AN INDEPENDENCE DAY TRIBUTE TO ONE OF THE MOST INDEPENDENT AND UNIQUE AMERICANS WE EVER BEFRIENDED -- THE LATE, GREAT BOB STUPAK 1942-2009
Editor's Note: In 2000, we abruptly changed careers by our own design. Before relocating from Ohio to Miami, we toured the nation -- interviewing legendary characters. Bob Stupak, the Casino King, stood out more than anyone else.
But he agreed to an interview only on the condition that it be published after he died. Though he was more than 20 years or senior, he had recently beaten the odds by surviving a horrific motorcycle crash. He was always lucky, so he probably figured the story would never see the light of day -- because he would somehow beat the house odds and outlive an interviewer young enough to be his son. He lost this wager, succumbing to leukemia less than a year ago.
So now his cantankerous soul can mutter in his Pittsburghese accent from the great Stratosphere in the sky "dat SOBing reporter got nothin' right about me and now that I can't sue 'eem, he's gonna print the whole #$%@ing story without recourse." The following is the whole bleeping story, frozen in Las Vegas in the year 2000:
PART 7: SOUL SEARCHING IN SIN CITY
“A man’s success is not based on his wins or loss, but on the values he instills in his children. I have three children and I am very proud of each of them,” Stupak offered, showing another gentle side of the more often pugnacious man.
Being in the casino business, have you made an enemies?, I asked.
“The devil,” Stupak said. And he wasn’t smiling.
This turn to the spiritual reminded Stupak that it was time for me to pass another test/quiz before I could extend the interview into its third hour.
“This is a hard question for atheists, but an easy one for people of faith,” he said, the smug grin reappearing on his mug as he ticked off my clues:
“It’s bigger than God.
Rich people don’t have it and they don’t want it.
Poor people have a lot of it.
If it is all you had to eat, you would surely die.”
I struggled for an answer of what “it” is. The intimidator goaded me more, saying most kids under age five answer the riddle correctly in an instant.
Still foundering, I was offered a lifeline. Stupak picked up the business card I’d handed him and began to dial my home number. He proposed a side bet -- $20 – on whether my wife would answer the phone back in Ohio. It was nearly 11 p.m. on a work night back home.
“She may be sleeping,” I offered. “With the guy down the street,” Stupak said with a fat, devilish grin.
The bet was a push because my mother, in town visiting my spouse during my Vegas adventure, answered the phone. My wife was equally stumped by Stupak’s riddle.
My father saved my bacon by coming up with the answer, muttering something about having read the riddle in Reader’s Digest.
“Nothing,” my dad answered.
“Nothing is correct,” Stupak said to me. “You should have known right off the bat that nothing is bigger than God. You must be an atheist.”
I tried to get back to the interview, asking whether Las Vegas had gotten better or worse in the three decades he’s lived there.
“Worse,” he said in that voice as dry and harsh as the Nevada desert.
Why?
“Too big, too crowded, too much traffic,’’ he rattled off.
I asked if gaming had gotten better since the Seventies.
“No. Too big, too complicated, too much,” he shot back. “Too many different people going after the pot.”
I asked if big money drove him away from the Stratosphere, the very place he dreamed of and campaigned for relentlessly when it was little more than an artist’s sketch and a dream in the complex head of Bob Stupak.
“I still go in the Stratosphere occasionally. It’s not like I’m not welcome or I’ve banished himself from it,” was the only way Stupak chose to address the line of questioning.
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