Raise or Fold

Author James McManus Takes a Gamble

By YVONNE DUTCHOVER

It was the perfect Las Vegas story: sleazy and exciting with high-stakes gambling, a high-profile murder, and a big win to spice up the pot. In 2000, James McManus received an assignment from Harper’s Magazine to cover the World Series of Poker. In the now-infamous tale, McManus used his Harper’s advance to enter the tournament himself, which eventually led not only to the article (included in The Best American Sports Writing of 2001) but to a book deal and a movie deal, not to mention a fifth-place finish in the tournament itself. Viva Las Vegas.

McManus had no idea whether or not his gamble would pay off. While he had played poker for 40 years, he had no experience going up against professional gamblers, and no illusions about his chances. McManus explained about the World Series, “This is not false modesty, but the odds are 9-to-1 against you in a one-table satellite, poker skills being equal. And certainly I was playing against people with much more experience than me, so it was probably more like 20-to-1. And I understood that.” But, he added, “I wasn’t going to go out and cover the World Series of Poker and not play.”

With the intention of playing in the tournament from the beginning, McManus said, “it seemed I was sort of falling into this thing. But what happened was the way I hoped it would happen. At the same time, I was right when I said that actually playing would make my coverage of the tournament better. If you have actual experience doing what the subjects of the piece are doing, you’re more likely to get the rhythm and texture down on paper.”

The Harper’s article “was going to be about women in poker, and book learning, and computers influencing the state of the game.” But as the tournament progressed, so did the story, and McManus found himself the center of attention. “When I managed to actually get into the tournament, and then I survived the first day and the second day, I became the center of the story. Not just for me, but for people who were writing about the tournament. So that was one way the poker story dramatically expanded.”

The other way the story expanded was that Ted Binion, the host of the tournament, had been murdered by his girlfriend and her lover and their high-profile murder trial was going on a block away from the tournament. The championship event ended on Thursday and on Friday the verdict came in. McManus was in the courtroom while the verdict was read. McManus explained, “The two big stories dovetailed so perfectly that it had to be a book, in a sense.”

Before McManus was a gambler, he was a professor and a writer. At SAIC, “I teach narrative non-fiction. Usually I teach an undergraduate literature course, a graduate seminar in writing or grad workshop, and then I have grad projects.” He also teaches the Science and Literature of Poker in the spring. “That’s been regular for the last couple of years. I’ll probably do that for another year or two. The students have responded well to the course and the material keeps getting richer because there’s a lot of poker literature being produced right now.”

The explosion of poker literature in recent years “goes back to the mid 1980s,” McManus explained. “Poker for 150 years was an all-male game, played by rough customers, swindlers, cheats, tough guys. You needed to be able to get in and out of town with the money and your life. So that naturally limited it to a very narrow segment of the population. In the mid-’80s, California and a few other places recognized that poker was a more legitimate form of gaming than regular casino games and they legalized it, which gave regular folks the opportunity to sit down at a legal, safe card room with guards and cameras and dealers who weren’t trying to cheat you so it became radically democratized.”

Additionally, many of the experienced players wrote books about poker and the creation of online casinos has resulted in “many more people ... playing tournament poker and other kinds of poker and they’re naturally more interested in reading about it.”

Just as in poker, McManus believes writing skills can be taught. “I learned a lot from my graduate training. Talent can’t be taught. But I think the craft of writing can certainly be taught. Programs and many teachers do a fantastic job. There are a million examples that one could point to of people who have learned to be terrific writers whose talent has been nurtured in MFA programs, including ours.”

Two of those examples could include David Sedaris and Anchee Min, both of whom McManus advised while they were students at SAIC. Min was working on early drafts of Red Azalea while she was a student. “Basically, she had a terrific story to tell, but she didn’t know English. She was watching Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers in order to learn how to speak English.” As for David Sedaris, McManus said he “was a blaze of talent.”

In addition to the luck (and skill) McManus enjoyed in the tournament, that good favor has followed him into his writing life. McManus said, “We just did a movie deal with Christine Vachon and Killer Films. The commercial and critical response has been very gratifying. People think that the big change in my life was as a poker player but during those four days, my writing life changed much more than my poker playing life. I got into FSG [publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux], which was a house that I had my face pressed up against the glass looking in at for a long time. You would never think that the way to get published by FSG was to write about strippers and Las Vegas poker, so it surprised me as much as anybody.”

Despite his success with non-fiction, McManus said, “I still think of myself as a novelist. My first love is the novel. I continue to work on a novel called Winter Casino that I’ve been working on since ’97. I have a contract to publish another nonfiction book ... called Physical. And it’s about ... the state of my health and the state of health care in America. A middle aged man faces his mortality.”

Although fiction is his first love, he found writing a non-fiction book less taxing. He explained why: “In nonfiction, as you gather materials, you get to use them verbatim in your book. So that if I’m writing a plot summary of poker books or I’m reporting the history of poker or card playing, I don’t have to make everything up. Your sources give you more of your final material. Whereas in fiction, you not only have to write it, but you have to invent every syllable worth of action and psychological background. I personally found this easier to write.”

When asked if he felt qualified as a journalist to write this book, McManus answered, “I have no training as a journalist. I have 25 years of experience as a fiction writer ... which gives me certain habits. My habits as a fiction writer created trouble for me as a nonfiction writer. I never felt fully qualified. I’m not a good interviewer. I forget a tape recorder, seldom have pen and paper.”

In fact, Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman sued the publisher over a passage in Positively Fifth Street that hinted Goodman had a part in the hit that resulted in the death of Texas U.S District Court Judge John Wood. The suit was settled in June but McManus cannot discuss any details due to a confidentiality agreement.

All of the attention, good and bad, has surprised McManus. He said, “I didn’t suddenly become a better writer.” He realized “how much the subject matter makes a difference ... people won’t shut up about it. I hit on material people want to talk about. My writing skill was about the same, but the material itself combined with these stories.” McManus said that author Scott Turrow told him, “I found my voice. As a fiction writer I’m a ventriloquist. In Positively Fifth Street, it’s Jim McManus talking at you. It has been the clearest expression of my voice. It was easier. And more fun.”