Memoir

Rounders

Rounders

If you haven’t seen the movie, Rounders, and you enjoy an occasional game of poker with friends, you really must find a way to see the movie. It was made in 1998, so it has more or less modern production value and yet its got the patina of age that makes it a classic. There are other great poker movies like Molly’s Game, The Cincinnati Kid, and Maverick, but almost everyone agrees that Rounders is by far the best. It has an all-star cast headed by Matt Damon, with Ed Norton as the bottom-dealing Worm and a host of great supporting cast like John Turturro as grinder Knish, John Malkovich as Teddy KGB and Martin Landau as the professor. What makes this movie so good is a combination of the Damon narration, the poker-playing action scenes and the ups and downs of the rounders’ roller coaster ride that inevitably plagues gambling addicts. The movie is well-cast, well-written, well-acted and well-directed, and that is a hard combination to match. Think of it as the pocket aces of poker films.

I grew up playing poker because of my time living in Maine, when I used to caddy at the local resort golf course. I was a big twelve-year-old in 1966 and having moved from the suburbs of Madison, Wisconsin to the Vacationland of Maine, living right on the eighteenth hole of the Poland Spring Golf Course, I was primed for summer employment as a caddy. In the years gone by, in the heyday of the revival of Poland Springs as an important summer spot for the Boston carriage trade, they actually had a proper caddy camp, but this was a bygone era in the mid-60’s and caddying was just a rag-tag way for local kids to make a few bucks. There was plenty of business and many days I would get two loops, most often with two bags. That translates to carrying two large golf bags (I have the notches in my shoulders to this day to prove that I was doing that) for two rounds of eighteen holes…on a very hilly course. We used to have a flat rate of $3.50 per bag per loop. To set that into perspective, the minimum wage in 1966 was $1.10. Goggle tells me that it was technically $1.25, so in typical fashion, I am now learning that someone at the golf shop was either scamming us poor caddies or they just hadn’t gotten the news yet way up in the north country. But even at $1.10, a four-hour normal loop should have drawn $4.40. I guess it was a more perfect market than I realized, because unless you got the bad luck of caddying for cheap bastard (which happened one in five times), you got paid $5.00 for the loop with tip. But for that tip, you had to clean the clubs at the end and put them in the guy’s trunk as well.

This all meant that if I dedicated my day from 7:00am to about 5:00pm and I got lucky on the timing, I would earn $20.00 and maybe get a hot dog and a soda paid for me for lunch. That was a hard day’s work to say the least. To put it into context, these days our Apple step meters tell us to get 10,000 steps, which is 5 miles of walking. A normal loop is 5 miles, so I would do 20,000 steps plus walking to and from the golf course, which was probably another 4,000, so call it 25,000 steps per day carrying two 35-pound golf bags. As best I can tell, that translates to almost 6,000 calories burned per day. It took a lot of hot dogs and Fritos to keep you going for days like that.

So, now imagine you have just double-looped with two Kangaroo Bags (the heavy leather monsters that probably weighed 40+ pounds) and you were sitting in the old tiled locker room with the other gritty caddies, who ranged in age from fifteen to fifty (the older ones mostly being wiry local winos with only half their teeth). They all knew that this twelve-year old midwestern hayseed had $20.00 in his pocket and they probably also knew that he was the son of the woman who had come to Poland Spring to run this government give-away project called the Job Corps. They may have even known that she was earning about a $20,000 salary (a tidy sum in those days), since the local papers had published the 60’s equivalent of a FOYA disclosure on who was making what at the new government installation. That big, dumb kid certainly didn’t need all of that $20.00, right? Guess what? Let’s play cards for a fun end of the day. Between poker and Acey-Deucey, I stood a good chance of going home with empty pockets for my 6,000 calories of labor. It was a fine poker education at a fair (?) price.

My next real encounter with poker came when I got to college at Cornell in 1971. On the very first night in the dorm, once all the moms and dads had left this floor full of strapping young men to their own devices, a poker game began in the dorm lounge. I honestly don’t think that game ended until Christmas Break (It may have been put on pause for Thanksgiving), running pretty much 24×7 through orientation, into class time and even going full steam through even the final exam period for the semester. The damage done to the lives of about a half dozen aspiring engineers, doctors and poets was immeasurable. One guy who had a marker for about $7,000 (equivalent then of about two semester’s tuition) just disappeared one night, never to be seen or heard from again. I got into that game on the first night figuring that my caddy shack training would serve me well. I had worked for the summer in Cleveland and saved enough money to get myself to Ithaca (hitchhiking) and get myself started at school. Mom was off somewhere in Colombia at a UN project and would come to say hello in October, but until then, I was on my own and expected to feed myself from my summer earnings. In other words, money was dear and I was learning the hard way about budgeting the cost of living in a new and wondrous land called the American college campus.

I don’t remember the table stakes for that game and I don’t really even remember the exact poker games we used to play. All I remember was the blur of losing $30.00 I could not afford to lose in about the same time it took the wiry old caddy masters to take my hard-earned money in the locker room. Luckily, I liked to eat more than I liked to lose money playing poker, so I bailed out after an hour of play to lick my financial wounds. I never once again sat down at the poker table that freshman year and thank God for that. I would actually walk around the lounge to avoid the temptation, since the smell of educational tragedy lingered in that corner like the old sweat socks that everyone wore.

I played a bit of poker in my business career and can remember some especially profitable and equally costly games, especially at partners’ meetings when a subgroup of us would head off after dinner and not stop playing for the rest of the night until breakfast. Between the caddy shack and the freshman lounge, I was always well-prepared to understand my limits and I never did too much damage to myself despite the egregious amounts of money we all had from our Wall Street gigs.

Last night, Mike and Melisa had a group of us over for poker. We played for three hours and since the stakes were $1/$2 blinds with $2/$4 limits (Texas Hold’em), it was what you would call a friendly neighborhood game. I went cold for the first hour, hot for the second hour and dribbled much of my winnings back over the third hour. I wound up down about $60, which was a fair price for an evening’s entertainment. It was great and somewhat reminiscent fun for me, but like the tell at the end of Rounders, I folded on the last hand rather than play an unsuited 10-6, and that told me all I need to know about me and poker. We are friends who understand each other just fine, and neither of us needs one another, though we do like to hang out together occasionally.