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Posted by on Aug 3, 2014 in Blog, General Poker, Sports Betting, World Series of Poker | 4 comments

Mickey Appleman to the Core

 

mickey-appleman-1996

I snapped this photo of Mickey Appleman outside Binion’s Horseshoe at the 1996 World Series of Poker.

 

One glance at Mickey Appleman, and you know he defies description.

If familiar at all, known to some as the old-school poker player with the hippie look who’s still stuck in the 1960s, Appleman has in fact lived an extraordinary life with more financial and emotional swings than just about anyone else who self-describes themselves a “professional gambler.”

Now 69, Appleman rarely makes appearances inside poker rooms anymore, except for the annual World Series of Poker, where he’s won four gold bracelets.  He’s also been playing daily at the Bellagio during the last month, where he still somehow grinds out a tough living playing against competition young enough to be his grandchildren.  One seriously doubts that many of those who sit down at the poker table with the shaggy-haired icon from New York City have the faintest idea of the incredible experiences Appleman has lived over the past five decades.

HERE’S AN INTERVIEW I DID WITH APPLEMAN BACK IN 2000.

Appleman spoke to the BARGE poker convention this past Saturday night.  I had the great privilege of not only hearing him speak for a second time but of sitting with him and reminiscing over the old days.  A few years ago, Appleman spoke at a similar gathering held in Atlantic City that I attended.  Although intentionally shy by nature and largely withdrawn from the rest of society, and hardly trained as a public speaker, Appleman’s Atlantic City speech was one of the most amazing biographical half hours I’ve ever heard described by anyone.  And that’s why he was invited back to speak again, this time to the Las Vegas group, which was made up of 200 poker players from all over the country.

I contrast the two speeches with a higher purpose in mind, so bear with me.

In that first speech, Appleman talked about his life in and out of gambling.  Few people know that his earliest ambition in life was to work with inner-city youth and help poor people.  Appleman lived and worked in some of the toughest neighborhoods in America, all right after the 1968 riots.  He not only worked as a teacher but embedded himself in the local culture.  He became a friend to those who lacked mentors, certainly none with Appleman’s background.  An avid athlete who always loved and played pick-up basketball on playgrounds, Appleman used to go out on the court where he’d be the only white person in the so-called “bad neighborhood.”  This might not seem like such a big deal now, but back in 1968 when there were race riots in many ghettos, that took real courage.  Appleman even remembered some of the local neighborhoods being controlled by the Black Panthers.  Nevertheless, he was accepted and helped people who needed desperately a hand up and a good deed.

Knowing Appleman’s story as I do, there’s a profound sadness to the fact he didn’t continue such a noble pursuit.  I wonder how many lives might have been transformed with Appleman’s sincerity and conviction.  I wonder how much some localities might have benefited from Appleman and people like him gaining a foothold in areas where little hope exists to this day.  I wonder how much more fulfillment teaching and social work might have given to Appleman personally, who was eventually forced out of the inner city (which is another long story) which led to him finding a new passion and way of life.

Of course, we all know what Appleman eventually became.  He’s now a professional gambler on par with the better-known legends — be it Doyle Brunson or Billy Baxter, both of whom he partnered with for decades.

The stories of those wild and reckless days are endless.  Six-figure swings.  Getting stiffed.  Golf.  Sports betting.  Poker.  Boxing.  Appleman and his pals lived like royalty.

One of Appleman’s best stories was the occasion he bet on Ferdinand to win the Kentucky Derby and ended up winning $1.2 million.  This was back in the 1980s, making the huge score equal to nearly $3 million today.  Back then, virtually all betting was through illegal bookies, much of it controlled by organized crime.  Appleman, a native New Yorker, won more than a million on a single race.  The problem was — getting paid.

The Mafia would pay off any winning sports bet, but this was a huge number, even for them.  After all, if word leaked out on the streets that the local bookie wasn’t good for the money, the suckers wouldn’t continue playing, pumping money into the coffers of men with vowels on the ends of their last names.  Anyway, Appleman was invited to a pre-arranged sit down with one of the powerful bosses of a crime family where the motley pair — Appleman looking like a rock guitarist sitting across the table from a syndicate capo who could wipe this problem off his balance sheet with a simple phone call — ended up negotiating a final settle up figure.  I won’t give away the gritty details — which deserve treatment in a book.  Let’s just say Appleman’s experience of being “too good a handicapper” would occasionally produce some dangerous consequences.

Another story told by Appleman at that first talk in Atlantic City was the time he started coming out to the World Series of Poker during the late 1970s.  Everyone took one glance at him with the long hair and dark shades and instantly thought he was a drug dealer.  But that wasn’t the case.  Appleman was one of them, which made him such a beloved compatriot amongst men in cowboy hats who seemed to be such polar opposites.

“Jack Binion took an immediate liking to me — I really don’t know why,” I remember Appleman saying.  “That was a good thing as it enabled me to be welcomed in that group which wasn’t easy to fit into.  My life changed because of Jack.”

Appleman bet staggering amounts of money over the years, many times risking up to half a million dollars on a single ball game.  There were lots of winners.  But also, some devastating losses.

“I’ve had many ‘sure things,’ that lost,” Appleman said.

When Appleman returned last night to the place where he’s lived so much of his colorful life, the memories came back to him.  Remarkably, this was Appleman’s first occasion to step back into Binion’s (Horseshoe) in ten years.  There was a lingering sadness on his face throughout the evening, etched and echoed by lines and crinkles of hard living and incessant stress.  Appleman told me later that this night that coming back to Binion’s after all those years was a painful process.  He remembered times when his wife, now deceased, had spent with him here.  He remembered high-stakes poker games that he’d played, replaced now by empty tables clouded with dust.  He recalled hanging out inside the sportsbook and watching games that had the equivalent of a new house riding on inaction, where no betting parlor now exists.  Mickey Appleman came and saw ghosts.  Now long gone, these ghosts of the past remain in memory and shall last only as long as those who were there remain among the living.

And so the time finally came for Appleman to finally take the stage and give his talk.  What would he say?  Which stories would he share among so many to chose from?

Looking much like the same man I first met twenty years ago but weathered by time, Appleman took the stage and stood in front of the microphone before a group that was silent.  Some among us remembered the Atlantic City speech.  For others, this occasion would be a first-time introduction to Appleman.

He began by telling us about his life in college, working in the inner city, and quite by accident stumbling into a career as a professional gambler.  Oddly enough, his best stories were those which weren’t poker-related.  Take for instance the time when Appleman flew to Zaire (Africa) to attend the Muhammad Ali-George Forman fight which became known as “THE RUMBLE IN THE JUNGLE.”  That amazing experience was filmed in a documentary called “When We Were Kings.”

Among the amazing tales from that trip, Appleman told of landing in Kinshasa, then under the brutal dictatorship of Mobuto.  There were no hotel rooms anywhere in the country for the big fight which was the grandest sporting event Africa had ever seen.  Appleman and his “connected” pals arrived without any room reservations.  The wise guys somehow managed to corner Don King in an elevator where they demanded rooms — “or else.”  Three hotel rooms magically became available.

The Muhammad Ali sidebar merits some pursuit.  Appleman’s hero has always been Ali.  He told of the cruel juxtaposition of betting a huge sum of money against Ali when Larry Holmes beat “The Greatest” to a bloody pulp in the tragic 1980 championship fight at Caesars Palace (Ali’s final time in the ring).  The beating likely contributed to Ali now being a mental basket case, unable to speak.  Oddly, collecting what amounted to $400,000 after that fight set Appleman into a depression.  Sure, he won the bet.  But in the process, he watched one of his heroes destroyed as a human being.  Indeed, that would become the painful concordance of all gambling, that for every winner there is also a loser, for every gain, a more profound and deeply personal measure of defeat.

Appleman continued on recalling huge sports bets he made, each with a deeper and more progressive poignancy than the one before.  He also shared the emotional devastation of suffering losses, none bigger than the week his son was born.

In 1987, Appleman had his first and only child.  Leading up to a day that should have been the happiest of his life, he ended with the worst string of financial losses of his life.  In a single week, Appleman lost more than a million dollars.  He tried to sell what he could to pay “people who weren’t used to waiting for their money,” as he described it.  He sold off racehorses and properties in what amounted to a fire sale and still didn’t have enough money.  The losses continued to the point where Appleman was completely flat broke and owed $400,000 to the mob on the very day that his son was born.

The grimace on Appleman’s face and the sadness in his eyes as he told his story — still deeply within him some 25 years later — lingers perhaps even more deeply today than way back then.  With plenty of time to remember and reflect, those moments in life, so rare and precious, became tainted with pain.

There was more.  So much more.  Only there wasn’t nearly enough time to tell all the tales or recall the names we know and adventures we long to hear more about.  As a speaker, Appleman only scratched the surface of his remarkable life, giving us an all-too-brief snapshot portrait of a man who mostly walks among us anonymously these days, virtually unknown by anyone outside the inner circles of a now seemingly ancient poker cadre.

Following his keynote address to the group, Appleman exited the stage at Binion’s, in the same room where he’d won some of his greatest poker victories.  He sat down and quietly returned to someone more comfortable within himself rather than in the public eye, a vulnerability masked by a hard almost impenetrable outer shell which masks all the demons inside.

When the night finally came to an end, Appleman and I were standing around and chatting with others who attended the speech.  That’s when he pulled out a small piece of paper from his breast pocket.  On that paper were a lot of scribbled notes.

“That was my original speech,” he said.  “But I decided not to do it.  Instead, I just got up there and it all suddenly came to me.  I talked from the heart.  I looked out and saw all those people having a good time and it came back to me.  All the good and the bad that had happened.  It just came back to me when I was standing up there.”

Incredibly, Appleman had pre-written a speech in which he intended to tell some old poker stories and relay tales of adventure.  But rather than simply rehash the past and keep his most inner thoughts hidden, on the spot Appleman decided to look out into the crowd and share what has been a melting pot of ups and downs, both financial and emotional.

Last night, where all were immensely privileged to share Appleman’s susceptibility to consciousness and reflection.  Such is a path is not easy to take, either while alone and certainly not in a room full of strangers.  If Appleman’s long journey to now has been amazing and fraught with jaw-dropping remembrances, then his willingness to apportion those joys and moments of pain and defeat makes us all both richer and wiser.

Note:  To read more about BARGE and BARGE-related events, go HERE.

READ: Hanging out with Mickey Appleman

 

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Mickey Appleman (second from left) outside Binion’s in 2014, with (L to R) — Rich Korbin, Steven Goldman, Nolan Dalla

4 Comments

  1. I love Mickey Appleman! He is a long time friend and sometimes I forget what times we had together. We did tons of sports betting together and aganist each other. We had a sports figure (we didn’t check very often) that was off $700,000 dollars. We tried to go back over the time we hadn’t checked figures, and couldn’t find the error or errors. We finally agreed to split it! The funniest part of that story is that I can’t remember if it was in my favor or Mickeys. I’ll bet he can’t either. That was us in the “early days”.

  2. Being from Cleveland, his talk both in AC and Las Vegas mentioned his start in Cleveland. I know the school area he played basketball. I would have nevet gone into that area ever. I knew some of the people he referenced when he mentioned Jackie Presser and related minions. It brought back some vivid memories both personal and those related to me by my parents (my mom went to high school with Billy Weinberger). I was friends with the attorneys who represented Presser and the Teammates Central States Pension fund. I also swear I remember Mickey from Cleveland just because of the closeness of the Jewish community. I had the pleasure of sitting next to Mickey at the At large dinner and I can attest to him being a very sincere and genuinely caring person. Just happy I was present for both talks as

  3. I wish I had been in Vegas to attend this. Appleman is a true character and legend of the game. I hope that one day you get around to writing that book on him. The poker world needs to be reminded of players like Mickey.

  4. Mickey is one of the special hand full of friends, along with tree top, stuie, sexton, Tuna, brad, betty carey, Mckelvy and hoff, etc, I made at the horseshoe WSOP when Benny and Jack owned it. It was always a time of excitement and fantasy being around them… from the sports, poker and golf to the stake house sky room dinners..that would last for 2-3 hrs. The amount of money
    wagered and changing hands with them was toxicating…
    but as soon as that bet or prop concluded ..the talk and dare was a bigger one next where the looser would go out on a limb with some crazy statement that the winner had to take him up on it. All this was in total good sport by men who’s honour was more valuably stated at the time of paying off a losing bet then the high felt by the receiving winner. The strange thing for me was I didn’t play or bet on their level, except for the few occasions I had a bank roll to take a piece of Strauses, or Mckelys action, but I was accepted into the decisions of their circle, trusted, when all the bets and props were being made. I was in dream land. I was broke most of the time,
    but there were many times at the end of the day Jack would give me my ‘free roll’.. perhaps 20- $25,000 at the end of the day. that’s in the early eighties.
    In any case Ill tell you one story about Mickey, I don’t think he’ll mind. Some time in around about 1988 when the basekets started we had a regular poker game at Conrad sour in Houston run by Mickey perry. All the high players played there including some wealthy Houston businessmen. Now as usual I would be broke but would always manage to fine a buy in or two , which could turn, in a few games, into a good bankroll for vegas. I would come in early , about 5pm, (the game started about 7), so I could sit in on the private phone call Mickey got every day from a mystery man at about 5:30 – 5:45 pm. (as I said I was always taken into bets and betting information like a trusted brother). He was getting the 12 -16 basket plays every night, and did so for about 4 months straight. He would then make his bets to the half dozen books on his list…a dime or two on each game , all 16 of them, to each bookie! At first I didn’t pay much attention to the figures mickey Perry was compiling until one night he was in a desperate way to reach new bookies with his face turning red in panic and excitement he said there goes 15 dimes I lost by not getting into him?! Then I took note what was happening… and I know no one will believe it but he was winning 12, 13, 14 ,15, some nights all 16 out of 16 bets for 1 and 2 dimes in 4-5 places!!?? 50-60,000 a night. this was about 1986 or 87. The end up was in 3 months , before Xmas time he had every bookey he was dealing with broke and oughing him tens of thousands. He was winning 300 – 400,000 a week. He won a few million during this run! Here’s why I told this story… I finally found out after words who the mystry man was , where the plays were coming from. Back east….. from a genies with a computer , handicapping … you guessed it.. Mickey Appleman. Besides being brilliant Mickey is a mystic, one of a kind that I have always been able to, in his presence, immediately connect with. doc

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