossible to make him nervous. When you’re dealing with a fellow who regularly wagers a million dollars on a football game, detecting a racing heartbeat during a friendly golf match is awfully difficult. So I’ve got no chance of winning today. Not a prayer.
Even against me, a nine-handicap with a piddling bankroll, the old hustler is loath to give away even the slightest edge. To make a fair match, I know I should be getting at least three shots a side. Rick insists on only giving me two—“and that’s too generous!” he complains.
We’re playing for twenty dollars.
I wonder: Does Big Daddy love to win? Or is he pathologically afraid of losing?
I’ve been eagerly anticipating my day on the greens with the legendary bettor. Since our introduction six months ago, we’ve spent several cordial and productive evenings together in Las Vegas. I’ve crafted excerpts from our chats into a story about sports betting, hoping to publish it in one of the slick periodicals during the heart of football season. It’s a good article, even if some of the choicest anecdotes were delivered off the record. Big Daddy has a habit of starting a fascinating story and then stopping in mid-sentence, smiling sheepishly, and declaring, “Naw, I don’t think we should talk about that.” But I can tell he likes me. Although I’m not officially part of his world—I don’t win and lose the average American’s yearly salary in one feverish night of action—I’m fluent with the vocabulary of people who look at life as a series of risk-versus-reward decisions. Most regular folks outside the surreal subculture of professional gambling see the high-rolling inhabitants of this parallel universe, where a “dime” means $1,000, as maladjusted freaks who could use a healthy dose of psychological counseling. The regular folks may be right. But there’s also something seductive and oddly respectable about men who are willing to back their convictions with a large portion of their net worth.
Ever since age five, when my great-grandma taught me how to play gin rummy, I’ve enjoyed card and board games: Scrabble, Stratego, Mastermind, Monopoly, hearts, poker—the excitement of an athletic contest and the intellectual challenge of problem solving have always appealed to me, a nerd with a competitive streak. But growing up with a healthy respect for money—my family never seemed to have quite enough of it—I viewed gambling with the cultivated skepticism of a striver inculcated in the twin virtues of Work and Study. Casino games fascinated me, since they were games after all. But losing hundreds of dollars at roulette and craps and slot machines, “recreational pursuits” that seemed as rigged as a carnival barker’s ring toss, was anathema to my stolid constitution. Part of me wanted to be a big winner. I wanted to take the risk. I wanted to overcome the odds with my wits and my guile. But I didn’t have the heart for it. Perhaps that’s why I was attracted to the rare fellows who did.
When I meet Rick Matthews in the summer of 1997, I’m thirty-two, moderately successful by the standards of “normal” American life but an inconsequential piker compared with the people I profile in the world of professional gambling. As a freelance writer, I contribute articles to a wide array of magazines, including several men’s publications that like to publish stories about wagering and Las Vegas, about big scores and big characters who heroically do what all of us working stiffs haven’t the heart for, men and women who play by a set of rules different from the ones we good citizens assiduously follow on our road to the pension and retirement home. These journalist assignments require monthly jaunts to Nevada, which remind me how much I like games, winning at games, and also how blasé and predictable my middle-class life is, how devoid of risk and its fraternal twin, reward. My biggest gamble involves appearing on a televised game show (and losing). My average blackjack bet is ten dollars. The poker tables I sit at produce wins and losses in the hundreds, not hundreds of thousands. I’m tickled when a casino pit boss offers me a comp dinner at the coffee shop (drinks not included). I pay the mortgage, I save for the future, I buy clothes and cars and concert tickets—and it all amounts to a rather ordinary variation on the theme of American triumph: You work hard, you endure the countless indignities of the unprivileged plebian, and then you go quietly.
The excitement in my life revolves around Vivian, my girlfriend of a year, a woman who is decidedly, willfully not average, not the usual middle-class gal obsessed with marriage and children. Vivian is what moralists would call a “bad girl,” a libertine who refuses to subscribe to the code of feminine conduct prescribed by church and state. She’s a pagan, a voracious reader of philosophy and science, and an omnisexual hedonist. To Vivian, Las Vegas is an adult playground, where every day is Mardi Gras and even the nicest people can be corrupted by temptations of the flesh. In Los Angeles, where we live together, Viv is an executive at a hotel company, a competent and presentable corporate achiever in a proper pantsuit. But when I’ve got a story assignment in the desert she likes to let down her hair (literally) and sate her carnal appetites. We gamble and flirt and go to underground adult sex clubs to play, and I feel at those fantastic, extravagant moments that I’m not just another anonymous young man hoping to find his way in the world. I’m doing something extraordinary.
When I began pursuing Big Daddy for my book project, I wasn’t conscious of wanting to work for him. If anything, I was simply keen to be let in on the secrets, to be given a glimpse of the recipe for his particular brand of special sauce. To see how one of the real rebels staked his claim to a grand slice of the American dream. Now, on Sherwood’s eighth green, I tell Rick Matthews, “I respect your accomplishments. And I reckon a young man like me could learn an awful lot from someone as sharp as you.”
Searching for ulterior motives, Big Daddy stares at me intently, as though I were a poker player he’s assessing for signs of weakness. Then he grins and says, “Well, that might work.”
A few holes later, riding up Sherwood’s closely manicured eleventh fairway, Rick Matthews nonchalantly asks me, “Hey, pards, how’dya like to make a little money this football season?”
Would my dog like a rare porterhouse for lunch? Like most American men, I bet a recreational pittance on the NFL games, and, like most American men, I win a bunch of games and I lose a bunch of games. I’m sharp enough to pick winners approximately half the time, but the juice, the bookies’ 11–10 vigorish, eats me up in the long run. I’m lucky if I break even.
I tell Rick, “Sure, I’d like to hear how I could make some money betting on football. But could we talk about it later, after the round? I need to concentrate. I’m playing for twenty bucks after all.”
“Sure we can,” Big Daddy agrees, chuckling softly.
We golf. He goes about his business with chilly precision and I don’t, so the outcome of our match is never in doubt. No matter how much I try to concentrate on tee shots and birdie putts, for most of the time I mull over whatever proposition might be awaiting me after the round.
When we’re back in the clubhouse, Rick spells out the plan: We’re going to be “partners,” which means I’ll bet his money as instructed. I’ll be part of his team of bettors, a squadron of associates who help him wager the enormous amounts of money he invests on every game. I’m not to play hunches. I’m not to divulge his picks to anyone. I’m not to reveal the source of “my” handicapping skill. And I’m supposed to wager all that I can.
Because of his reputation and the low limits the casinos impose upon him, Big Daddy Matthews can’t bet his own money in most places, and he certainly can’t bet enough to make it worth his while. He needs people like me to help him “get down,” to get his huge bankroll in play. In return for this valuable service, I’ll be entitled to 10 percent of the net profits. If we lose (“which ain’t gonna happen”), he absorbs the hit; if we win, I get paid a potentially substantial fee. I pay taxes on my share, he pays on his, and everyone gets rich. “Plus, one day when we’re all through you can write a helluva book.”
I’m going to contribute a small minority interest in the bankroll, which will mean I’m betting my own money as well, but the casinos may look upon this distinction as rhetorical hairsplitting. I ask Rick why he just doesn’t get one of the usual suspects, a salaried sportsbook runner, a human mule, to do the deed. He tells me that it would look better if a hotshot Hollywood type—or at least a guy who can play the part—flew into Vegas each weekend, looking like hundreds of other high-rolling suckers. Plus, Rick explains, I’m comfortable in the casino environment; I know the vernacular, and I can convincingly imitate the habits of a hopeless loser.
And most important, he says, he’s got a strong instinct that he can trust me.
Big Daddy Matthews has just invited me to join his team, the organization that those in the know call the Brain Trust.
I nod soberly and tell him I’ll think about it.
But I already know I’m in.
The next week I have supper with my friend Spanish Jack, one of the best seven-card-stud players in the world. Over margaritas at a downtown Los Angeles Mexican restaurant, I tell Spanish Jack about my opportunity to work with Big Daddy. Jack says that Rick Matthews has a reputation throughout the gambling world as a snake, a rat, a back-stabber, and every other lowdown epithet you could imagine. “He’s the most successful gambler of all time. He’s probably won fifty to a hundred million. But you don’t want to be his partner. He just can’t stand not getting the best of every transaction. I’m sure he’s great to work for. He pays, and pays well. But you don’t want to have to trust him.”
I’ve heard similar innuendos before from other professional gambler acquaintances, but I don’t want to believe them.
I’m still deliberating two weeks later when a men’s magazine assigns me to write a story about Las Vegas. It’s a good excuse to interview Eric “Jox” Brijox, the man who creates the Las Vegas line, the guy whose job it is to make it difficult for people like Big Daddy to make a living. We’re sitting in Jox’s office, a brightly lit workspace decorated with sports memorabilia, in a corporate park not far from the Vegas airport.
Jox, a former statistician with a major aerospace concern, has a pasty complexion and thick eyeglasses befitting a fellow who spends most of his waking hours in front of a computer monitor analyzing batting averages and rebounds per game. The Las Vegas casinos—and dozens of others around the world—pay Jox a monthly fee to help them set their opening point-spread numbers, which Rick Matthews and friends subsequently comb for weaknesses to exploit. Jox doesn’t like Big Daddy. He says Matthews is a compulsive liar and a scoundrel in general, a guy who refuses to follow the casinos’ rules on betting limits. I can see the distaste on Jox’s pale, boyish face when he talks about his chief nemesis.
Without revealing that I’m pondering joining the Brains, I tell Jox that I’ll probably take a shot at beating football this season. I tell him I’ve come into a substantial amount of money and that my neighbor, a computer whiz, has a program that can pick something like 60 percent winners (52.4 percent is break-even). Does Jox have any thoughts?
He tells me he’s skeptical and says that if I ended up the season losing only a little he would consider it a huge success.
I glance over Jox’s shoulder at the framed photo of Secretariat winning the Triple Crown at Belmont. I say I’m confident of my system. “I’m planning on betting a lot. Might as well put my money where my mouth is, right? Any reason I shouldn’t?”
“Because you’re probably going to lose!” Jox predicts, chortling. “I make a pretty good line, you know.”
I think about how Jox sets that line, how hundreds and thousands of sports statistics are fed into a computer on an hourly basis, stats that are analyzed by a program created and fine-tuned by Jox and his crew of geniuses. For the average sports gambler, Jox’s line is tough. “The best,” I reply reverentially. But I’m thinking, It’s not infallible.
Outside Jox’s window, another plane lands at McCarran Airport, depositing hundreds of fresh suckers in the desert. Their cumulative wisdom about gambling wouldn’t come close to equaling what Eric Brijox knows about risk and reward. Yet even he, I realize, can’t stop syndicates like the Brain Trust from beating the Las Vegas sportsbooks. There’s a reason they’re called the Brains: They simply seem to know more than anyone else does. To most casual players, the point spreads are as solid as the commemorative baseball bat, signed by Reggie Jackson, hanging on the wall behind Brijox’s head. To Rick Matthews, they’re as fragile as a crystal champagne flute.
“Here’s my plan,” I explain. “Either I’m as good as I think, or I’m going to go down in flames. So I’m going to bet as much as I can afford.” We talk about the Kelly Criterion, a formula for determining the optimal percentage of one’s bankroll to wager on each game, and other mathematical arcana beloved of serious gamblers and math wonks—but really I just want to put the proposition in front of Jox. I know if I end up betting big sums, some sportsbook manager is going to call Jox the Linemaker and ask, Who the hell is this precocious kid? If Jox tells them I’m just some punk writer, things might look suspicious; if he says I’m a gambling author with the dumb luck to have a big bankroll and a funny idea in his head that he can beat football—well, then they’ll probably be happy to take my action.
Jox asks how much I want to bet. I tell him I don’t know—$20,000 to start, $30,000, maybe even $40,000, depending on how good my system is. Jox laughs. “That’s going to be tough to bet that much. There’s only one guy who knows how to get that much down. You want that kind of action, you better get in tight with a guy like Rick Matthews.”
I swallow hard and try to keep a straight face.