American Poker Players: Damon Runyon

Damon Runyon is a distinguished writer for his talented perception and portrayal of an America not commonly given to glory. In the years between World Wars, he wrote of bettors, bootleggers and Broadway.

After the scandals of political corruption and payoffs of the 1920s, the Stock Market collapse in1929, and ensuing Great Depression "30s, Runyon's tales of gamblers and gangsters who endeavored to beat the odds found a sympathetic audience.

His characters lived on the edge often caught in life's roll of the dice. Criminals, hustlers, con artists, and cheats filled his frequently humorous stories about big city backstreets and underground figures of the Prohibition Era.

Damon Runyon's stories were often filled with real life characters. One such story, featuring notorious New York crime czar Arnold Rothstein as Nathan Detroit, was eventually made into Guys and Dolls, a hit Broadway musical.

But Runyon's roots were far from the Great White Way. Born in Kansas in 1880, he grewup in Pueblo, Colorado. At age eight, his mother died of TB. His three sisters were sent to live with grandparents in Kansas not to be seen again for 30 years. He and his father, a typesetter, shared a shanty with one cot.

He got a job as a reporter for a Pueblo paper when he was 15. Eventually he moved to Denver, became a well known member of the Press Club where, one biographer says, he spent "many hours with a whiskey in one hand and a poker hand in the other".

In 1910, Runyon headed for New York where he got a job as a sports writer. He covered baseball and boxing in the Big Apple for ten years. His beat, as well as his personal gambling activities, brought him into contact with gamblers, touts, jockeys, bookies, boxers and bad guys. Runyon learned who was who, what was what, where it went, and who got it.

Despite his firsthand knowledge of just how crooked was horse racing and sports; Runyon was nevertheless an inveterate gambler. Sunday nights were always "wash" nights at Lindy's, a high class NY restaurant and rendezvous.

Here, he would meet with his bookies to settle the previous week's action. Runyon had a front row seat for Prohibition, an era when crime became a national pastime and the underworld seemed to have more power than the government. Reporter and aspiring commercial writer, Runyon counted among his associates the celebrities of early organized crime.

Sports were just beginning to emerge as big league entertainment and as fertile ground for graft. The leading kingpin of crime, Arnold Rothstein, is believed to have been the one behind the 1919 World Series fix.

When newcomer Jack Dempsey upset Jess Willard in a major title fight, it was fixed. Realizing that Al Capone and others were all banking underdog Dempsey because they already knew the outcome, Runyon bet all he could get on Dempsey. At the time, it was common practice for reporters to bet the sports they covered.

Although the much bigger Willard was the heavy favorite, each of Dempsey's hands was taped around a lead pipe.

With a tremendous right and left, Dempsey dropped Willard to the canvas with a severely broken jaw and crushed ribs. The end for Willard, it was the beginning of the Dempsey legend. In 1928, Runyon was dining with Arnold Rothstein at Lindy's when the king of crime received a phone call. Rothstein had to meet someone at the Park-Central Hotel. The two buddies walked together to the nearby hotel. Waiting in the lobby for the gangster, Runyon heard the crackle of pistol shots. The King was dead.

It seems that at the end of a three day, high stakes poker game with other mobsters several months earlier, Rothstein owed $320,000. Overly confident of his position and power, he claimed the game was fixed, refused to pay, and left. Bluff or belief, he bet his life... and lost.

Reporter Runyon's inside accounts of the sensational front page murder brought him wide recognition. His short-stories, filled with gambling and underworld characters, told in the vernacular, using the colorful language, slang and accents of New York, captured the public's imagination and interest. His stories began appearing in the foremost magazines of the era - Collier's, Cosmopolitan and Saturday Evening Post.

For Runyon, in the Game of Life, the odds "are six to five against" winning. He accepted gambling, hustling, conning, and cheating - all part of the human condition - were simply efforts to beat the odds. His stories and characters reflected a gambler's understanding and compassion, best summed up by his admonition, "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way to bet it."

Hollywood, too, recognized there was a market for his work. In 1934, his story, "Little Miss Marker", about a gambler who leaves his little girl with a bookie to hold until he returns to pay his losses, was made into a movie. A big hit, it introduced Shirley Temple to moviegoers.

By the time Damon Runyon died in 1946, 16 of his stories had been made into films. Perhaps more than any other writer, he defined and characterized the underworld of gambling, horse racing, boxing, and baseball during the Roaring Twenties.

Through his work, he helped shape America's image of Prohibition and the Golden Age of Gangsters.