Michael Craig's Journal

So I followed Mike Matusow downstairs, where he proceeded to drop to the floor and fall asleep in front of a 72-inch TV for the next 3 hours.

And yes, that was Sam Grizzle sprawled on Mike’s couch.

For those of you who don’t haunt the poker circuit, Sam Grizzle is a long-time poker pro who I had heard a great deal about, seen several times, but never met. He looks so much like his name that I just assumed it was a nickname. He is one of those characters very common in poker but seen (or noticed) much less frequently with poker’s high mediacentric profile: talented, erratic, broke, undefinably sinister.

And by undefinably sinister, I mean there are certain questions that can never be answered: If he’s so good, why is he always broke? If so many people complain about what happened when they loaned him money or staked him, how does he keep getting money?

To me, he was a soft-spoken gentleman, almost courtly. And I got to know him almost uncomfortably well.

Sam Grizzle and I sat watching the World Series game in the dark, making small talk for 3 hours, punctuated by Matusow’s snoring and other bodily noises. I had the good sense not to tell Sam of his two appearances in this Journal: when I poked fun at that silly “Our Players Suck” picture of Sam in the Doyle’s Room ad, and the story about him making a terrible play, beating Doyle Brunson out of a big pot, and cutting Doyle off when he started to complain: “You play your money; I’ll play their money.”

Between innings, there was a commercial for Volkswagen, with Slash pounding out an especially wicked guitar riff. “Who is that?” Grizzle asked. I told him that Slash was the guitarist for Guns ‘n’ Roses, but even that was more than a decade ago.

“Well, I wouldn’t have even known who that was fifteen years ago.”

I thought, What is Sam Grizzle doing here? Then I thought, What am I doing here?

I mean, I came to get the last bit of the Omaha Eight-or-Better chapter from Mikey, but what was the likelihood of that, with Mikey snoring to beat the band, supposedly stuck a hundred dimes, playing host to Sam Grizzle. And Sam wasn’t going anywhere. There was no car in the driveway, so Grizzle must have just materialized from the dust between the floorboards.

Still, I didn’t leave. How could I? I wanted to see how this came out, and I don’t just mean the Game 2 of the Series.

The game ended. The Tigers won. Mike made $30,000, which allowed me to upgrade his condition from comatose to semi-comatose. He was still miserable, both for losing so much earlier in the day and for not betting MORE when he was sure he had the winner.

We even completed the Omaha chapter, and here is where I have to let the legend of Mike Matusow grow.

I did a total of 3 interviews with Mike for this chapter. None of them lasted more than a half hour. He fell asleep during the first and last of them and insisted that the middle one take place in his swimming pool - perhaps to keep himself from falling asleep. I can’t tell you the Omaha Eight-or-Better chapter is an encyclopedia of how to play the game in tournaments. Many of the other contributors were more diligent about being comprehensive in their advice.

But the advice is frequently brilliant, and seemed more so when I would occasionally have to wake him up in the middle of a sentence to finish a thought.

When we finished, it was getting close to 10 PM. I was ready to leave, happy to get my work done and pleasantly stunned by the strangeness of the environment.

Then came the quid pro quo:

“Can you do me a huge favor and give Sam a ride?”

TO BE CONTINUED

(Oh, and for those of you interested in getting to know these men better, Mike Matusow plays on Full Tilt Poker. Sam Grizzle is a representative of Doyle’s Room.)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 25th, 2006 at 1:43 pm and is filed under My favourites:.