The Three Battles of Wanat

by Mark Bowden

  Johnson did not miss the math. For example, at the Trop, he was willing to play with a 20 percent discount after his losses hit $500,000, but only if the casino structured the rules of the game to shave away some of the house advantage. Johnson could calculate exactly how much of an advantage he would gain with each small adjustment in the rules of play. He won’t say what all the adjustments were in the final e-mailed agreement with the Trop, but they included playing with a hand-shuffled six-deck shoe; the right to split and double down on up to four hands at once; and a “soft seventeen” (the player can draw another card on a hand totaling six plus an ace, counting the ace as either one or eleven, while the dealer must stand, counting the ace as eleven). When Johnson and the Trop finally agreed, he had whittled the house edge down to one-fourth of 1 percent, by his figuring. In effect, he was playing a fifty-fifty game against the house, and with the discount, he was risking only eighty cents of every dollar he played. He had to pony up $1 million of his own money to start, but, as he would say later, “You’d never lose the million. If you got to [$500,000 in losses], you would stop and take your 20 percent discount. You’d owe them only $400,000.”

  In a fifty-fifty game, you’re taking basically the same risk as the house, but if you get lucky and start out winning, you have little incentive to stop.

  So when Johnson got far enough ahead in his winning sprees, he reasoned that he might as well keep playing. “I was already ahead of the property,” he says. “So my philosophy at that point was that I can afford to take an additional risk here, because I’m battling with their money, using their discount against them.”

  According to Johnson, the Trop pulled the deal after he won a total of $5.8 million, the Borgata cut him off at $5 million, and the dealer at Caesars refused to fill the chip tray once his earnings topped $4 million.

  “I was ready to play on,” Johnson said. “And I looked around, and I said, ‘Are you going to do a fill?’ I’ve got every chip in the tray. I think I even had the $100 chips. ‘Are you guys going to do a fill?’ And they just said, ‘No, we’re out.’”

  He says he learned later that someone at the casino had called the manager, who was in London, and told him that Don Johnson was ahead of them “by four.”

  “Four hundred thousand?” the manager asked.

  “No, four million.”

  So Caesars, too, pulled the plug. When Johnson insisted that he wanted to keep playing, he says, the pit boss pointed out of the high-roller pit to the general betting floor, where the game was governed by normal house rules.

  “You can go out there and play,” he said.

  Johnson went upstairs and fell asleep.

  These winning streaks have made Johnson one of the best-known gamblers in the world. He was shocked when his story made the front page of the Press of Atlantic City. Donald Wittkowski, a reporter at the newspaper, landed the story when the casinos filed their monthly revenue reports.

  “I guess for the first time in thirty years, a group of casinos actually had a huge setback on account of one player,” Johnson told me. “Somebody connected all the dots and said it must be one guy.”

  The Trop has embraced Johnson, inviting him back to host a tournament—but its management isn’t about to offer him the same terms again. (Even so—playing by the same rules he had negotiated earlier, according to Johnson, but without a discount—he managed to win another $2 million from the Tropicana in October.)

  “Most properties in Atlantic City at this point won’t even deal to him,” Rodio says. “The Tropicana will continue to deal to him, we will continue to give aggressive limits, take care of his rooms and his accounts when he is here. But because he is so far in front of us, we have modified his discounts.”

  Johnson says his life hasn’t really changed all that much. He hasn’t bought himself anything big, and still lives in the same house in Bensalem. But in the past year, he has hung out with Jon Bon Jovi and Charlie Sheen, sprayed the world’s most expensive bottle of champagne on a crowd of clubgoers in London, and hosted a Las Vegas birthday bash for Pamela Anderson. He is enjoying his fame in gambling circles, and has gotten used to flying around the world on comped jets. Everybody wants to play against the most famous blackjack player in the world.

  But from now on, the casinos will make sure the deck remains comfortably against him.

  Attila’s Headset

  New Yorker, November 2002

  In his debut performance as head coach of the Washington Red skins—a home victory over the Arizona Cardinals on September 8—Steve Spurrier was among the injured. It was hardly surprising, given his flea-on-a-griddle exertions on the sidelines. He paced, he fidgeted, he shouted, he pleaded, he writhed, he leaped, he threw his handwritten laminated play sheets on the ground in anger or waved them impatiently to demand someone’s attention. When his offense left the field, he dropped to one knee and bore into his play sheets, scratching his head and grimacing; and when the offense took the field again, he was back in motion, leaning into passes and kicks as if he’d launched the ball himself. Sometimes, in a game, he will peer up at his assistant coaches in their boxes high in the mezzanine and throw his arms open wide, as if to say, “Help me out here, will ya!” He is a virtuoso of facial expression, with features that twist, flex, bend, stretch, slacken, and knot like putty, reflecting every nuance of mood during a game. In the opener, a bulky headset sat astride his sun visor, a trademark accessory that he had flung from his head many times during twelve seasons with the University of Florida Gators. He fiddled with the headset constantly. When one of his successful plays was nullified by a holding penalty, Spurrier tore it off and sliced his middle finger.

  “The earphones had that little sponge padding on them and the edge went right through it—cut me pretty good,” he said after the game, displaying the bandaged finger to a room crowded with reporters and cameras.

  In addition to the usual pack of Washington sportswriters, a number of scruffy writers from the Florida swamplands had shown up to see how their ol’ Gator “ballcoach” would fare in the big leagues. He did well this first time out, putting up thirty-one points (to Arizona’s twenty-three), dispelling predictions that his “collegiate system” would collapse in the face of a genuine pro defense. Spurrier faced the room with cheerful resignation, his usual pose in the spotlight. He is a lean, loose-limbed man with a mop of chestnut-colored hair and a quarterback’s physique. (He retired from the field twenty-five years ago, when he was thirty-two, and shows hardly a wrinkle or patch of gray hair.) After the hours he spent in the sun, his face was burned pink up to a distinct curving line under his eyes; above that, where the shadow of the visor had fallen, the skin was pale. His hair was tousled and matted with sweat, and his black cotton shirt—he has not worn the Redskins’ team colors, burgundy and gold, presumably because they resemble too closely the colors of his old rival FSU (Florida State University)—hung limp on his sloping shoulders. He looked pleased and weary, as if he had just finished playing in the game himself.

  In Washington, a city that straddles north and south, Spurrier’s down-home style has tilted the axis toward Dixie. For many years, the Redskins were the capital’s only big sports franchise, and pro football is followed there with a passion that unites its widely disparate social classes like nothing else. Fans now speak of their “ballcoach,” and the “ballplays” with which he plans to “pitch and catch” the Skins back to the Super Bowl. “Spurrier Dazzles in Debut” was the headline on the Washington Post columnist Thomas Boswell’s account of the Arizona Cardinals game.

  Spurrier built his career in a league that is made of raw talent and youthful exuberance. He says that there are only two ways to be successful. One is to work harder than everyone else; the other is to do things differently. He long ago chose the second path, refusing to work long hours. When practice breaks, he often runs on a treadmill and lifts weights for about an hour, and then he drives home.

  “He’s the opposite of a workaholic,” his wi
fe, Jerri, says. “He doesn’t overwork himself emotionally, mentally, or physically, and he doesn’t want those working for him to, either. If he sees them working late, he’ll kick them out. Some of them sneak back, but, eventually, when you work with Steve you get into that mode. You don’t have to grind, not in anything.”

  Normally, college coaches who reach the NFL spend years as relatively low-paid, overworked assistants. Pro coaches like to think they play a more sophisticated brand of football, so Spurrier’s sudden ascent was seen as an insult, and there has been some grumbling about the folly of bringing a collegiate system to the pros. The hard feelings were aggravated by Spurrier’s salary. Under the five-year contract he signed with the Redskins’ pugnacious young owner, Dan Snyder, he will earn almost $5 million a season—making him one of the highest-paid coaches in NFL history. Also, Spurrier is what even Jerri calls a “brat.” His zeal for winning extends well beyond the football field. His family avoids playing games with him. On the golf course he insists that his partners keep strict count of their strokes, and is known to needle them at the tee. In speeches and at press conferences, he sometimes teases or belittles his opponents. When he’s ahead, he tends to run up the score. He ridicules other coaches’ punishing work habits, tangles spiritedly with reporters, and has an unassailable confidence in his own eventual success. Judging by his season so far, he will need that confidence.

  After the opening win, the Redskins lost four of their next five games. This wasn’t surprising. It usually takes a head coach at least two years to rebuild a team in his own image. Spurrier has been successful wherever he has coached—at Florida, where he took over as head coach in 1990, he compiled a record-setting 122 wins (to just twenty-seven losses and one tie), won seven Southeastern Conference championships, and captured the national championship in 1996 by defeating his rival FSU—so his owner and his fans are likely to be patient with him. If he should do well—and many expect he will—he may change the definition of the job. “Steve Spurrier is the future,” Snyder told me. “I believe he will be very influential in the NFL, just as he has been in college ball.”

  Forty years ago, the exemplar for a football coach was Vince (“St. Vince”) Lombardi, the avuncular head of the Green Bay Packers. He was blunt and unassuming, intensely competitive, and unfailingly sportsmanlike, and he experienced victory only vicariously. Lombardi’s ethos of humility began to erode in the 1970s, when personalities like Don Shula, with the Miami Dolphins, and Tom Landry, with the Dallas Cowboys, assumed a status like that of CEOs in the increasingly corporate NFL. As the value of its franchises surged with television profits, and as the price for season tickets approached that of a small car, the teams’ front offices tripled or quadrupled in size and their coaching staffs expanded and specialized. Teams moved from cramped, dirty locker rooms in the basements of drafty stadiums to state-of-the-art, multimillion-dollar campuses, with sprawling air-conditioned offices, three or four training fields (each with a different style of turf), and NASA-style weight rooms and physical-therapy facilities. The head coach became a paragon of corporate leadership and public-relations savvy, working eighteen-hour days and seeking to control aspects of the team that had traditionally been the owner’s prerogatives—scouting and drafting players, negotiating contracts, managing the team’s salary cap. The mark of true status in today’s NFL is not just to be head coach but to run the whole show, to be general manager or president of football operations. Such ambitions sometimes get coaches into trouble. Marty Schottenheimer, Spurrier’s predecessor in Washington, was fired because, Snyder said, he wanted “power I wasn’t willing to give up.” Schottenheimer now coaches in San Diego.

  Spurrier wants less responsibility, not more. He shuns many of the traditional roles: he doesn’t mentor his players or get over-involved in scouting and recruiting talent. He has little or nothing to do with the team’s defense—for that, Snyder hired Marvin Lewis away from the Baltimore Ravens. The result so far has been disastrous—the Redskins defense has given up more points than all but a handful of teams. Spurrier delegates to assistants responsibility for coaching blockers, tacklers, kickers, and receivers, whom he calls “catchers.” He works primarily with his quarterbacks, his “pitchers.”

  And for that the NFL affords him a tool he never had in all his years of winning at the University of Florida. Eight seasons ago, the league decided to allow head coaches to talk by one-way radio directly to quarterbacks on the field between plays. Once the ball is officially replaced on the field after a play, the offense has forty seconds to plan before the next snap. For the first twenty-five of those seconds, the coach is allowed to talk to his quarterback, who has a transmitter in his helmet. It’s as close as Spurrier will ever get to being back on the field.

  In his debut game against the Cardinals, Spurrier rode the transmission button on his radio so heavily that his quarterback, Shane Matthews, complained afterward that on top of the general din of eighty-five thousand screaming fans he had to contend with the coach’s breathing, sideline conversations, and the relooped roar of the crowd piped into his helmet. Matthews was voted offensive Player of the Week in the National Football Conference for his performance. At that moment, the future looked bright for both the new coach and the quarterback. Matthews encountered Spurrier in a hallway underneath the field after the game, held out his hand, and congratulated his coach.

  “Some of it was you, some of it was me,” Spurrier told him. “We’ll sort it out when we look at the film.”

  Long after the rest of the team headed for the showers on the sunny campus of Redskins Park, in Ashburn, Virginia, this September, Spurrier stayed on the field with his three quarterbacks: Danny Wuerffel, Shane Matthews, and the rookie Patrick Ramsey. Wearing shorts and a white polo shirt with the collar turned up, Spurrier took snaps from center and, moving in slow motion, demonstrated again and again the proper execution of the three-step drop: head level, eyes downfield, ball poised under his right ear, arm cocked for a quick release. He was working with young men who have been playing quarterback—in high school, college, and the pros—for years, and still no detail of the mechanics was too minor for Spurrier’s further instruction.

  When he finished, he jogged off the field with the careful, slightly mincing steps of a middle-aged athlete whose knees are tender. He greeted the assembled local reporters who monitor the team daily—“Boys and girls, are you still here … I was trying to outlast you. I don’t want y’all to write that we stayed out here and practiced.”

  A few minutes later, I followed him into the air-conditioned Redskins building, where he has a big office with windows that look out over the practice fields. Framed photographs of Spurrier romping with his various championship teams—sweaty, bloodied, and gleeful, in the heady glory of victory—fill one wall. Another group of pictures features his family: Jerri and their four children and seven grandchildren, including a set of triplet boys. The desk was piled with paperwork. At one end was a well-thumbed, highlighted, underlined copy of The Art of War, by Sun Tzu, and on top of it the Wess Roberts bestseller, Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun. He picked it up.

  “I gave Dan Snyder this book,” he said. “There’s some good advice in there, the way Attila there used to treat his Huns, or the generals under him. It’s the same thing, Attila and his Huns, me and my players. There was one story in there. Attila lanced the boil on one of his soldiers and sucked out the pus and blood himself, and spit it away. The soldier’s mother cried when she heard the story. She was asked why it made her cry, and she said because Attila had done the same thing for her husband, the boy’s father, and afterward he had been so loyal he’d marched gladly off to his death in the front ranks of Attila’s armies. ‘Now my son will do the same,’ she said.”

  Spurrier is less likely to find this kind of selfless player in the pros than at the college level. NFL locker rooms are filled with cynical, hard-bitten athletes, most of whom have already tasted a measure of glory elsewhere, some of whom are in t
he game solely for the money, and some of whom know that their worth to the team—and their paycheck—easily outweighs the coach’s.

  Spurrier compiles and memorizes lists of coaching maxims. There are thirty on his “Guidelines for a Good Ball Coach.” Number one reads: “Treat all players fairly; the way they deserve to be treated.” Number eighteen: “Make the game fun for your players.” Number twenty: “Don’t ever use foul language in front of your players.” But Spurrier’s magic lies not primarily in planning and motivating—the traditional skills of the head coach—or even in devising the complex plays in his thick book, which sportswriters consider the key to his success. His talent is for calling plays. Among the thirty-two head coaches in the pros, he is unusual in having been a celebrated football player himself. He has a gift for thinking on his feet, for understanding game situations and reading defensive formations. In the seconds between plays, he chooses from the subtle variations in his playbook or invents minor adjustments on the spot in order to surprise and snare his opponent.

  For most coaches, victory is something carefully plotted in the film room, where the game’s mysteries are dissected. Unless you have the luxury of studying game film, slowing it down and isolating different portions of the field, and unless you know exactly what was supposed to happen on a given play, you can’t know for certain why most plays succeed or fail. The coach’s painstaking strategies for the next game are kept deliberately obscure. They are printed out by computer in long coded patterns on the laminated play cards that the coaches take to the sidelines. Spurrier is more improvisational. His handwritten play cards look like something he threw together over breakfast. His offensive style has been called the “fun ‘n’ gun,” because he disdains the slow, laborious methods that many NFL coaches consider basic for success in the pros. The traditional road to victory in football is to wear your opponents down. Spurrier prefers to fool them.